Seven Roosters, twenty-two days, and a lot of math.

Extra Roosters from February batch

Sunday's butcher day produced 272 ounces of ground raw dog food from seven roosters — heads off, intestines and vents out, everything else through the grinder. Bone, organ, muscle. We keep the good stuff.

Cricket eats 12 ounces a day. Which means seven roos feeds one Border Collie for twenty-two days. That's the math we ran at the kitchen table this morning, and once we had a number, the rest of the spreadsheet sort of wrote itself.

For Cricket alone over thirty days: ten roosters a month. Manageable.

For all four dogs at maturity — Cricket, Saoirse, Pivot, and Keeper — somewhere around forty roosters a month if we fed roosters only. (Keeper and Pivot stay on kibble until they hit six months, so we've got runway before the full pack number kicks in.)

Forty roosters a month is a serious operation. Doable, but not a one-protein job.

So we ran rabbit math.

We get about 2.5 pounds of usable grind per rabbit — heads, intestines, and vent out, everything else in. That's 40 ounces per rabbit.

One rabbit feeds Cricket for three and a third days. Nine rabbits a month covers him. For all four dogs at maturity on rabbit alone? Thirty-six rabbits a month — roughly eleven productive does running year-round. That is a real homestead rabbitry.

The number we'll actually run: a 70/30 rabbit-to-rooster split. For the whole pack at maturity, that's about 25 rabbits and 11 roosters a month. Eight productive does plus a steady rooster pipeline from the laying flock excess and a seasonal Cornish Cross batch. That leaves enormous room for Rosie's rabbit business, table meat, pelts, and sales.

— While we're here — Raw feeding works for working dogs for a few specific reasons. Whole-prey ground (muscle + bone + organ in the right ratio) delivers calcium and phosphorus in balance, which kibble has to engineer in via supplements. The bone content keeps stools firm and teeth clean. Organ meat carries the bulk of the trace minerals and B vitamins. And the protein source rotation — rooster one week, rabbit the next, the occasional venison or goat trim — gives a varied amino acid profile and reduces the odds of developing a single-protein sensitivity. The honest version: it's also cheaper when you're raising the protein yourself, and it closes a loop on the farm.

Cull roosters that would otherwise be a problem become next month's breakfast. Nothing wasted.

— Nana