butchering - easiest, best bang for the buck...

It depends upon your facilities and what your family likes to eat.

For meat as the only consideration, you must consider both the feed conversion ratio and cost of pens. You must consider the breed that you are raising.

Rabbits, predator-proof pens are the least expensive because the pens are small. Easy care. Delicious meat. Easy to butcher. Buy California or New Zealand for best feed conversion. Initial cost of stock is small.

Cornish Cross chickens or Pekin ducks. Feed conversion is excellent on either, time to butchering, fuss of butchering are about the same. Cost to raise is low if you can free range. Pens can be fairly expensive and feed costs are higher if you have high predator pressure. With Pekins, you can breed your own. Cornish cross, you must buy chicks every year.

If you have pasture, sheep do not require any input except for grass and ordinary fencing. Feed conversion isn't all that great, but it doesn't matter if they are grazing. If you have to purchase feed, then feed conversion matters. Some people don't like lamb meat.

If you have pasture, cattle only require a small input of grain. A good breed of beef cow has decent feed conversion and if they are on pasture, the feed doesn't cost. Contained with ordinary fencing. I send mine out to butcher. I could do it at home, but it a big job. Not difficult, just a lot of time cutting and wrapping. Butcher has correct facilities to age; I don't.

Goats have lousy feed conversion to grow not much meat and lots of bones. For best feed conversion, buy Boer goats. All goats can eat and grow on scrub. If you have scrub land, they don't need any other feed input. Fencing has to be super tight and they will still get out, so fencing costs can be higher.

Horse. Right now, every week, there are free horses on Craigslist. Take a fat one home, de-worm it, feed it well on grain and good hay for 30 days, and that's a lot of meat for nearly no cost. You won't find a commercial butcher to process; you'll have to butcher it yourself.

Turkeys, the broad breasted whites will give you a lot of meat in a fairly short time period. The heritage breeds take twice as long to grow and produce less meat.

Add: pigs have a very good feed conversion rate. The meat doesn't need to be aged, so they can be home butchered. Butchering isn't difficult, it just takes time because it is a lot of meat to cut and wrap. Home smoked bacon is a real treat.

Pigs can be kept in a smallish area and can eat scraps to cut the cost of their hog grower. The meat is better if the hog eats the majority of its diet in quality food, but free day old bread and veggie garden scraps can make part of the diet.

An aquaponics setup can give you quite a bit of tilapia, plus really boost some vegetable and herb growing. In a 100 gallon fish tank and a 100 gallon grow tank you can produce 4-6lbs of fish a week by staging your sizes so that you have fish at different stages of growth going. They are fairly easy to breed and you can cut feed costs down to almost nothing by growing duckweed. Not to mention the veggies grow like they are on steroids!

Our last pigs cost us $20 each at a swap meet and about $20 each in finishing feed as we fed scraps, extra goat milk and veggie leftovers from the garden as well as lots of apples from the crab apple trees and any other extras we ran across for free that were good for them. For an initial investment of around $40 each we ended up with over 250lbs of meat after processing between the two animals. Not a bad investment. When we make the move back this summer, we are planning on guinea hogs so we can keep the majority of our meat on the hoof and for the ease of butchering size.

I think a question to ask would be what feed you can produce on your property. We grow rabbits, but I am hesitant to throw them out there because so many people don't have the ability to supply a good diet for them from their property. If you can grow a decent patch of corn you can feed the ground corn to poultry and the stalks to the pigs to offset feed.

I am a big fan of ducks. We have had great luck with khacki campbells, welsh harlequins and muscovies as far as letting them forage for the majority of their feed and them giving us lots of babies for the freezer without any input from us as well as a ton of eggs.

Goats are great because they can handle so many different food sources and prosper. We have fed up several meat goats on a good mineral block and brush cuttings while they were allowed to browse wood patches for their own. For our dairy goats I planted an acre with a couple of bags of deer browse. They loved it and it cut down on our feed for part of the year. Plus local hay is something you might also be able to barter for.

There are many considerations here, but I would think that looking at what you want and setting up for it and determining what feed sources you can produce onsite, barter for or buy local and go from there.

I'm so glad I posted this comment, I'd thought about withdrawing it! Spurred some great spin off's but I was more referring to things like crabs, scallops, and more exotic meats that I tend to enjoy from time to time. ;-)

This is an interesting thread. A lot of different thoughts. I guess for me, I would be in the beef group because I have fenced pasture land and with a days work I can have enough beef in the freezer to feed the family a year. We grass feed only, and usually have to have very little hay for the winter. Some winters only a bale or 3. Don't do chickens, rabbits, or goats because they are more trouble to fence and manage and I also work. But where I live, I suspect I'd have issues with protecting smaller animals where I live. But I can alos understand the fish and deer response. Only takes about 3 hours to have a deer in the freezer and it costs nothing if you discount the rifle and time. Fish are pretty much the same. That is the only thing I miss about living on the gulf.

The only problem with the wild fish though, is the hours and beer it takes to get them caught...

Oh wait, that's not really a problem, is it?

Catch?? If your talking about Wild Game most around here we are not allowed to Catch in the way of Large Game we have to shoot and kill it either with Bow or Firearm.Small Game we can Trap and Fur Bearers.

big rockpile

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I ran across this info on another forum, looks like pig is your best percent of meat when comparing carcass weight, cow second, lamb third. Guess we'll have to speed up our plans to raise a few pigs! http://www.das.psu.edu/research-exte...0My%20Meat.pdf

We have a meat processing plant.We get a few people who cut up their hogs and bring us the hams and bacons to cure. To me i would say a hog would be easy to cut up not very many differant cuts. But goats and sheep are easy to.

We do it.

Chicken, rabbit, pork, goat, and wild meat (venison, partridge, etc.). It's not hard, unless you're picky about the cuts.

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Cadbury Bunny which may be a Flemish Giant Hybrid that clucks like a chicken and lays different types of creme eggs.