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Originally Posted by (E)
Bit of a tangent but this will make it easier for anyone who is interested to make some broad calculations regarding livestock. I may also refer to it as it makes descriptions easier (faster)
(SNIP)
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This is interesting, and very different from how it's done, around here.
Here, the basic unit of livestock is the "cattle unit" or "animal unit" and that's equivalent to a beef cow (not a dairy cow). It gets used to measure how much feed or acreage is needed to support livestock of all sorts. The other one mostly used is "conversion ratio" -- how much feed it takes to create meat for the market, on an animal that weighs about a half-ton (455 kg, or so).
I know a pig is about a quarter of an animal unit, and sheep are about a fifth. A horse is a bit more, IIRC.
Interestingly, it takes about 1.25 acres per month per AU in the rich grazing areas of the Midwest, the Old South, or the Pacific Northwest (The Willamette Valley can graze 10 months of the year). Here in Colorado, on the semi-arid short-grass prairie, it can take five times that. It's only economical because we have so much empty land, here, that's so cheap.
Ranches are huge, in the Rocky Mountain West, because they have to be, really. The only good grazing is found in the piedmont areas, close to the mountains, where there's a fair amount of water.
(More than 80 percent of all the water used in the Rocky Mountain West goes to irrigate agriculture or water livestock. Municipal water supplies use about 3-5 percent, depending on state. The rest gets taken for ecological preservation or other uses.)
If I remember right, a beef steer from a good breed converts fodder to weight at about 8:1. Smaller animals do it more efficiently, and pigs and goats can live on scraps. Poultry is the most efficient, I think, although I don't know about fish.
(Man, I learned a lot about this stuff, when I worked out at the Fort Morgan Times -- and I wasn't even the Farm Editor. Although, I did do a special section on the Morgan County Fair, every year, and that meant I talked to the 4-H people and the extension agents and the high school agriculture economics teachers, a lot.)