A cost book for small farms selling beef, pork, lamb and goat direct. Every expense lands on an animal as you enter it, so when a half sells, the margin is worked out.
No credit card required.
The notebook in the truck console works fine — right up until you want to know whether that steer made money.
Purchase price, feed, hay, vet, minerals, processing — each one lands on a head as you enter it, not in a pile in February. The single receipt was never the hard part. It's the ton of grower that fed the whole pen for six weeks. Split it evenly, or by the days each animal was actually there, and it comes out per head.
A sale happens in steps, and the number is the last thing to arrive.
Log weights when you get them. Gain and breakeven per pound hanging, worked out as you go.
A cash-basis summary along Schedule F lines, raised separated from purchased. A bookkeeping aid for your preparer, not a substitute for one.
You shake hands on $4.25 a pound hanging a few weeks out from the butcher date, and nobody knows what that comes to until the animal is on the rail. Enter the hanging weight at close-out and every buyer on it settles at once.
[ PLACEHOLDER — 2–4 sentences, first person: what you raise, how you sell it, and the question about your own animals you couldn't answer without building this. ]
One monthly price after that.
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