Betterall focuses on making the most out of the land you have. They will happily draw up farming plans for any space they are given and can also source the seeds and even livestock for the customer. Betterall will also work with their customers to develop crop rotation plans and training to ensure the farming land can be maintained long term. A full farm with pastureland and livestock can cost around £5m to set up from scratch. Many farm animals can be sustained from what humans consider crop ‘waste’, such as plant husks and other plant derivatives. These can be fed raw or compacted into pellet form for storage. Large farm animals require 1 acre of land space minimum per animal, and if you are solely feeding your animals from crops and crop waste, you will require up to 2.5kg of feed per large animal per day (based on dairy cows that weigh 500 kg).
For an example of how much space you would require if you wanted a farm both crops and livestock with no running feed cost:
If a wheat producer counted 30 heads per foot squared, and each head contained 24 seeds, assuming a 1,000-kernel weight of 35 grams the crop yield estimate using the standard formula would be 30 x 24 x 35 x 0.04356 = 1,097 kg/acre. Moreover, since wheat is 27.215 kg/bu (bushel), the yield we estimated would be 40 bu/acre (1097/27.215) or 40 bushels per acre.
Therefore, harvesting 1 acre of healthy wheat crop could potentially feed 435 large animals for a day if they were receiving no other input into their diet. This amount can be drastically reduced where sufficient grazing is available.
With this in mind, a single dairy cow can be maintained in 2 acres of land, where 1 acre is solely producing feed, providing an excess of 71 kg of harvested produce for human consumption.