How Many Goats would you Need to Survive Solely off of Goat Meat for a Lifetime? (work shown)

When my friend asked me to join her in running away and becoming a goat farmer and living purely off of goat meat, I knew that fleshing out the details was the first step.

Let us assume we are running away at age 16, and will live until the ripe ol' age of 80. We will need 64 years' worth of goats to slaughter and eat.

In order to calculate the amount of goats we'll need to bring, there are a couple questions to answer. Let's break it down:

1. How many goats will you eat in total?

2. How many goats do you need to start with?

Calculating Total Goats Consumed (by the end of your lifetime)

You need 1/2 pounds of meat per meal. For simplicity's sake, let's say we skip breakfast and have lunch and dinner each day. That's 1 pound of meat per day.

How many pounds of meat does one goat offer? Well, there are 40-50 pounds of meat you'll get per goat (assuming it is raised to market age). Let's take the lowball estimate and go with 40 pounds.

Since you're eating 1 pound of meat per day, each goat can last you 40 days. Let's talk about years now. 365/40 is 9.125, but let's round up in case of emergencies. So, we will consume 10 goats/year, for a total of 640 goats/rest of lifetime. This is represented by the equation y=10x

Now, How Many Goats do we need to Start Off With?

On average, a goat will have 2 offspring. A goat can give birth twice a year twice a year, so we'd have an +4 goats per year, but also -10 goats per year because we're eating them.

Our equation for the starting goats would be y = -4x + b

Solving for our Answer

Now that we have our two equations, we can solve. If we think about this graphically, the y-axis would be represented by number of goats, while the x-axis is the number of years that pass. So our key coordinates are (64, 640). We can input that into our second equation, and we get:

640 = -4(64) + b 640 + 256 = b 896 = b

So, there we have it. When we run away, we'll need to bring 896 goats. Technically 1792 since we're two people.

Closing Remarks

Is the math a bit dubious? Yup. Plenty of oversimplifications and assumptions. But we have a starting point. In the future, when we start planning this more seriously, we can factor in other conditions and logistics. But for now, the spark of hope is there. And if I ever go off the grid in the near future, you'll know what's up ;)

p.s. here's the Desmos visualization we created to help with calculations.