Simple, Healthy, Homemade Dog Food
We adopted Annie, our Antolian Shepard Livestock Guardian Dog, just about a year ago. She has made such a great addition to our little farm.
Annie roams around and keeps coyotes, bobcats, raccoons, owls, hawks, skunks and all kinds of other critters off of our property and keeps an eye on all of our animals. We haven’t lost another animal since she’s been keeping watch for us.
She is a just over 2 years old, huge puppy energy and has no idea how big she is. She is over 6ft tall on her hind legs and weighs in at over 100 pounds of pure muscle. She works so hard here, is incredibly active and is also very hungry.
We have been on quite the food journey with her. She’s a hard working part of our farm and I know how important whole food nutrition is so people and know its the same for our animals too.
When we first brought Annie home, she was full grown at 18 months, but still filling in with more muscle and fat. We started buying big cans of plain chicken and dog kibble from Costco and mixed those with bone broth for breakfast and dinner.
We noticed within a few weeks that she started itching and gnawing at her skin. I did some digging and found that chicken can be really irritating for dogs.
We decided to ditch the chicken and invest in a dog food service where they send you prepackaged meals with simple, real ingredients. We chose a turkey blend that Annie really liked. The itching went away, but she did still seem hungry with the 3 pounds a day she was getting.
Her food was costing over $13 per day and we were still adding a bit of kibble and table scraps to keep her full, costing us over $400 a month.
Thank goodness for a friend who saw the box at my house and said, “You can totally make that yourself, for way less and it is super easy. I can give you all the links for everything.”
I was super intrigued and incredibly grateful for all the information and support, but was honestly intimidated by the responsibility of making my own dog food. I was hesitant to add something like that to my plate, so I continued with the expensive service for another month.
I couldn’t stop thinking about it though and learned more about how she placed orders ahead of time for free pickup at places like Aldi, where you can get large quantities for super reasonable prices.
I decided to give it a shot after crunching the numbers and finding that 10 days worth of food would cost us about $60 instead of over $150, saving us nearly $3000 a year. That's a fun family vacation in savings, not to mention saving all of that plastic that was used to individually wrap each meals from the delivery company.
I wish I would have started this earlier though! it is way simpler than I thought and after a few months of making it, our family is in a really good groove.
We order two big batches worth of food, make one and freeze the ingredients for the other so that we only have to pick up supplies every 3 weeks.
With this large 18 Quart Roaster that I have loved using, I can make a huge batch with over 12 pounds of meat that lasts my dog about 10 days. I only use it for making dog food and can store it in the laundry room or floor of the pantry in between batches, it is pretty large so keep that in mind for storage.
Even if your dog is smaller, I still think it is nice to make this recipe in bulk to freeze for later. I store all of her food in glass storage containers, but my friend likes to make room in her fridge and put the whole roaster with the lid on in the fridge and take that out for daily feedings. Totally up to your preference and fridge abilities.
We also add in this eggshell powder once the food is cooked and slightly cooled, you add a certain amount of scoops depending on how many pounds of meat you cook. When we cook this recipe with 9 pounds of beef and 3 pounds of pork, we add 24 scoops, 2 for each pound of meat.
Before taking her food out we also add this daily multivitamin from Holistic Pet Organics to ensure Annie is getting all of the vitamins and minerals she needs to be a strong, healthy dog.
We love our animals so much and want them to live a long healthy life and know that nutrition will play a huge role in that.
This is our current recipe:
ingredients:
9 pounds ground beef (3-3 pound logs from Aldi have been the most economical for me)
3 pounds of ground pork
3 cans of sweet peas with the liquid
6 carrots roughly chopped
6 zucchini or squash roughly chopped
2 cups of white rice
4-6 cups of water
directions:
Add meat, veggies, rice and water to the large roaster and stir to combine. Ingredients should just be above the water line. If yours is looking really dry, add a few more cups of water.
Cook on low between 300-350 degrees for 4 hours, striring every hour or so.
After about 4 hours, unplug and let cool down for a few minutes with the lid off.
Mix in egg shell powder and stir to combine.
Store in glass containers in the fridge for up to 10 days or in the freezer for a few months.
Add a serving on canine multivitamin for every meal.
If you make your own dog food and have found some great things to add in, please let me know below in the comments! Its always fun to learn from people who are working on cooking and cultivating more from home too.
