Monday, March 16, 2020

Dog food planning

We feed our dogs dried dog food. We buy it in fifty pound bags from one of the local farm stores. I almost always buy two bags at-a-time.

Hercules, our older German Shepherd, is not as active as the younger one. He gets one "scoop" a day. Our scoop is a disposable, snap-top, plastic container that measures 5.5" long by 4.5" wide by 1.75" tall.

Zeus, the younger German Shepherd gets 1-1/2 scoops every morning.

I wondered how long 100 pounds of dog food lasts because I never really measured it.

We keep the bulk dog food in a steel trash container in the basement. The trash container deters rodents and the basement is the coolest part of the house.

I filled our intermediate bin, another plastic, snap-top container that measures 11"-by-13"-by-10".  For the record, that is 6.2 gallons of volume.

Our digital scale informed me that the filled intermediate container weighs 32 pounds or approximately 45 cubic inches of dog food per pound.

Quite by accident, that is almost the size of our scoop. The math is easy. 1.5 pounds + 1 pound equals 2.5 pounds of dog food a day.

100 pounds of dog food divided by 2.5 pounds a day equals 40 days. Nine bags of dog food would last half a year.

That might be good to know.

6 comments:

  1. We have cats. I usually give them a mixture of Purina One and Costco dry cat food. I laid in 120 lbs. Good thing, too. Because at two different Costcos' his weekend they were totally OUT.

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    1. I also laid in 150 lbs of cat litter. ;-)

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    2. 19 20# jugs of cat litter. The jugs are also handy for water storage. Probably enough cat food for 3-4 months. Cats will eat after we're dead.

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  2. I did the math for our 60 pound hound a couple weeks ago and found that a 50 pound bag ought to last 50 days. Convenient, no ?

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  3. Yep, pounds roughly equals days here too... 55 lbs, 50 days

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  4. You all only have 1 or 2 dogs ??? Slackers !! ( We have 6. Trying to slowly downsize...long story involved....anyway 6. Holding at that number. SO have a bag and the dogs are small but it wont last a month. So far runs on dog food have been limited. We haven't rolled up sidewalk ( yet) or welded doors ( yet) but we have cut back with the goal of a trip to store about every 2-3 weeks .

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