So, I have never owned a farm, but if I did, I might be starting with a spreadsheet that looked something like the attached (and I just threw random-ish numbers in for January as an exercise). You want to organize it so that it’s easy to see what’s being spent each month, and what income is coming in (if any). Note that things like hay, you probably wouldn’t be buying every month, more like a few times a year.
This spreadsheet assumes that if you have boarders, they will pay for their own supplements and veterinarian and farrier. This spreadsheet also assumes the barn/facilities are already built.
If you’re not sure how much things cost, do your best to figure it out. For example, for hay: predict how many horses you expect in the barn. Then multiply that by 20 (assume that each horse will get 20 lbs of hay per day). If you have five horses, that’s 100 lbs of hay each day. One hundred pounds of hay per day, times 30 days, equals 3000 lbs of hay each month. That’s 1.5 tons of hay each month. Call around and find out how much hay is, per ton, in your area, and then you can figure out your estimated hay costs.
For bedding, it depends what you want, obviously. But if you’re doing bagged shavings, assume maybe a bag a day per stall, averaged out to include initial bedding and weekly stripping (I don’t use bagged shavings, so I really don’t know)? So, with five stalls, over seven days, that’s 35 bags per week or 140 bags per month, times whatever bagged shavings cost in your area.
And so on…
Good luck!!
