The pail weighed six pounds this morning. What did that milk cost?
Put your feed and hay receipts against what the pail actually weighs and get a real cost per quart — then the milk line your next soap batch consumes. Everything stays in your browser.
The doe
The numbers here are yours to check. This page does arithmetic on what you type — it cannot see your recipe, your equipment or your batch.
Want it to remember?
In MadeKeeper, your cost per quart lives beside your materials, so every soap batch consumes its real quarts at your real cost and milk soap finally carries an honest milk line instead of a guess. See for milk-soap makers or poke around the live demo. $19/mo for the whole back office, kept for as long as you stay. The shop stays free for cost a piece and one fair — no product cap. The tax packet, Etsy and Square, and more fairs are the $19.
Free calculator · Dairy goats & goat-milk soap
The division is easy. The arguments are over whose numbers go into it — so here is how the calculator counts, and which numbers stay yours to set.
What's the actual math?
Add up what feed and hay cost you per doe per day — from your receipts, not a chart — then divide your pail weight by 2.15, the published pounds-per-quart conversion, to get quarts. Daily cost divided by quarts is your cost per quart. Say $2.80 a day of feed and hay against a 6 lb pail: that's 2.79 quarts, or about $1.00 a quart. A two-quart soap batch then carries $2.01 of milk — the calculator holds the unrounded quart cost so the pennies stay honest.
Why does it ask for my pail weight instead of using my breed's average?
Because a chart can only describe an average doe. Breed, stage of lactation, and the doe herself all move the number — and none of that averages out in your barn. A chart cannot know your doe; your scale can. So yield is not a lookup here, it's your setting: weigh the pail, type the number, and the cost is built on what your goats actually gave.
Do fencing and vet bills belong in my cost per quart?
That one is a convention, not a fact, and keepers land on both sides of it. Some amortize fixed costs like fencing and vet care into every quart; others keep the quart number to feed and hay so it moves with the feed bill and nothing else. This calculator counts feed and hay only — if you'd rather fold the fixed costs in, that's a fair way to keep books, just a different number than the one this page figures. Your books, your call.
Can this tell me anything about selling or handling raw milk?
No, and that's deliberate. This page does the cost arithmetic between your receipts and your pail, and it stays out of everything else about milk. Nothing here should be read as an answer in either direction.