The Homestead Paradise Guide

Homestead Paradise keeps your livestock, garden, preservation, and gear in one place — each with its own books that roll up to a single homestead total. Then Harold reads those records and tells you what to do next.

1. Create your account

Start a free account or a 14-day trial at sign up — no card needed to begin.

2. Confirm your email

• We send a confirmation link from Homestead Paradise (noreply@homesteadparadise.farm), usually within a minute.
• If it isn't in your inbox, check spam and — on Gmail — the Promotions tab.
• The link works from any device, so it's fine to sign up on the laptop and tap the link on your phone.
• Never arrived? There's a Resend confirmation email button on both the sign-up confirmation screen and the login page.

3. Walk the Getting Started card

The first time you open your Overview, a Getting Started card walks you to your first real record in three short steps. It picks up wherever you already are — if you've got a flock but haven't logged anything yet, it starts you on the last step.

1. Name your place. Your homestead name and location.
2. Add what you keep — or what you grow. Step 2 has two tabs. Animals sets up your first group: species, counts, and the breed if you know it. Garden sets up your first planting: the crop, and a bed name if you keep beds. Pick either one — you only need one to finish, and you can add the other whenever.
3. Log something. Today's eggs, milk or honey if you started with animals; today's pick if you started with the garden. Either one is the moment the app starts working for you — and the card disappears for good, replaced by the first badges you just earned.

A zero is a real answer at that last step. A day with no eggs, or a row with nothing ready yet, is still worth recording — Harold reads the gaps as well as the numbers.

From there the Overview shows your stats, your finances, and what Harold has noticed. Add a garden bed, a pantry item, or a piece of equipment from the left sidebar whenever you're ready.

Everything about you and your place lives on one page: My Farm & Account. Get to it from the sidebar, or just click your farm name at the top of the dashboard. Edit anything here and it updates everywhere — including how Harold talks about your place.

• 🏡 My Farm — farm / homestead name, location, USDA hardiness zone, and your average last-spring and first-fall frost dates. Harold and the planting calendar both read these, so they're worth getting right. Your zone shows as a badge at the top of the card.
• 👤 My Account — your name, your farm or business name (this is what shows up on invoices and in emails we send you), your email, and an optional phone number.
• 💳 Plan — the plan you're on, when your trial ends or your subscription renews, the date you joined, whether you're in the community, and your personal invite code.

Your local forecast rides along on the Overview dashboard.

• Set your location once: the first time you open the dashboard, the weather card asks for your ZIP code. Enter it and your forecast appears.
• Today plus a 7-day outlook: current conditions and today's high/low, with a Show full 7-day forecast button for the week ahead and a refresh arrow to pull the latest.
• Frost watch: when an overnight low near freezing is coming, the card raises a frost alert so you can cover tender plants and check unheated waterers — and Harold flags it too.

Weather comes from the U.S. National Weather Service, so it's US-only for now.

Harold is the whole point. He's not pasting generic tips — he reads your records (this week's lay rate, your frost window, your feed spend) and gives specific, husbandry-literate advice, the way a neighbor with thirty years on the land would.

• “Harold noticed” on the Overview. You don't have to go looking. The first screen you see each login carries a 🪶 Harold noticed card with the top few things he's watching right now — a lay-rate dip, tonight's frost, a jam about to expire, a tractor overdue for service.
• Chat anytime from Advisor in the sidebar. Ask things like “Why did my hens slow down?” or “What should I plant this week?” The Advisor page also shows his full watch list, not just the top few.
• Weather-aware. Harold reads your live forecast too, so you can ask “Is frost coming?” or “Should I water today?” and he answers from your actual conditions.
• The better your records, the better his advice. Log production, health, and dates regularly and Harold gets sharper.
• Harold's Eyes (Max/trial): in Harold's Eyes, snap a photo and Harold identifies it — a breed, a plant or weed, a bug (friend or foe), what's wrong with a plant, even a snake. Answers come ranked with honest confidence, never a fake percentage. You can save a breed ID straight onto an animal's record, or drop a dated note — with the photo attached — onto a garden bed (find them under each bed in Garden, stored privately). Up to 50 photo IDs a month. Harold never makes eat/don't-eat calls, always treats unidentified snakes as venomous, and never gives chemical mix rates.
• Availability: Harold is included on Pro, Max, and your trial. Free accounts get a limited number of consults each month.

Track any species — poultry, goats, rabbits, bees — from one workspace.

• Animal groups: in Livestock, add a group by species with female/male/juvenile counts, breed, purpose, and an optional photo (snap one with your phone camera).
• Individual animals: two ways in — Individual animals in the sidebar shows every animal you track across all groups, or tap the 🐾 Individual animals button on any group card for just that group. Add each one with a tag, breed, birthday, status, notes, sire and dam, and its own photo.
• Group counts or individual records? Head counts are plenty for a laying flock. Track animals one by one when you want to weigh them, follow one animal's health, name a sire and dam on a breeding pair, or build a pedigree — those all need an individual record.
• Weigh-ins: open the animal's group, find its card, and tap the ⚖ Log weight button (next to 🌳 Pedigree, under the counters) to record a weight (lb, oz, kg, or g) with a date and an optional note. The card shows the latest weight, the recent history, and — once there are two weigh-ins — average daily gain, the 📈 figure beside the weight. Total gain tells you whether an animal grew; gain per day tells you whether it grew fast enough, which is the number cattle, sheep and pig keepers actually manage on. Each weigh-in in the list also shows its own per-day rate. Gains are never compared across units — log one in kg and one in lb and the app declines to guess rather than quietly converting.
• Herd report — the whole herd on one line each. Herd report puts every individual animal in one table and lets you tap any heading to rank them: this year’s calf crop by weaning weight, your slowest gainers, who is thinnest. Filter by calf crop, group or sex. Every figure comes from records you already keep — nothing is estimated.
• It will not rank pounds against kilograms. If some of the herd is weighed in lb and some in kg, the ranking runs in whichever unit most of them use and the others drop to the bottom labelled — they are unranked, not last. Same for body condition: a 5 on the nine-point cattle scale is not a 5 on the five-point goat scale, so those are ranked separately too. The table always says how many animals the ranking actually covers.
• Feed conversion. On a group’s page, once you’ve logged feed by weight and weighed the animals twice, a feed conversion figure appears — pounds of feed per pound of gain, the number that says whether a pen is paying its way. It’s a pen number by necessity: feed goes in the trough for the whole group, so it’s all the feed divided by all the gain of the animals you weigh, over the period your weigh-ins cover.
• What it won’t do. Feed logged in bags or scoops has no weight, so it’s left out and the card says so — log feed by the pound to feed the ratio. It won’t divide pounds of feed by kilos of gain either. And if you only weigh some of the pen, it tells you so, because the pen ate for all of them. Typical ranges are shown as context, never a grade — conversion swings with age, ration and season.
• Weaning. Tap 🍼 Wean on the animal's card to record the date and the weaning weight. The weight is saved as a weigh-in on that day, so it lands on the same line as the birth weight — which is what the gain figures read from.
• Selling one animal. Tap 💵 Sell on its card to record the date, sale weight, price and buyer. The animal is marked sold, the money posts to Finances as animal-sale income against that group, and you choose whether to drop the group’s head count by one — head counts and individual records are two different numbers and plenty of people keep only one. Recorded by mistake? Undo sale puts it back.
• Price per hundredweight. With a sale weight in lb, the card shows $/cwt — the number cattle are actually bought and sold on — plus the gain from birth to sale. Weigh in kilos and it shows the plain price instead: a hundredweight is 100 lb, and the app won’t quietly convert to make a number appear.
• Adjusted weaning weight. With a birth weight and a weaning weight on record, the card shows the adjusted weaning weight — the figure that normalises for age, so a February calf and a May calf can be compared fairly. Each species is adjusted to its own standard age: 205 days for cattle (BIF), 60 days for sheep (NSIP), 90 days for goats (the meat-goat standard). The age is always shown next to the number, so a mixed herd is never comparing a 90-day kid to a 205-day calf.
• It refuses outside the standard’s own age window. BIF accepts a weaning weight taken between 160 and 250 days; NSIP accepts 40 to 90. Weigh outside that and no adjusted figure is shown, because projecting a nursing animal’s daily gain out to a date months away is extrapolation, not a standard — and it would look official while being wrong. You still get the plain weaning weight and the daily gain, which are exact.
• Pigs and rabbits get no adjusted weaning weight, and that is deliberate — there is no published one. They are judged on something else entirely, and the app now reads that instead.
• Pigs: days to 250 lb. Weigh a market pig and her page shows the NSIF adjusted days to 250 lb — the trait the industry actually selects on, which lets two pigs weighed on different days be compared fairly. Fewer days is better, the opposite way round to every other figure in the app, and the page says so. The equation needs to know whether she is a gilt or he is a boar or barrow, so record the sex; without it the app shows nothing rather than splitting the difference.
• Rabbits: the ARBA market fryer window. A fryer is under 70 days and 3 lb 8 oz to 5 lb 8 oz. Weigh a young rabbit and its page says whether it makes the class, how many days are left, or how much more weight it needs in those days. Aging out is not a fault — it just makes a roaster. Weigh in pounds or ounces (16 oz is exactly a pound); a metric weigh-in gets no verdict rather than a rounded one.
• Born alive. When you record a birth you can enter how many of them were alive. Total born and born alive are different numbers, and for a sow or a doe the gap between them is the whole story. Her production record then shows average litter size, average born alive, and total stillborn. Leave it blank and it stays blank — the app will not read an unrecorded figure as a whole litter lost.
• Body condition scoring. Tap 🤲 Condition to score fat cover by eye and hand between weigh-ins. Cattle use the 9-point scale (1 emaciated, 5–6 ideal, 9 obese); sheep, goats, pigs and rabbits use the 5-point scale (1 emaciated, 3 ideal, 5 obese). The scale is always shown with the score — “5 / 9”, never a bare 5 — because a 5 is ideal on one scale and fat on the other. An arrow shows which way she has moved since the last score.
• Log production: record eggs, milk, and more. After you log, the card shows a running “last 7 days” total so you can spot trends fast.
• Health & mortality: under Livestock → Health & mortality, log health records, raise alerts (Harold reads open ones), and record losses. If a treatment came out of your Medicine Cabinet, pick the bottle and the app handles the stock and the withdrawal date.
• “Coming due” — who needs a booster. When you log a vaccination, worming or checkup, fill in next due. The Health page then shows a Coming due panel with everything outstanding or landing in the next 30 days, and anything overdue turns the panel orange. It also reaches the dashboard, so a missed booster finds you without going looking.
• It moves on by itself. Log the next dose and the old reminder disappears — the app only ever counts the most recent record for each animal, each kind of job, and each product. A herd vaccinated three years running is one reminder, not three. Blackleg and lepto stay separate schedules, because they are. And if the newest dose sets no next due date, the app stays quiet rather than inventing one. One deliberate exception: logging a bare “vaccination” with no product named will not clear a named schedule, because it could have been any shot — a nagging reminder is an annoyance, a booster silently dropped is a dead animal.
• Breeding & hatching (Max/trial): in Breeding, start a cycle and the due date is worked out from the species' own timeline — 283 days for cattle, 150 for goats, 114 for pigs, 21 for chickens, 17 for coturnix.
• Per clutch, or per cow. Choose what the cycle is about. Birds set a clutch against a breeding pair. Cattle, goats, sheep and pigs breed one female at a time, so pick an individual dam and the whole record — service, pregnancy check, calving, calves — belongs to her. Record the sire too and the calves are born with a pedigree already attached.
• Service type. For a live birth you can note whether it was natural service, AI, or embryo transfer.
• Breeding seasons and the calving window. On a breeding pair, record when the sire was turned out and when he was removed, plus how many females were exposed. The card then shows your calving window — the first and last possible birth — because everything bred between those two dates arrives one gestation later. Leave the removal blank while they’re still together and the window stays honestly open-ended until you record it.
• How tight is the season? The card rates it: 65 days or under is the usual target and gives a calf crop that comes in close together; much past 90 and it’ll be strung out.
• Which season a cow belongs to. When you start a cycle for an individual dam you can pick the breeding season she was turned out in. It is optional, and nothing is ever guessed from dates — a cycle that merely overlaps a season could easily be by a different sire, so the app only counts the ones you name.
• Season scorecard. Once cycles are attached to a season, the pair’s card totals it up: exposed, bred, open, not yet checked, how many calved, and how many calves, plus your conception rate and calving rate. Goats kid, sheep lamb and pigs farrow — the card uses your species’ own words.
• It stays blank until it knows. No conception rate is shown until at least one pregnancy check exists, and no calving rate until at least one cycle has finished. A season that is going perfectly well should never read “0%”. And with fewer than four females it will not call the rate good or bad, because one open cow moves a small herd’s number too far to mean anything.
• Fill in “females exposed”. Without it, the rates are counted against only the females that have a cycle on record — and the card says so. With it, the females that never bred at all are counted too, which is the whole point: those are the ones costing you money.
• Pregnancy check. Weeks later, tap Preg check and record the date and the result — confirmed pregnant, open, or too early to call. An open result closes the cycle, because there is no longer a birth to count down to.
• Calving, kidding, lambing, farrowing. The button and every figure use your species’ own words — cattle calve, goats kid, sheep lamb, pigs farrow, rabbits kindle. Record it takes how many were born, the date, and how she did on the standard 1–5 scale (1 unassisted, 2 easy pull, 3 hard pull, 4 caesarean, 5 abnormal presentation). Cattle named that scale, but lambing and kidding ease are scored the same way, so it carries across. Scoring it the same way every time is the point — repeated hard births on one female are what tell you something.
• Birth weight becomes the first weigh-in. Enter it while recording the calving and it is saved as that calf's first weight on its birth date — so average daily gain works from day one, and the weaning weight later becomes the second point on the same line.
• Pedigrees & lineage: every individual animal has a Pedigree page — a four-generation chart, an offspring list, and sire/dam pickers. Set a sire and dam on an animal and the whole chart above it fills in from what you already have. Empty boxes are shown on purpose, so you can see which parent is worth going and recording. The page prints in landscape for a sale or a show.
• Her production record. On a female’s page, once she has offspring on record, a Production record panel appears: calvings (or kiddings, or lambings), young weaned and the share of those born, her average interval, and their average weaning weight, with the adjusted figure where her species has a standard. It also shows days since she last calved and every calving-ease score she has been given. This is the panel you cull on — and it is built entirely from records you already keep, so it fills itself in.
• Twins count as one. Two young on the same date is one calving — or kidding, or lambing — not two — otherwise every interval after it would be wrong. A calf a year is the aim, so an average interval up to about 380 days reads well and past 420 means she is costing you a calf.
• Pedigrees write themselves: when you add a breeding pair, pick your actual animal records for the sire and dam rather than typing their names. Then, when you record the hatch or birth result, tell it how many offspring to create individual records for — each one is created with that sire and dam already set. Goats and rabbits default to every offspring; poultry default to none, because nobody wants thirty new records after a quail hatch.
• Related-pair warning: pick two animals for a pair and the app checks four generations of records on both sides, telling you in plain words if they are full siblings, half siblings, or share an ancestor further back. It warns, it never blocks — line breeding is a deliberate choice and the app does not overrule you.
• It will not let a pedigree loop. Naming a parent that would make an animal its own ancestor is refused, with a message saying so.
• Grazing & pastures (Pro/Max/trial): in Grazing & pastures, add each paddock you rotate through — a name is enough, and acres let the app work out head per acre. Then Move a herd onto one.
• Rest days count themselves. There is no “fallow” switch to remember. Moving a herd somewhere new automatically closes out the pasture they were on, and that paddock starts resting from the same day. Each card shows either Grazing · day 6 or Resting 21d.
• One herd, one pasture. A herd can only be in one place at a time, and the app enforces it — so the rest-day figures stay honest. A Herds not placed count tells you which groups have no pasture recorded at all.
• Feed (Max/trial): in Feed, track feed inventory and usage (which auto-decrements stock) with low-stock flags and cost.
• Medicine Cabinet (Pro/Max/trial): in Medicine cabinet, keep a shelf inventory of what you actually own — wound spray, wormer, electrolytes. Four things matter: what it is, when you bought it, when it expires, and how much is left. Everything else on the form is optional.
• It warns you before you need it to. Tiles count what's expired, expiring within 60 days, and running low, and a Needs attention panel lists them worst first. Expired items get a one-click Binned it. Tick the reminder box and a task lands in Tasks 30 days before the expiry date.
• The cabinet and the dose are different things. The bottle lives in the Medicine Cabinet; the dose you gave an animal is a health record. When you log a health record you can pick the bottle it came out of — that draws the stock down automatically, the same way logging feed does.
• Withdrawal dates, worked out for you. Put the label's withdrawal period on the bottle and every treatment logged against it saves the date eggs and meat are clear again. A Withdrawal in effect panel on the Health page lists anything still inside its period. That date is frozen when you log the treatment, so correcting the bottle later never changes a food-safety record you already have.
• Used-up bottles are archived, not deleted. What you treated with and when is worth keeping. There's a hard delete behind the archive for genuine mistakes.
• Processing & cut sheets — butcher day, on the books. In Processing & cut sheets, record the trip to the processor for any individual animal: the processor, the drop-off and kill dates, then — as they arrive — the carcass weight, the days aged, the packaged weight when the boxes come back, and the bill. The animal is marked processed, which is its own status: not sold, not a loss, the plan working.
• It checks the withdrawal date first. Record a kill date while any treatment's withdrawal period still runs past it and the app stops and says so, naming the product and the clear date. You can acknowledge and record it anyway — it is your call — but it will never let that date pass silently. The withdrawal date on a treatment exists for exactly this moment.
• Say whether the carcass weight is hot or chilled. Processors mean different things by “hanging weight” — some quote the hot carcass weight from kill day, some the chilled weight after aging, and there is about 6% of shrink between them. The form makes the distinction so your figures mean what they say.
• Dressing percent, worked out honestly. With a weigh-in within 30 days of the kill date and a hot carcass weight, the page shows your dressing percent — grain-fed steers typically run 60–63% (Oklahoma State Extension). No weigh-in near the date, no percentage: a figure built on a stale pasture weight would be a guess wearing a number. Given a chilled weight instead, it shows the chilled-carcass ratio, labelled as exactly that.
• Cutting yield without the verdict. Once the boxes are weighed, the page shows packaged weight as a share of the carcass — typically 50–65% of the chilled weight. It will not grade that number, because the spread is mostly your own cut sheet: a boneless, closely-trimmed order should yield less than a bone-in one. A lower number is usually the order working, not the butcher shorting you.
• What a pound in the freezer really cost. Kill fee and cut & wrap divided by packaged pounds gives the processing cost per lb. Add what the animal cost to raise — you state that figure, the app won't guess it from your ledger — and you get the all-in cost per pound. One tick posts the processing bill to Finances under its own category.
• Shares — halves and quarters, each with its own cut sheet. Split the animal between your freezer and any buyers: whole, half, quarter, eighth, or a custom fraction. A sold share records the buyer, the price (per lb hanging weight is the usual way, per lb packaged and flat prices work too), the deposit, and the balance due — worked out for you once the carcass weight is in. The app will not let shares add up to more than one animal, and Mark paid posts the money to Finances as meat-sale income.
• Cut sheets you keep. A cut sheet records the choices every processor asks for: steak thickness and count per package, bone-in or boneless, roast size, ground packaging and patties, short-rib style, brisket, organs, bones, suet, aging, wrapping. Save one per household, attach it to a share, and duplicate it next year — “same as last year” is how real orders get filled out.
• Your own share can land in the pantry maths. On the home share, Log it as meat production records the pounds as meat production with home use set — so the home-use pricing you've set values your freezer alongside your eggs and milk.

• Beds & plantings: in Garden & Crops, add beds, then plantings with the crop, planting method, and status.
• Companion planting. Pick a bed and a crop and the form shows how it gets on with what’s already growing there — good company (the Three Sisters: corn, beans and squash) and pairings traditionally kept apart (beans next to garlic, tomatoes next to potatoes). Each crop also lists classic companions worth interplanting, herbs and flowers included. It’s traditional guidance — some of it well documented, some of it long practice — so it suggests and never blocks.
• Crop rotation warning. Pick a bed and a crop and, if the same plant family grew there in the last few seasons, the form flags it — “Nightshades grew in this bed last season (Tomato).” Rotating families starves out the soil-borne pests and diseases that specialise in them. Each bed card also shows what recently grew there. It warns, it never blocks — you know your own soil. (Tomatoes, peppers and potatoes are one family; so are the squashes and melons.)
• “Coming up in the garden.” The Garden page shows a running list worked out from your plantings: what’s ready to pick (past-due picks turn the panel amber), and when to sow the next round of anything you succession-plant. Nothing to do, nothing shown — it never invents busywork.
• Succession sowing. For crops you sow in rounds — lettuce, beans, radishes — each planting shows when to sow the next one, from your own last sowing plus that crop’s interval, so the harvest comes steadily instead of all at once. It stops when the season runs out: once a sowing couldn’t mature before your average first fall frost, it goes quiet rather than telling you to plant too late.
• How many fit. Pick a bed and a crop on the planting form and it estimates how many plants the bed holds at that crop’s spacing — a rough figure, before paths and edges, but enough to plan a row.
• Pick the variety. Each planting can carry a variety — Brandywine vs Roma, Buttercrunch vs Romaine. Common crops come with a starter list; type any variety you grow and it’s saved for next time. It shows on the planting and follows through to your records, so “which tomato did best” is a question you can actually answer.
• The harvest date fills itself in. Give a planting a seeded (or transplant) date and the app works out when it’ll be ready from the crop’s days to maturity — counted from the transplant when there is one, since that’s where the clock really starts. You can change it. The card shows how to put it in the ground too: how deep, how far apart, and roughly how long to harvest.
• Harvest logging: record harvests against a planting to keep your yields and finances accurate.
• Sold what you picked? Log the sale against the harvest and the Recent Harvests list remembers it — the row carries a green Sold · $X badge, and the money is already in your finances. No more wondering which basket you sold.
• Planting calendar: from Garden → Planting calendar, enter your average frost dates once and the app lays out recommended spring and fall sow-and-harvest windows for every crop — tuned to your place, not a generic almanac. It's a starting guide, so adjust for your own microclimate.
• Don't know your frost dates? Tap 🌱 Let Harold fill these in and he'll estimate them from your location — or give him a ZIP code. He saves the hardiness zone he finds onto your farm details too, so you only do it once. Adjust anything he suggests; they're your dates.

• Storage locations: in Preservation, set up your pantry, freezer, root cellar, etc.
• Preserved items: log canned, frozen, and cured batches with a category (tomatoes, jams, pickles…), a unit, and a best-by date. Items are color-flagged as they approach expiry so nothing turns before you use it.
• Use it a jar at a time. Tap Use to draw down the count as you eat through a batch — it retires itself when it hits zero. Used up clears the rest in one tap.
• Low-stock flags. Set a “low-stock at” number on an item and the pantry flags it — and Harold mentions it — when you're down to your last few, so you know what to put up more of next season.
• Canning details. When you add a canned item you can record the process from your tested recipe — water bath vs. pressure, jar size, headspace, processing time, pressure and gauge, and the recipe source. Set your elevation on the Account page and the form shows the USDA altitude adjustments for reference. These are your figures from a lab-tested recipe — Homestead Paradise records what you canned, it never tells you a safe time.
• Seal check. Canning a batch adds a task for the next day to confirm every jar sealed; tap confirm on the item once they have. A jar that didn't seal needs refrigerating or reprocessing.
• From harvest to jar. Link a new item to the harvest it came from, and the pantry card shows where it started — your July tomatoes, now twelve quarts of sauce.
• This season. The top of the page totals what you've put up this year against what's still on the shelf, by category — so you can see you're down to two jars of tomatoes and can more.
• It counts toward “paying for itself.” Set a store price per category (Max, on the Finances page) and the jars you put up this year are valued into your homestead's cost-avoided total — the food you grew or put up instead of buying.

• Equipment: in Gear & Equipment, track gear with a maintenance interval.
• Maintenance logs: record service and the app calculates what's overdue, due soon, or coming up.
• Tasks span the whole place, and Harold factors frost-aware warnings into what needs doing.

Every domain keeps its own income and expenses. The Overview page rolls them into a single homestead net, with a per-domain breakdown chart — so you can see at a glance whether the flock, the garden, or the whole place is in the black.

Sales & invoices: sold some eggs, honey, or produce? From Sales & Invoices you can log the sale as income and print a clean invoice headed with your farm name for your own records. Those entries flow into the rollup and the full Finances ledger.

Farm and household (Max): Max adds a full set of household categories — mortgage, groceries, utilities, off-farm wages and more — and a Farm / Household filter on the Finances ledger. Household money is kept completely separate from your farm books and never appears on the Schedule F tax report.

Paying for itself (Max): when you log production you can note how much you kept for your own table, and set your own store prices. Finances then shows what share of your homestead's yearly cost it covered — cash sales plus the food you didn't have to buy — valued at your grocery prices, with the date shown so it's never mistaken for cash.

From Budget you can set monthly spending targets — overall, by area (livestock, garden, and so on), or by category (feed, seed, vet…) — and income goals to aim for. A simple bar tracks each one against your real ledger: green while you're on target, orange the moment you tip over. A “Budget — this month” strip on the Overview keeps it in view.

Cost to produce: tag a feed or vet purchase to a flock and Homestead Paradise divides it by what you gathered — so each livestock group shows its real cost per dozen (or per pound) right on the Livestock page.

Household budget (Max): budget the house side too — mortgage, groceries, utilities and the rest, plus off-farm income goals — in its own section, kept cleanly separate from the farm.

Overall and per-area targets and goals are free; per-category and per-source ones, plus cost-to-produce, are part of Pro. The household budget is part of Max.

Reports turns your ledger into a profit & loss for any period — income and expenses by category, down to a net figure. Underneath, a Schedule F summary rolls those categories into the IRS Form 1040 farm-tax lines, and a Print / Save as PDF button gives you a clean one-page sheet to hand your accountant.

The profit & loss is free; the Schedule F summary is part of Pro. Household categories (Max) are excluded from Schedule F by design — only farm money reaches the tax report. It's a helpful guide, not tax advice — confirm the totals, and any shared farm/household bills, with a tax professional.

Cash flow looks forward instead of back. Enter your cash on hand today and it projects your balance six months out — using your budget for expected spending and your recent income for what's coming in. If you're headed for a lean month, the balance turns red and flags it early, while there's still time to plan.

Farm or whole homestead (Max): by default the projection is farm-only, so it means the same as it always has. With Max you can flip it to Whole homestead to fold in household spending and off-farm income.

Cash-flow projection is part of Pro; the farm/household toggle is part of Max.

• Recurring entries. From Recurring, set a monthly, weekly, or biweekly income or expense once and it posts itself as each date arrives — catching up automatically whenever you open the app.
• Bank import. On Import CSV, upload a CSV from your bank, confirm which columns are the date, description, and amount, review the auto-sorted rows, and add them in bulk — exact duplicates already in your ledger are skipped. With Max you can also tell it whether the statement is a farm, household, or mixed account, so a house bill on a shared card isn't filed as a farm cost.
• Attach receipts. Every row in the Finances ledger has a 📎 button to attach a photo or PDF of the receipt. They're stored privately and opened through a short-lived secure link — never public.
• Scan a receipt. On Finances, tap 📷 Scan a receipt, snap a photo, and it reads the amount, date, and vendor and fills in the expense for you — you just confirm, and the photo stays attached.

Recurring entries and bank import are part of Pro. Attaching a receipt photo works on every plan; the automatic receipt scanner is a Max feature (up to 50 scans a month).

Made a typo or need to remove something? Most records have an inline Edit panel — open it, the fields pre-fill, then Save, Cancel, or Delete right there. Recent-entry lists on the livestock, garden, and gear pages make your latest logs easy to find and fix.

Your data is never locked in. From Export data you can download any dataset — animal groups, production, health, mortality, feed, plantings, harvests, preserved items, equipment, and transactions — as a CSV, one click each.

Plans at a glance:

• Free — full logging across all four domains, one animal group + one garden bed, the cross-domain finance rollup, and a taste of Harold each month.
• Pro ($7/mo or $49/yr) — daily Harold advice (fair use), up to 5 animal groups, and multi-bed garden, preservation, and equipment.
• Max ($12/mo or $99/yr) — everything unlimited, plus breeding/incubation/gestation, feed tracking, receipt scanning, Harold's Eyes photo ID, and the full household finance suite (household budgets, categories and off-farm income).
• Founding Member ($39/yr for life) — everything in Max, at a price that never goes up for as long as you keep the subscription. Max is normally $99/yr. Limited to the first 100 members; the live count is on the pricing page.
• Your 14-day trial gives you full Max-level access so you can try everything. Annual billing is cheaper than paying by the month.

Managing your subscription

• Billing & plan in the sidebar (Billing & plan) shows the plan you're on now and what each of the others includes.
• Upgrading or switching takes you through a short review of what changes before anything is charged, and a confirmation banner tells you when the new plan is live.
• Manage billing opens your secure billing portal, where you can update your card, change or cancel your plan, and download past invoices.
• Got a promo code? Enter it at checkout — valid codes are applied there.
• Cancel anytime. You keep your access through the period you've already paid for, and your records stay yours — export them whenever you like.

As your records build up, Homestead Paradise awards badges for what they show. Open Achievements in the sidebar to see the ones you've earned and exactly what the rest need.

• Earned, never chosen. Badges come out of your own records. You can't pick one, and nothing you write in a notes field can earn you one.
• Dated and permanent. A badge records that something happened. If the flock shrinks or the pantry empties later, the badge stays — it's history, not a scoreboard.
• Candling and lockdown dates. A running clutch now shows when to candle and when to go into lockdown, worked out from the species’ own timeline — day 7 and day 18 for chickens, day 7 and day 14 for coturnix. Lockdown is the one people miss: stop turning, raise the humidity, and leave the lid alone. Both say “due” once the date arrives.
• Hatch rate, and the two rates that are not the same thing. Finish a clutch and its card shows the hatch of eggs set — chicks out of eggs you put in. If you also record the fertile count at candling, it splits into fertility (how many were fertile) and true hatchability (how many of the fertile ones hatched). Those are different numbers: 30 set, 20 fertile, 18 hatched is 60% of eggs set but 90% hatchability — and knowing which tells you whether to look at the breeding pen or the incubator. The app says which one it is showing you, every time.
• It reads the losses for you. Mostly clear eggs points at the pen — the ratio, the age of the birds, the season. Good fertility with a poor hatch points at the incubator — temperature, humidity, turning. Under 20 eggs set it stays quiet and calls the result a result, not a rate.
• Eggs per hen — the hen-day rate. The Livestock card now turns “84 eggs” into 72% hen-day · 5.0 eggs a week per hen: eggs divided by hens times days. Only days you actually logged count in that sum — a day nobody wrote down is a day nobody watched, not a day the hens laid nothing, and a number that sags because you took a weekend off would be worth nothing. Needs a week of logged days and a hen count on the group.
• Cracked eggs. Logging eggs? There is a cracked box next to the count. Fill it in and the card adds how many were cracked and what share was saleable. Leave it blank and it stays blank — an uncounted batch is not a clean one. Cracked eggs still count toward the laying rate, because the hen still laid them.
• No grade on the laying rate, on purpose. A flock laying 80% in June and 40% in December ate the same feed and did nothing wrong — that is molt, short days, and hens getting older. You get the number and the context, never a scolding. The one thing it will say is if the rate comes out above one egg per hen per day, which no flock sustains. That almost always means the hen count on the group is out of date, so it works out how many hens your egg numbers imply and tells you. The other cause is several days’ eggs logged under a single date.
• Honest numbers. Anything based on a rate has a minimum sample size. An 80% hatch rate needs 20 or more eggs set, so a lucky four-egg clutch can't claim it.
• The locked tiles are the instructions. Each one tells you exactly what to do to earn it — it's a decent tour of everything the app can track.
• Breeders get their own. Recording parents, breeding ten animals with both parents on record, and building pedigrees three, four and five generations deep all earn badges.
• Share a card, free on every plan. Share this badge makes a public card with your farm name, the badge and the number behind it. Paste the link on Facebook and it unfurls as a picture. The card also prints as a 6×4 card for the fair, the club, or the wall — just print the page.
• What's on a shared card. Your farm name (or homestead name), the badge, the one number behind it, and the date. Nothing else — no email, no notes, no finances.

New badges show up on your Overview the next time you sign in, and the list refreshes whenever you open the Achievements page.

Homesteading goes better with neighbors. The Homestead Paradise Community is a free forum for members and non-members alike — flock troubles, garden wins, preservation questions, and the odd “what is this bug.”

• No second password. If you're signed in to Homestead Paradise, the Community links in your dashboard sign you straight in. Your account carries over.
• Not joined yet? A join card sits on your Overview until you do — one tap and you're in.
• Invite a neighbor. The Invite a neighbor card gives you your own invite link with a Copy link button — text it, post it, or email it. Whoever follows it lands on a welcome page with your invitation already attached. Your invite code also lives on your My Farm & Account page.

Plenty of Homestead Paradise is free and needs no account at all — share these with anyone.

• Free calculators — what a dozen of your eggs actually costs, your frost dates, hatch-day math for any bird, and gestation due dates for goats, sheep, cows, pigs, and rabbits.
• Guides — can chickens eat it, what's eating my crop, chicken symptoms, and how many of a thing you actually need.
• The Homestead Journal — longer pieces on the numbers behind the chores, each one tied to the tool it explains.

Homestead Paradise installs to your phone's home screen and runs full-screen — no app store needed.

• Android (Chrome): open your dashboard and tap Install on the “Get the Homestead Paradise app” banner, or use Chrome's menu → Install app.
• iPhone (Safari): tap the Share button, then Add to Home Screen.
• Once installed, it opens straight to your dashboard and works great in the barn.

Stuck or have an idea? Open Support in the sidebar and send us a message. You'll see your past messages and our replies right there.

• Never used to train Harold. Your records are yours — we don't use them to train Harold or anyone else.
• Photos and receipts. When you use Harold's Eyes or scan a receipt, that image is sent to our vision provider to be read, and it is not used to train any model. The Privacy Policy names the provider and spells this out.
• Stored privately. Receipt and photo attachments are never public — they open through a short-lived secure link that only you can use.
• Export anytime. Pull everything to CSV whenever you like.
• Cancel anytime. No lock-in — leave whenever you want and take your data with you.
• The details: read our full Privacy Policy and Terms of Service.

Do I need a credit card to start?

No. Start free or begin a 14-day trial without a card.

I never got my confirmation email.

Check spam, and on Gmail the Promotions tab — it comes from noreply@homesteadparadise.farm. Still nothing? Use the Resend confirmation email button on the login page. The link works from any device, so you can sign up on one and confirm on another.

What animals can I track?

Any species — poultry, goats, rabbits, bees, and more. Production types include eggs, milk, and others.

Why does the garden calendar care about frost dates?

Planting timing is driven by your hardiness zone and frost dates. Set them on My Farm & Account, or let Harold fill them in from your location on the Planting calendar and adjust from there.

How do I change plans or cancel?

Open Billing & plan and use Manage billing. You can switch plans, update your card, or cancel — and you keep access through the period you've already paid for.

What is the Founding Member rate?

Everything in Max for $39/yr, locked for as long as you keep the subscription — Max is normally $99/yr. It's capped at the first 100 members; the pricing page shows how many spots are left.

Can I invite friends?

Yes — the Invite a neighbor card gives you a personal invite link to share, and your invite code is on your account page.

How do I get Harold to be more useful?

Log regularly. The more current your production, health, and dates are, the more specific his advice gets.

Is there a mobile app?

Yes — install it to your home screen from your phone's browser (see Install the mobile app).