Every other page in this plan treats feed as a single number — 7,000 SEK per animal — and never mentions water at all. This page builds both from the bottom up: how many litres and how many kilos of dry matter one animal needs each day as it grows from a 250 kg weaner to a finished 600 kg steer, how that multiplies as the herd grows, and what infrastructure has to exist on the land before the first calf arrives.
The short answer, at 50 animals finished a year. The herd standing on the land is about 63 animals, averaging roughly 430 kg. They drink on the order of 2,000–2,200 litres a day — about 800 m³ a year — and eat roughly 230 tonnes of dry matter a year, of which about 125 tonnes must be conserved winter forage because the grazing season near Stockholm covers only about 165 days.
Neither number is alarming in itself. What matters is that both are infrastructure questions before they are cost questions: water has to reach every paddock on the hottest day of the year, and 125 tonnes of dry matter has to be cut, wrapped and stored before winter. Those are the two things to check on any parcel of land before signing a lease.
Two numbers elsewhere in this plan need revisiting, and this page is where that shows up.
The land page's forage assumption looks low. It defaults to 8 kg DM per animal per day. For an average animal of ~430 kg that is about 1.9% of body weight, below the 2.2–2.5% that published intake capacity implies for growing cattle. At 2.3% the winter forage requirement rises by roughly a quarter — and so does the forage acreage on the land page.
The 7,000 SEK per animal feed line is fully consumed by winter forage alone if you buy that forage in. At a 2025 round-bale price of 2.80 SEK/kg DM, the winter ration for one animal costs roughly 7,000 SEK by itself — leaving nothing for minerals, bedding or any concentrate. The operating model's feed number therefore only holds if you grow your own winter forage, with that cost sitting in the land lease and machinery instead.
The calculator
Set the herd and the growth assumptions; every figure below updates. Defaults match the buy-and-finish model — 50 animals a year, bought as ~250 kg weaners, owned 15 months — and the land page's 200-day winter.
One animal, from weaner to finished
How a single animal's weight, feed intake and water intake move over the months you own it. The point of this chart is that an animal's demand is not constant — a finishing steer drinks and eats roughly twice what it did on arrival, so a herd of mixed ages has a demand that depends on its age profile, not just its head count.
Live weight (kg, left axis)
Water, litres per day (right axis)
Feed, kg dry matter per day (right axis)
How it grows with the herd
Annual water and annual dry matter against the number of animals finished per year. Both scale linearly with head count — the interesting part is where each line crosses a threshold that changes what infrastructure you need.
Water, m³ per year (left axis)
Feed, tonnes dry matter per year (right axis)
Your current setting
The full requirement, line by line
Everything the calculator derives, with the arithmetic shown so you can check it against your own adviser's numbers.
Water — the part no other page covers
Two published methods, 40% apart
Swedish advice offers two ways to size cattle water. They do not agree, and the page shows both rather than picking the convenient one.
The age-band table. Calves under 1 year 14 l/day, young cattle under 2 years 25 l/day, cattle over 2 years 38 l/day. Simple, but it takes no account of body weight, ration or weather.
The category range. "Ungdjur 20–50 litres per day" — the figure repeated by Gård & Djurhälsan, Länsstyrelsen and the Kunskapsbanken alike. It is a 30-litre-wide band, which is another way of saying nobody will commit to a number.
The intake-linked rule. Roughly 3–4 litres of water per kg of dry matter eaten. This is the method used in the calculator above, because it is the only one that responds to how big the animal is and how much it is eating.
Size on the higher number. For a 430 kg animal eating ~10 kg DM, the intake-linked rule gives ~35 l/day against the age band's 25. Water is cheap and running out is not, so the calculator defaults to the intake-linked figure and the tiles show both.
The 1999 problem
Follow the citations and they converge on a single document: Jordbruksverket's brochure Jordbruksinformation 13 – 1999, "Vatten till husdjur". Länsstyrelsen's current farmer advice reproduces its table and names it as the source. Gård & Djurhälsan's article dates from 2015. The Kunskapsbanken page is newer, but its numbers are the same lineage.
So the entire Swedish advisory chain for cattle water rests on one 27-year-old brochure, whose cattle entry is a single range covering every animal from a 200 kg calf to a 700 kg bull. There is no modern, weight-specific Swedish table to be found.
That is not a reason to distrust the number — it is a reason to build in margin and measure your own. A water meter on the supply, read daily, converts this whole page into fact within one season, and it is the cheapest instrument on the farm.
What the rules require, and what heat does
The real water problem is not volume — it is delivery to the paddock. At 50 head the herd needs roughly 2.2 m³ a day. Spread over 24 hours that is about 1.5 litres a minute, which almost any borehole can supply. But cattle do not drink evenly: they drink in bouts, mostly after milking-time-of-day equivalents and in the heat, so the trough has to refill fast — Swedish guidance asks for 10–20 litres a minute at the drinking place, an order of magnitude above the average draw.
That gap is what storage is for. A buffer tank of a few cubic metres near the paddocks turns a modest well into an adequate supply. The expensive failure mode is the opposite: a scattered set of leased parcels with no pipework, served by a bowser on a trailer, in the week the temperature reaches 30°C.
Getting water onto leased land
Mains, where it reaches. Stockholm's municipal variable charge is 21.75 SEK/m³ (2025 tariff). At ~800 m³/year that is roughly 17,000 SEK/year for the whole herd — trivial against the operation, but mains rarely reaches a rented pasture.
A drilled well. Trade sources quote 80,000–250,000 SEK depending overwhelmingly on depth, and suggest a livestock holding wants 1.5–3.0 l/s. Note these are drilling contractors' own figures, not an official statistic.
Rainwater and storage. Länsstyrelsen's own worked example: about 10 m² of roof per cow and 600 mm of rain gives ~6 m³ per animal per year. Not a primary supply, but real for washing water.
Natural water. Grazing animals take in water from the grass itself, and a stream in the paddock reduces the draw — but abstracting from a watercourse can require notification or a permit from Länsstyrelsen. Check before relying on it.
Drought is the scenario that decides the lease
Heat raises intake at the same time as it dries the grass — you need more water in exactly the weeks a shallow well yields less.
The documented uplift is modest — about +10% when the daily minimum rises from 12°C to 22°C — but that is measured on dairy cows and it is a daily-minimum effect, not a peak-hour one. The hot-day slider above goes higher deliberately.
Swedish law requires animals to be given water at least twice a day. In a drought that is not advice, it is the standard you are held to — with no exception for a leased field that has run dry.
The practical mitigation is boring and cheap: a mobile tank, a plan for where refills come from, and paddocks chosen so no group is more than a short haul from a filling point.
Feed — where the money actually is
What the ration has to contain
Gård & Djurhälsan's published targets for growing cattle. These are quality specifications, not quantities — the quantity comes from the calculator above.
Grazed grass versus conserved forage
The split is set by the calendar, not by choice. Near Stockholm the grazing season runs roughly May to October, so the herd spends over half the year on stored feed. At the defaults, about 45% of annual dry matter is grazed and 55% is conserved.
Grazed grass looks free because its cost is booked as land lease. Conserved forage does not: it is cut, wrapped, stored and fed, and every tonne of it is either bought at market price or grown with machinery you own or hire. This is the single largest controllable operating cost in the business.
One consequence worth planning for: silage should sit at 35–40% dry matter for maximum intake. Below 20–25% DM the animals physically cannot eat enough, and growth stalls — a wet first cut is not just lower quality, it is lower quantity eaten.
Bedding, minerals and the outdoor-wintering choice
Straw is a housing cost, not a feed cost. The rule of thumb for deep litter is 1.4 kg of straw per 100 kg of body weight per day — about 6 kg a day for a 430 kg animal, or roughly a tonne per animal over a 170-day housing season. At ~2.50 SEK/kg that is ~2,500 SEK per animal.
Which is why this plan winters outdoors. The unit economics assume outdoor wintering, and the straw arithmetic above is the reason: housing would add a cost of the same order as the entire feed budget. The calculator defaults housed days to zero — move it to see what a housed system would cost.
Establishing a bed takes 20–25 kg of straw per m² before any animal walks on it, and a bed grows 70 cm to 1.2 m over a housing season. Budget for the muck-out, not just the straw.
Minerals are small money and real risk. Hushållningssällskapet's published calculation for a 22-month organic steer budgets 29 kg of mineral per animal over its life — about 64 g a day — at 7.73 SEK/kg, or 224 SEK per animal. Swedish guidance otherwise specifies ratios rather than doses: calcium to phosphorus between 1 and 2.5, potassium to magnesium between 4 and 8. Analyse the forage, then buy the mineral — the reverse is guesswork.
How this reconciles with the land page. The forage tonnage above converts to hectares at whatever your ley yields. At the land page's default of 5 t DM/ha, the winter forage in this model needs the acreage shown in the results table — and if you raise intake from the land page's 8 kg DM/day to the 2.3% of body weight used here, that acreage rises by about a quarter. The two pages are consistent in method; they differ in one assumption, and this is the honest place to say so rather than quietly matching them up.
Sources
What could not be verified, and what is derived rather than published.
No weight-specific Swedish water table exists. The per-animal litres in the calculator are derived from dry matter intake using the 3–4 l/kg DM rule, then cross-checked against the published age bands. They are not a published Swedish figure for a 430 kg steer, because none was found.
Dry matter intake as a percentage of body weight is a standard livestock-nutrition rule of thumb, not a Swedish published norm. The Swedish sources found give an NDF-based capacity (~1.5% of body weight as NDF) and observed intakes in feeding trials (9.7–10.5 kg DM/day for finishing steers). The 2.3% default sits inside what those imply; treat it as an assumption, not a citation. It does survive the best available check: Hushållningssällskapet's published budget for a 22-month organic naturbete steer allows 2,850 kg DM of silage plus 1,650 kg DM of grazing over a 15-month rearing period — 4,500 kg DM, or almost exactly 10 kg a day, which is what this page's default produces.
Intake per cent falls as animals get heavier. The calculator applies one flat percentage across the whole growth period, which slightly overstates the finishing months and understates the early ones. The totals are close; the monthly profile is smoother than reality.
Forage and straw prices are single-seller listings from 2025, not a market index. Jordbruksverket publishes no standing forage price series. Get quotes.
Well cost and yield figures come from drilling contractors' marketing pages — the only public source found. Treat the 80,000–250,000 SEK range as indicative of an order of magnitude and nothing finer.
Nothing here is site-specific. Whether a given parcel can water 60 animals in a July drought is a question about that parcel's well, its watercourses and its pipework. It cannot be answered from a desk, and it is the first thing to ask the outgoing farmer.
Open questions
Quantities are modelled from published norms; these are the site-specific answers that decide whether they can be met.
Question
Why it matters
Where the answer comes from
What does the parcel's water source actually yield in August?Blocking
Heat raises intake exactly when a shallow well yields least, and the law requires water at least twice a day regardless of which field the animals are in.
A yield test on the existing well; the outgoing farmer's experience in 2018; Länsstyrelsen if you plan to abstract from a watercourse.
What does home-grown forage cost per kg DM with your contractor and your fields?Important
The published organic calculation uses 1.80 SEK/kg DM for own forage against 2.80 bought in — the difference across a winter is the whole feed budget.
Contractor quotes for cutting, wrapping and carting, against your realistic yield.
What does your forage analysis say, and what mineral does it call for?Important
Swedish guidance gives mineral ratios rather than doses, because the right supplement depends on the forage. The published budget is 29 kg per animal.
A forage analysis each harvest, then a mineral spec from the adviser — in that order.
What do the animals actually drink?Important
Two published methods differ by 40% for this herd. One season of metered data replaces the entire estimate.
A water meter on the supply, read daily. It is the cheapest instrument on the farm.
Prepared August 2026 as a planning aid. Water and feed quantities are modelled from published Swedish norms applied to this plan's buy-and-finish herd, not measured on a holding; per-animal water figures are derived from dry matter intake rather than published directly. SEK figures are indicative and ex-VAT unless stated; the municipal water tariff quoted is Stockholm's 2025 variable charge. Growth is modelled as a constant daily gain, which is a simplification — real animals gain fastest on spring grass and slowest in late winter. Verify against a local adviser, the actual forage analysis and the specific parcel's water supply before committing to a lease or a herd size. Not financial advice.