▲ 118 points
back
137 comments
As someone who has a backyard hobby garden, don't forget about failures.
This year something ate the leaves off all my cucumber plants and they stopped producing after about 3 weeks. In 6 or 7 years of having them, that has never happened before.
One year squirrels overran the neighborhood and did the same to tomatoes. (The little f-ers take one bite of a tomato and drop it. It's so frustrating.)
One year I had to go out of town unexpectedly for 2 weeks and we happened to have a dry few weeks. Most of my plants died or were in bad shape.
Just off the cuff, if I were planning to do this, I would personally immediately almost double the size of garden I was told I needed just because I expect there would be a lot of loss.
Exactly, if this is for survival you'll need fencing to keep small animals out, and possibly something like a pellet gun to remove pests like squirrels from existence.
Then you have the effort of preserving all the food. The modern house isn't a great place to store potatoes. You'll probably want to can/jar most of it. I mean you could freeze it, but in a survival situation you probably don't have reliable power. Oh, and like you said with a dry spell, where are you storing enough water for the dry season? We just got over a 60 day spell with no rain. Wouldn't want to try and survive here.
I concur. This year we had a biblical plague of grasshoppers year through our area and eat everything.
And the climate.
In southern Spain you could have fresh veg all year round. In the UK you're going to be struggling in January and would need much more land area.
I thought about this a lot during the peak of the pandemic. How much would you need to grow to not need to go to the grocery stores. But then I noticed, even for myself, if I eat 1 potato every meal, that’s over 1K potatoes a year. That’s a shit ton of potatoes. Include veggies, fruits, grain for chicken to make eggs, it’s really really tough to survive on your own garden. Makes me really appreciate our current food system.
People do it in parts of the world, generally referred to as 'subsistence farming' and not considered a desirable situation
I think it's really awesome for people to grow their own food but at the same time we need to have our eyes open - industrial ag is the backbone of our civilization, our way of life, and our freedom to do anything else with our time is dependent on it.
There are home gardeners out there who tout how much of their food they grow but curiously never seem to address that the bulk of their calories come from your industrial staple grains and starches.
Something to take into account is we are all addicted to food. You dont know it until you have experienced it. Eating when you wake up, then at lunch and again at dinner is terrible, it's very addictive making you eat more and more and more, with less and less satisfaction. You can eat less and be healthier. For that, faste 16 hours a day and try to eat all your daily calories in a small window of 4 to 8 hours. In other words, sleep, wake up, coffee and no food until after you finished work. Thats what I (more or less) do and it's just amazing. You dont need to go nazi on this either, it's self fullfiling anyway. I can tell im very healthy as a result and my relation to food and eating is different. I can tell Im way less addicted. I can tell when i see someone he's just loaded intestines on legs, which is ugly. It makes me dam hot.
I had been on half a litter of veg soup plus 2 eggs plus 2 sausages, some bread, some nuts. A day. For months. And I felt absolutely fantastic. Now okay its a tat too short, lack variety and all, and its to note i wasnt working much. I have since got more resources and been able to eat a more balanced diet. But this gives you an idea of what we are talking about here when we say you can eat less. You still need some amount of calories every day but its really all different on many levels and no chance you go on 4k calories for no reasons other than "youre hungry". This 16 hours fasting is marvelous. It's all about the intestines somehow. You want them clean.
Please adapt to your own situation, you may have physical conditions that could affect your ability to do that, check with a specialist.
Not a farmer but, I think potato yields are such that is achievable if you were dedicated to the task.
According to[0], a hectare (100m x 100m) should yield 25,000kg in a year. That's a whole heck of a lot of potatoes.
It blew me away when i learned in roman times it took nine farmers per non farming person.
It depends on where you live. In many tropical places you can essentially grow year round and there’s enough natural fodder that goats don’t really need a whole lot of supplemental nutrition. Also you can have fruit trees that bear a lot of food with only a small amount of work. You can grow enough rice and pulses to feed yourself on a pretty small plot of land.
I know people who farm for themselves and frequently have a surplus of vegetables on about 50m2 of land.
The US Government felt that 160 acres was the right size to sustain a family, and so that is the size allocated to a family in the Homestead Act. On a side note, individuals in their own gardens cannot even remotely approach the efficiency of modern farms, so going back that direction would be counter-productive and terrible for the environment.
Certainly a family garden is a better use of land, time, and resources than a lawn.
Well, we're making some assumptions about self-sufficiency being desirable and/or necessary here. If we don't, it's obvious I should be making Javascript, not food.
160 acres was enough to entice some dopes to risk their lives, nothing to do with some consumption based calculation.
This article begins by saying that estimated land requirements are 4000 sq ft per person, but probably if you’re efficient you can drop that to 200 sq ft. That 20x reduction out of nowhere makes me instantly question the rigor here.
There are several trivial ways to get way more than that efficiency difference. For example, switching from lettuce to potatoes. A greenhouse. That's not what the article is talking about, but it's enough pf a thought experiment to show that it's not necessarily unreasonable.
Whether you have the required space or not, two other variables complicate any attempt to do this:
1) length of the growing season - Where I live, we have 5-6 months of active growth. Never more than 6. Snow covers the garden the rest of the year.
2) time - Tending your growing food source is one investment in time, but because the food does come in all year at a regular rate, you are forced to spend time prepping it in a way that it will remain edible until the next harvest after the snow melts. It’s a lot of time. We only have about 100 m2 for vegetables but we spend hours a week pickling, canning, freezing, dehydrating, cooking and freezing. If our yields were larger to the point of complete sustainability, it would be a full time job.
It's amazing to me how many people are so far removed from food production in modern times that they've forgotten what most of our ancestors knew, "Subsistence farming sucks."
I have a long-term goal of doing similar. Specifically, I'd like to produce as much food as 2 people need, even though we won't actually try to survive off of it. If/when I do reach that point, I'll probably trade/sell/give away any excess, or send it back into the ground as compost.
I'll share my setup in case anyone wants a real life data point: I have about 2400 square feet of garden (in 4 plots), 19 fruit/nut trees, a small vineyard, blueberry/blackberry bushes, and various animals like chickens. I also grow indoors during the winter and have an herb garden. I think we'll accomplish this goal once the trees I've planted in the last 5 years start producing full loads, but we're probably at around 40% of needs currently. Technically, I could probably get much closer now if I hunted deer, since there's huge herds in the area and I'd qualify for a DNR crop damage permit (allowing me to take many additional deer over the limit and out of season), along with other animals. I have plenty of space for additional garden plots too, but don't really have any more bandwidth for it due to working full time as a software engineer.
Worth noting that while I have this goal, I'm not really min/maxing it either. I "waste" space/energy on flowers, gourds, luffas, and other nonedible things. Also, this is just a fun hobby, not really something too serious.
Do you have good soil on your land or do you need to bring in a lot of outside topsoil and compost each year.
I grew in a family where we were self-sustained on potatoes. We had ~250m2 plot that yielded ~1200kg every year. More than enough for a family of 6, so we gifted/sold a hefty amount too.
What article doesn't cover is the amont of hard work required to sustain such garden. At least we had a two-wheel tractor that tremendously helped with planting, bushing, weeding and harvesting.
Harvesting is not a final step either. You need to let it dry, clean from soil and probably sort by size to pick ones you will plant later. You need a pretty big, cold and dark storage for over a tonne of food. You need a way to transport it to your kitchen. So work spent by us only on potatoes was ~400 man hours each year.
What sort of things were you making with the potatoes? Just to get a picture of what the family ate, and accompanied it with. Did you and any siblings find it miserable or did you cope well?
How did you address disease being introduced when resowing? I usually buy accredited seed potatoes because if I sow the eyes from old potatoes, sometimes by the time I'm harvesting, I find that the inside is diseased.
When was this out of interest? And why did you do it?
My back-of-an-envelope maths tells me your family worked for approximately £2 per hour, though I imagine if this was a few decades ago that would be worth a lot more.
I’m no farmer, but 200 square feet feels way too small. Really?
I'm a home gardener and find that estimate hilarious.
Even if you just grew potatoes you would likely be starving.
I can't see how you'd have a chance. Isn't that 3x6 metres?! Literally everything would have to be perfectly efficient and go right without weather incidents, pests, etc. And I think you'd still need to supplement it, or have some miserly meals.
I wonder if this is more feasible doing something like what Freight Farms[0] does with hydroponics and farming vertically.
I think we'll eventually see non-commercial ventures use a mixture of vertical/hydroponics and typical gardening. Pointless using up ground space growing lettuces if you can do it vertically in another part of your garden. But then there are other useful crops that don't suit that approach at all.
I could see this developed into an efficient garden with 3-4 shipping container sized portions running west-east with the most opaque at the rear to avoid blocking winter sun. Maybe something like: [1] enclosed and controlled space with vertical farming, grow lights, solar panels, heat pads, etc, [2] glasshouse with summer ventilation and hydroponic buckets and tubes/shelves, [3] open wicking beds with framework for climbing plants or shading, etc.
What about a middle solution like a greenhouse.
100% the way to go IMO, because with outdoor farming, all sorts of things can fuck up your entire crop and leave you starving for months. The reliance on externally-developed technology is a risk however.
Anybody interested in exploring this may enjoy a series of shows from the BBC on farming using the technology available at various points in time. The first series is called "Tales from the Green Valley" and uses 17th century tech [0].
There are many practical concerns related to timing and food storage which are not considered in the original article which you can learn about in this series.
The followup, Victorian Farm [1], demonstrates how much of a force multiplier industrialization is, but also shows how capital intensive the machinery is, and it becomes pretty obvious why large scale industrial farms are the end state for feeding people at scale.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tales_from_the_Green_Valley
You also have to preserve most of that food for the non-harvest months. There's a reason why famine was common and widespread before modern agriculture.
For a far more in depth look into high intensity gardening, with real data and realistic expectations, I strongly recommend
John Jeavons:
How to Grow More Vegetables: Than You Ever Thought Possible on Less Land Than You Can Imagine
Wouldn't you need more than that per person for redundancy? I assume that would help protect against some forms of crop loss?
From TFA:
> You’re going to need a margin of error if you’re going to live off your garden—and you will likely need a year or two to figure out what not to do and make adjustments to your plan.
This plan lacks fats.
You can live without any sort of oil, but concretely it's really terrible to eat without fats.
And salt, of course.
Totally nonsensical. Even from a basic energetic calculation it does not make sense. Assume:
- Photosynthetic efficiency (sunlight to starch) 0.5% for typical crop plants [1]
- Average daily sunlight of 5kWh/m2 [2] or 18MJ/m2.
- Daily requirement is 8700 kJ for adults.
With 200 sqft you will only get ~1700 kJ. Even if you a had a cow stomach that could digest the entire biomass of the plant (2~3%) you would barely make it.
And then there's the issue of where you will get any nutrient other than carbohydrates.
Don’t forget crop rotation, fertility, sun vs. shade, storage, processing and lastly: salt.
I got deep into gardening during the pandemic, and wanted to live off the garden.... with succession sowing and varied season per locale, it's actually very hard to figure out how much to plant, when, and for how long. I actually built http://raddish.app/ to help me figure it all out.
I am in full agreement the thekevan -- I would take excepted yield and multiple by .75. Things just don't work out very well at least 25% of the time.
You can grow an ungodly amount of potatoes in a very small space if you keep burying the plants up to their tips every month or so. They just keep producing more higher and higher up.
This article have a strange math... Except, perhaps, some tropical areas, we need to eat the entire year, while the garden produce just few months. As a result we need MUCH MORE surface to harvest enough for the rest of the year, nourish animals and so on.
There is no fixed dimension since it vary from local climate to local climate + margins due to weather variations year per year but just to get enough grains, nourish enough poultry and so on in temperate climate we need MUCH, MUCH more.
This isn’t even accurate, there’s been better analysis written on this exact topic previously rather than some LLM generated lifehacker blog post.
The book Environment, Power, and Society for the Twenty-First Century: The Hierarchy of Energy by Howard T. Odum is an eye-opener in this regard. Odum studied this topic for decades and presents some numbers how much energie needs to be spent to feed a person in different regions of the world. It turns out the cheapest to feed humans is if they live sparsely in a rain forest.
This is low-quality content. Can't believe it's so upvoted..
Why isn't it considered to keep chickens?
If slugs and snails eat your crops, eat them instead.
In the UK, snails were brought over by the Romans explicitly as a food item.
1 acre of land can grow 40,000 lbs of potatoes. At 350 calories per potato you that is 14 million calories. If you need 2000 calories a day that is 730,000 per year. So one acre can support about 18.5 people.