The Dervaes family in California, and what they have done on their 1/10th of an acre propterty.
They say they harvest 3 tons of food off that 1/10th acre!
that is amazing.
Path to Freedom
Forum member Wishful posted this link today in a thread where we're talking about how much land does it take to feed a person for 1 year.
How Much Land Does It Take to Feed One Person for One Year?
You'd think that would be an easy question to answer but it's not.
I've been out among the interwebs this morning looking for some (not terrible technical) data about it and have found about as many suggestions and ideas and people answering the question.
It would depend on where you live, what you want to eat, the quality of the land, growing techniques used etc...
There are a lot of claims but not a lot of research that I could find yet.
But I'm still looking.
I found this on a site and it looks interesting. here's the link. http://ask.metafilter.com/77287/How-much-land-does-a-person-need
Quote
These are from speech notes from a guy named Jason Bradford, to a Rotary group in northern California. I don't know where he got them. The presentation used to be online here, but the link is broken, so I don't know where it is now.
Each person needs --
vegan food -- 3000 sq. ft.
a few eggs/week -- 3,500 sq. ft.
one chicken/week -- 24,300 sq. ft.
one cow/year -- 67,300 sq. ft.
posted by salvia at 9:51 AM on November 28, 2007
if you take the above and average it out, it comes to 24,525 sq. ft. per person per year.
according to and online conversion doo-hicky, that comes to 0.563016 acre. Or a little over 1/2 acre per person.
If I figured right, that would give a person a well rounded diet for a year from half an acre.
Of course, you can't raise a cow on half an acre and have room to grow everything else, including food for the cow.
So, let's remove the Cow.
out cow out!
now, we're looking at 10266 sq. ft. per person per year or 0.235674 acre, about 1/4 acre per person per year.
Wow.
I wanted to start a discussion about this hoping that for people looking to buy property, it would give them a better idea of how much land to buy.
so far, we've been talking about just land for food.
We'd want to add to that room for a modest home, and area for energy production which actually could be the roof of the house, or windmills that have very small footprints, area for water tanks for rainwater harvesting, and of course housing for your chickens or goats perhaps or rabbits.
If you plan on using wood for cooking and heating you would also have to add land big enough to renew itself as you harvest firewood over time.
so if you want to go beef free, a family of 4 would have to find a place with 1 acre of land for food, plus, land for the home and other buildings, plus woodlot.
If someone could find better numbers please post it.
I'd like to get some discussion going on this so that people have a more realistic idea about requirements when they go land shopping.
or, help people figure out how much they could do with the property they already live on.
So think girls what you could do with your yards!
Anyway, I'll be back later or tomorrow sometime, have to go to the gallery and get some new pencils!
love you girls,
keep prepping.
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