Bonus:
Hm, the Edenicity guy makes the opposite case here that small scale farming is actually quite viable (in the context of the viability of cities being self sufficient by growing their own food in urban areas) due to much increased yields compared to industrial scale farming based on studies referenced by David R. Montgomery, and it seems fairly compelling.
In terms of food production it’s absolutely viable. It’s not economically viable though because farming has extremely low margins that can only be made up at scale.
Also, most modern machinery isn’t useful on a small scale, though there are some exceptions. So small scale farming will be quite labor intensive. So the OP here is kinda right that most people don’t want to put that much labor into it.
This is why I think small-scale robotics is going to be important to future small-scale farming, but we haven’t quite gotten there yet.
At a small scale you can take advantage of advanced irrigation, physical pest barriers, advanced fertilization, and even human or AI based individual plant diagnosis and weeding.
Thank you for that video - it gave me a few interesting articles and a new book for my reading list 😁
And one of the points in that video is there’s a huge difference in the carbon footprints of different types of urban agriculture - actual urban farms make efficient use of resources, whereas home gardens and community gardens don’t.
And even then, those urban farms are not “self sufficient” the way prepper fantasies like this meme promise - they rely on external inputs like fertilizer and building material and irrigation.
Which is, yeah. I love competently designed urban farms. I love competently designed home gardens. The image in my post is neither.
The image in my post is selling a rugged individualist, manifest destiny, pioneers breaking sod in the prairie image of homesteading - the lone smallholder supporting himself and his family solely through the production of his land - which has rarely been true and, when it was, really sucked for the people stuck doing it.
Small scale farming is viable. Rugged individualism is crap.
I’m totally on-board with calling out the rugged ultra self-sufficient individualism, I just didn’t want people to come away with the idea that industrial scale farming is the only viable way to farm based on her second tweet. But you’re absolutely right that home garden’s aren’t the best use of resources though. I’d actually forgotten that section of the video, and only remembered the latter part that I linked to until watching it all the way through again just now.
Glad you also enjoyed the vid! He makes some cool stuff ^^
This seems like an opportunity to cite ‘The Martian’ and estimated crop area of potatoes per person required.
Yes please
400 square feet is 20x20, which is much much smaller than the lawn we can see here. I understand her point but you could use this space far more efficiently. I’d like to see some actual math here since we know the overall size (1 acre), with calories per sqft and all that
Keeping a useless ass lawn is the most American fucking thing lmao
I mean, yeah, but it’s also a pretty central part of this yard plan, so the yard is kind of functioning as a pathway here. If you imagine a bunch of lil paths going in various directions instead of plain grass it doesn’t seem unreasonable.
My lawn is clover for the bees
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yeah i think people don’t understand the scale needed to support a family’s worth of cow versus a family’s worth of corn or wheat or rice
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The acreage per cow is very dependent on where you are. I have a friend with a mother who just wanted to raise cows in her retirement (and reap the sweet tax breaks of having a ‘ranch’), and they support roughly 1 cow per acre with slight supplementation of food cubes during the winter. Go out to someplace that’s famous for cattle like west texas, and suddenly it’s a lot less,but they have so much range out there that they can let the cows go nuts.
From John Seymour’s excellent book “The Self Sufficient Life and How to Live It”
Layout for 1 acre.
Also, layout for urban garden
And a layout for a 5 acre homestead
I love that book!
The interesting thing about Seymour’s one acre compared to the prepper fantasy in the meme is that he doesn’t try to pretend an acre is “self sufficient”. He optimizes the space for crops that make a big difference to his quality of life - fresh vegetables take up almost half his diagram, for example - instead of putting in a few tiny plots of grain and a duck pond. He has a cow in the same space as the meme does but notes he’ll have to buy fodder for it because that’s not enough land to feed a cow - but he’s cool with that because fresh milk is so important to him…
The difference between an actual farmer and an online bullshitter, I guess.
I know this is what the solarpunk space is for, but it really is frustrating to have to separate prepper weirdos from actual self sufficiency discussions.
At least for me the frustration is that it isn’t always easy to explain why a certain image or idea gives you bad vibes. The modern petty fiefdom obsession with lawns and land and wasted urban density is very very icky to me, but these illustrations, some of the other posts on here, they do speak to a certain fantasy that I myself have.
It might help that where I am, a lot of rural housing is smaller 4-5 floor apartment buildings where each floor is typically occupied by one sibling and their nuclear family. So a homestead for me, conceptually, wouldn’t be my prepper enclave with 3,000 each of guns, cans, toilet paper packs, and flashlights, it would be a family area with a whole lot of fresh vegetables, fruits, herbs, composting, a few chickens, and pleasant places to sit around.
And it’s not a fantasy for me at all, because I have pieces of that, so I know how it works. Chickens, solar panels, herbs. A bit more than that in my family home, where my relatives live (I just visit).
Cattle is a bit far fetched for me, lol. Chickens will eat most organic waste and give you eggs, they’re great and convenient. Cattle are a whole other thing.
This is the missing middle I hear people online (especially from the US/Australia/Canada) complaining about. This makes so much more sense to me than borderline nonsensical suburbia.
Yep, it’s a treasure! I wish there was a slightly more tropical version sometimes, but the advice generally applies well and lots of things grow very easily here.
It’s such a funny coincidence that the layout of several elements is the same that I feel like the meme one must have been inspired by the illustration. I did want to highlight a more realistic take on this concept, and since he puts those 3 layouts right by each other in the book, I also wanted to include them. Like you say, the difference is in focusing on practical realities of the space and getting the most out of it.
And a layout for a 5 acre homestead
That’s a small farm.
what the fuck kind of super space efficient micro-farm has dedicated LAWN space‽‽
how many stalks of wheat is a reasonably year’s supply in the modern era? 126 stalks of corn would easily be enough for a family that also has other food sources
that also has other food sources
No idea how reliable this is but suggests that 1/2 to 1 meter squared if crop is needed for a loaf of bread: https://www.thenakedscientists.com/articles/questions/how-much-wheat-make-loaf-bread
No idea what the scale is in that picture, but it’d be a lot more efficient to grow potatoes or some similar riot veg if space is a concern.
This comment has a super rough scaling algorithm, and using it I’d eyeball the grain patches at 20x50 ft each, so 2000 sq ft or about 185 square meters, which, if the grain was wheat, would make between 185 and 740 loaves depending on yield.
Which is frankly more than I expected, though given how much effort it takes to process wheat into bread flour, I’d go with corn or potatoes 100%.
From what i know this is actually pretty bad set up with the garden because it destroys the soil
