How Much Land Per-person for Subsistance Farming?

CWL

CWL

Joined
Sep 15, 2002
Messages
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Folks,
How much land per-person is necessary in order to do subsistence farming?

Say you live in a area with mild weather and good water source, I'd imagine, that you could manage 3 crops every year of base foods like corn, wheat or potatoes, plus a little extra space for vegetables & spices.

So how much land would be needed?
 
Great question. I started a small garden this year myself. Not enough to survive on, but enough to take us through the summer and maybe put up some pickles and can some tomatoes.

I am the son of a woman that grew up in Appalachia. She was poor as dirt and lived off the land. 9 people in a 4 room house with a dirt floor. No kidding.

I just called her (she is 87 now) and she said her farm was 12 - 15 acres of cleared land. About 4 or 5 acres of crops to feed them and feed the animals and the rest pasture.

So I would think, about 1/2 acre per person with livestock and a little less than a quarter acre per person if you have another source for meat. That is given that you have little or no food supplies coming from the outside.

Hope that helps.
 
Wow, that's interesting, I didn't think it'd be that little.
What did you guys grow to live on when you were young?
Any fruit trees? (I live in FL, and am looking for some good fruit trees that will grow well -- thinking of peach trees, for one).
 
I would think that the answer would depend on the quality and type of land too. The land (and water supply) dictate what grows well in any specific location. I always understood that one reason potatoes became the mainstay of the oppressed Irish was that it was about the only crop that would produce enough food on such small amounts of poor soil. If you use draft animals to plow, etc. then you have to have a surprising amount of land to grow the crops to feed the animals through the year. I have read that the rule of thumb was seven acres per horse to feed the horse. :confused: Small animals such as swine and fowl would probably be much more in tune with a subsistence situation where there was no attempt at cash crop surpluses to transport, etc. Then again on the frontier a mult-purpose animal, such as a milk-cow that was broken to a yoke to pull as well as milk and ultimately to eat was common.
 
CPL, that was her.

I grew up the son of a pipefitter near Philadelphia. Family of 7. My uncle had a 4 acre farm in NJ and we put up preserves and slaughtered a steer every year, but I had it great in comparison to that, horrible according to todays standards.

I never went hungry but Disney for vacation was not even a thought.

I remember riding from NJ to NC to visit my Moms "Kinfolk" in the back of a Ford F150 pickup the whole way.

I would think the 7 acres per horse included grazing.

They had a Mule and a few pigs, chickens of course.

In any case, others need to chime in because this is only one data point and as I said, while she is pretty sharp, my mom is 87.
 
Its hard to say, because there is no real documented sources. There are variables such as weather and availability of seed, diseases and such.

the real key to self sustainability would be starch based crops like wheat, corn and potatoes, as well as legumes such as beans and lentils, which you have figured out.

just as important would be meat protiens, free ranging animals to cut down own the amount of grains you would have to feed them.

my family grows hundreds of acres of corn, beans and wheat. Some of which go to livestock and some go to human consumption. We also milk cows, which creates a beef by product in the form of male holsteins (steers) and we raise pigs and chickens in a factory farm type of setup.

My point here is that all the crops we grow, the animals we raise, are all high yeild hybrid genetics developed over the last few decades. All of these breeds and plants make it pretty easy to create mass quantities of food with the least amount of effort.
 
You could forget about a horse or cow and think smaller. Several goats will supply you with milk for cheese and drinking. They don't eat near as much as larger livestock. They won't be of use in plowing but if you had a breeding pair you could have meat every so often.

If you're talking about farming in the north, you've got to consider storing enough food for a winter. Canning, drying, growing crops that will last in a root cellar is key. It's either that or go carniverous. I remember reading that early on in US history there were lots of recipes with dandelions since they were among the first fresh green edible plants to come out in number in the spring.

Having several fruit trees like apple trees would be of great benefit. Smallish trees can be trained to produce a lot of fruit. Apples last for a looooong time and you can do a lot with them, namely make hard cider. Johnny Appleseed knew what he was doing.
 
Oooooh, I forgot about that.

Gandpa did do time because they found his sour mash still at Flat Rock.

No Kidding.
 
Keep in mind that modern hybrid meat animals are very energy intensive and require a lot of care to maximize production. The old historical breeds for beef and oxen were smaller, less productive, but much hardier, and required less. A donkey might be as large as you wanted to go for a draft animal, but what a difference that would make in just hauling a smallish sledge around for firewood, etc.!!!!! Dont forget fire wood, unless you are assuming you will remain on "the grid" for electricity or natural gas or regular propane deliveries. Wood is a renewable resource especially if carfully managed for fuel, but that requires land too. Ah, well, I think it comes down to planning as well as you can and then making do with what you have. :eek:
 
I am going to think 2 acres for a family of 4 could support you unless you want cattle.

You are probably not going to get all fat like jabba the hut, but you will be OK.

Cruising around checking your figure 4's, fishing, whacking a rabbit here or there and shooting a few deer and turkey in the winter will keep you fed.

Keep in mind, corn is tough to grow without pesticides, bugs tear it up.
 
Depends on whether you're a vegetarian or a meat eater. Eating meat is EXTREMELY wasteful, as far as land conservation and the ecology is concerned. It takes 7 acres per person to sustain the amount of meat the average American eats per year. It only take less than an acre to sustain a vegetarian, and you don't have the problem with all the methane emissions that cows and other livestock produce.

And if anyone was wondering, yes, I am a vegetarian.
 
"Soy milk is essentially Coffee-Mate laced with estrogen, and is best left to vegans and other socialist vegetarian types that can't bring themselves to eat the completely natural-for-humans flesh of our friends the Animals but who have no trouble with slaughtering trillions of our other friends the Plants and processing -- in gigantic factories run by multinational corporations with shareholders that eat meat themselves -- very selectively chosen components of their poor little bodies into gooey shit that humans have never had an opportunity to adapt to digesting. Why, eating such material, with its high levels of isoflavones, touted by gynecologists as tantamount to Estrogen Replacement Therapy (ERT), will make you grow boobs, and this will screw up the clean lines of this fine young man's Under Armor. I recommend against it."

- Mark Rippetoe
 
Humans are hunter gatherers.

I say a half acre per person, maybe less, hunt what you can, gather what you can, throw in some small livestock like chickens or pheasants/quail and you should be good.

Vegetarian? For every animal you don't eat, I am going to eat three in addition to my regular meals AND I am going to make sure they are on the endangered species list!

Just kidding buddy, to each their own, but every vegetarian I ever met was kinda pasty white and anorexic looking.

Predators= eyes in the front of their head looking forward

Salad eating Prey = eyes on the sides of their head

I'm not prey.
 
I support PETA (People Eating Tasty Animals).

Since you're looking at the land to support you, plant some crops and raise some goats, pigs and Guinea Fowl. Everything else you can harvest from the surrounding country side.
 
Self-sustained living is very admirable, whether a vegan farmer or the Nuge feeding his clan with harvested venison. We can't all be Dick Proenneke, but I'd sure like to be.
 
Hi,

Depending on your climate and desire for a more variable diet, it's generally accepted that it takes 1 to 2 acres to feed a single person for one year. This is for single cropping only with no fertilizer or herbicide/pesticide use. Just simple crop rotation.

The idea of hunting for survival, while appealing to one's machismo, really isn't sustainable in the long run unless many square miles of unclaimed land are available. But animal husbandry is viable. Think poultry, rabbits, sheep, and goats. For draft animal work, oxen are superior to horses. They are stronger and you can get more work out of them with lower quality feed than you can with a horse.

And no offense to those vegans here, but under more primitive survival farming, raising meat animals allows of better usage of land that is unfit for cultivation. And most of the land mass falls into that category. While not suitable for human edible crops, most of it is suitable for grazing. Why waste it?

dalee
 
Here,...We raise only 6-8 beef cows per year for slaughter, and calve out 6 of those before doing so. It looks like alot of acreage, until you see how much is pasture 2/3rds, corn silage 1/3rd and forest 1/3rd. Ok, sometimes we run hay in the corn field for a year or so before going back to hay. It's a heck of alot of mechanized equiptment including a self propelled baler, and various tractors to get' er done. Now you may not be able to notice to 20 x 10 ft chicken coop near the long barn, but it's there with 20 laying hens inside. They're good for the year then they make soup. If you have a laying barn then you'll want a side barn for a rooster and breeding hens. Then there's the 40 x 80 vegetable plot that's kept 6 folks in decent chow during the season.

Note, fruit trees take considerable knowledge to have decent crops off of; and farming in general is not 'light work' that you learn from books...unlike what most of the blogs on the 'net want you to believe. I spent the first 20yrs growing up dairy farming and never want to go near another milk cow.

I say stick to smaller critters and have a large enough 'garden' to allow for the losses that will occur due to weather, critters, and rot in the fields. A 10 acres 'spread' could work out fine for a family of 4 if everyone worked it full time and you know how to manage a woodlot. Not too many folks making fun of me now for going to 'Farmer High School' while they were driving their daddy's vet's to the 'party high school'!
 
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I agree Dalee about the oxen being better than horses for field work. I drove a team of Belgians for a few years, and pretty as they are, they are more work then oxen. I still have a friend up in Maine who works a team of horses, but he's getting on near 70yrs old now and think he's going to give them a rest from here out. I have some friends up in SE CT that raise prize winning oxen, so much so, that the Amish from as far away as Ohio come and buy them in teams from them! A good ox team is'nt cheap either depending on what level of work they are broke to....$6-10,000.
 
Check out this web site on urban homesteading.
http://urbanhomestead.org/journal/

Garden size is 1/10 of a acre and they produce 350 different fruits, vegs, and herbs. This produces 6000 lbs of food annually. Yes 6000 lbs. They use the square foot gardening techniques. In 2008 their goal was 10,000 lbs of food. The homestead feeds 4 adults and several volunteers and clients.

Check out their bio diesel production and electricity production. Even if you don't believe in global warming you have to love the self sufficiency these folks are achieving.
 
Gardens are great ideas, but most things are hybrids now and seed production is questionable. Where do you plan on getting your seed to plant these gardens year after year?

I don't look forward to the concept of gardening for subsistance. I grew up in a family of 7 and we had about a one-acre garden. We worked all the time out there in the spring and summer. We raised our own beef and canned and froze stuff from the garden. Working acres by hand will be a very un-enviable task.
 
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