I live on a 54 acre property: I can picture 12 acres as about a quarter of my property. If I further divide that into 72 plots, I end up with a bunch of little gardens.
What works in a small garden plot is usually totally unscalable at crop production volumes. My experience (over decades) is I couldn't sustain my family for a year on a 1-acre garden plot even if I had the time to work it intensively and used nothing but recycled organic byproduct (compost and, uh, other stuff) as fertilizer. Even if we tried to reproduce the great Kampuchean agricultural experiment of the mid-1970s and put everyone to work in the fields full time we could not feed the world this way.
I don't have a problem with folks idly dallying in this kind of research, and I think useful practices could possibly be revealed, but scale and practicality need to be taken into account when interpreting results.
> My experience (over decades) is I couldn't sustain my family for a year on a 1-acre garden plot even if I had the time to work it intensively and used nothing but recycled organic byproduct (compost and, uh, other stuff) as fertilizer.
I find this surprising. I help run an Atlanta-area non-profit that has a ~1 acre organic farm that donates everything it produces. For the year 2020 we have already donated 3120 lb / 1415 kg of food.
We're not trying to produce a nutritionally complete output on the farm, but that's still ~70 lb / 31.7 kg of food a week on average.
Well, potato is one of the higher-calorie crops, and one pound contains around 350 calories. If you produce 3,120 lbs a year, that gives you about a million calories.
Now, let's assume a family of three - an average person needs around 2,000 kcal a day. That's 2,000 * 365 * 3, or around 2,200,000 kcal a year. So, you come quite a bit short. And that's on a good year; you're gonna have bad years, too.
Also a function of climate and soil. In the 19th century, settlers in the plains - Nebraska, Wyoming, etc - often couldn't make it work on 640 acres granted by the government. In contrast, there are eastern states where 20 acres would be more than enough.
(Farming in the West is now much more viable thanks to deep wells and mechanical irrigation, but that's a capital-intensive and resource-intensive approach that works best at a scale.)
As pointed out downthread, you can indeed feed a family on one acre of land, and many people do actually do this.
The problem with your math is that it assumes the 3k lb yield from gp comment is for potatoes. Your crop yield depends a lot on the crop. Aparently you can get between 10-30 tons of potatoes per acre (that range is from beginner yields to expert) which would be 7-21 million calories per year. Plenty of room, then, to grow a number of other crops to eat a balanced diet.
Potatoes (if you eat the skin) and milk would theoretically be a balanced diet, supplemented with fish/occasional meat it was pretty much the Irish diet pre-potato famine.
Boring as hell after a while but it'd keep you alive.
During the famine, ireland produced way more for/potatoes then it required to feed it's people; they were just taxed to all hell.
Currently the US produces about twice the calories it requires. There are so many calories produced in forms of corn that the industry has made huge efforts to find new ways to use those calories (hfcs, ethanol, etc) in order to justify corn industry practices. The one liner is that we need to be able to feed the people, but obesity is at an all time high. People need more nutrition, not more calories.
Taxes were not the main contributory factor.
"Ireland continued to export large quantities of food, primarily to Great Britain, during the blight. In cases such as livestock and butter, research suggests that exports may have actually increased during the Potato Famine.
In 1847 alone, records indicate that commodities such as peas, beans, rabbits, fish and honey continued to be exported from Ireland, even as the Great Hunger ravaged the countryside."
https://www.history.com/topics/immigration/irish-potato-fami...
Thanks for the clarification. I was actually meaning that they were being "taxed" in terms of food sent to the rest of the UK and not in terms of money. Even with the article you linked, it's not clear to me if "exports" means they were forced/taxed into sending food, or if they were willingly exporting food for money in lieu of eating... Or something else
Most Irish didn’t own property and were tenants. They didn’t “export” in lieu of eating, the English landlord exported the fruits of their labor and left them to starve. The English were very concerned about the Irish and their moral fiber, so they allowed them to persevere rather than get hooked to charity.
Others couldn’t pay their rent and were evicted. Millions of Irish didn’t flee to the slums of NYC, etc for kicks.
You can maybe keep a small family alive on an acre, but not really feed long term. With such little space you need to dedicate nearly the entire plot to high caloric crops such as corn.
Each year, I grow an increasing amount of my food from less than an acre. Corn is not an efficient way to get calories in an organic system, it requires too much nitrogen. As others have mentioned, potatoes are much better. And beans/peas, which require achieve their nitrogen requirements via bacterial symbosis. If you really want to go efficient, grow Azolla. I once calculated that a person in a temperate climate could produce most of their nutritional requireents with a plot roughly 25 square meters. Azolla doubles in mass every 2-3 days in ideal conditions and draws everything but trace minerals from the atmosphere.
You math is wrong. Way wrong. 70lb per week is 10 pounds per day. I'm not sure its feasible for a person to eat that much. Maybe a family could. Maybe.
It's frequently claimed that the average Irish male just prior to the potato famine ate well over 10 lbs of potatoes per day:
On a typical day in 1844, the average adult Irishman ate about 13 pounds of potatoes. At five potatoes to the pound, that’s 65 potatoes a day. The average for all men, women, and children was a more modest 9 pounds, or 45 potatoes.
I have lived almost exclusively on potatoes at several points in my life, and there's just no way. I've watched a bulky manual laborer live almost exclusively on potatoes as well, and still not near 10 lbs a day.
This is kind of inconceivable to me. Is it because I’ve never done enough manual labor to eat 65 potatoes in a day? I can’t imagine even finding the time to cook and eat them.
Arguing against the article, 1/5 lb is a pretty small potato. I just weighed a baseball sized potato I dug last week, and it was 7.5 oz (~1/2 lb, 200 g). So if you are picturing an average baked potato, it's probably only 30 potatoes per day. Which, granted, is still a lot.
Cooking time doesn't strike me as a problem. Boiling 30 potatoes does take somewhat longer than boiling 1 potato because the mass is greater, but it's pretty much boil and forget. Also, the boiling can probably be done by one of those women or children who are only eating 10 potatoes a day!
Probably because they weren't getting enough protein. It's easy to eat carbs forever if you have nothing else because you'll still feel intensely hungry without protein.
And if the calorie count upthread is right, that’s 4550 calories per day purely from potato, not counting any added butter, milk, beans, meat etc! I know people did more manual labour back then, but something seems wrong with that figure.
They may not have had access to much of (barely) higher end foods. I read somewhere that the English, who had conquered them, took away a lot of that sell / use in England, including beef.
Update: Found where I read it - Wikipedia:
[ The Celtic grazing lands of ... Ireland had been used to pasture cows for centuries. The British colonised ... the Irish, transforming much of their countryside into an extended grazing land to raise cattle for a hungry consumer market at home ... The British taste for beef had a devastating impact on the impoverished and disenfranchised people of ... Ireland ... pushed off the best pasture land and forced to farm smaller plots of marginal land, the Irish turned to the potato, a crop that could be grown abundantly in less favorable soil. Eventually, cows took over much of Ireland, leaving the native population virtually dependent on the potato for survival.[41] ]
I used to eat about that much a day when I was running twice a day (and I was losing weight while doing so). Michael Phelps was known for eating 10,000 calories a day.
His math is correct. Also, it's really easy math to verify. It's not surprising either. With the stated yields, you could feed a person. You'd need more for a family.
Of course, the yields could probably be improved in order to get the 140 or so lbs needed to feed a family of 3
When I used to work heavy manual labor I was definitely able to easily put down around 7-8 pounds of food per day. One of my coworkers was into weight lifting and estimated we were burning between 3,000-5,000 calories per day depending on the job.
10 lbs of potatoes is only 3,500 calories. Which, while far in excess of a "normal" sedentary lifestyle, is completely reasonable for people working heavy labor jobs if that's their primary food source.
A typical person eats 3 to 5 lbs of food per day, and that generally includes some very calorie rich meats, dairy, nuts and/or processed foods - not exactly the stuff you'll get in your backyard. You might be able to feed a family on an acre of beans, but not on an acre of generic greens.
A 10lb bag of potatoes isn't really that big. If you take one of those bags, split into thirds, as in three meals a day, that's a bit more than 3lbs per meal. If that's your only source of food, that doesn't seem entirely unreasonable.
Potatoes have great yield in terms of calorie per unit harvested. Other plants, not so much. Think about how much weight you might throw away with a pumpkin or a watermelon.
I have some family members who devoted about an acre and a half to a mix of crops, squashes mostly as they grow the best where they live, and for a family of 5 still had to supplement their diet pretty significantly.
At the same time, they ate more healthily than they ever had before, and often had too much of certain crops that they gave away or sold at the local farmer's market.
The magic valley in Idaho (named after its transformation) is a great example of this. Modern irrigation has turned what is naturally a high dessert climate into a food producing powerhouse.
My guess is your one acre of growing whatever you grow would feed about .6 people per year. A human consumes about 1M Kcals a year (accounting for meat as waste), and at best you can achieve 11M kcals per acre with corn or potatos. Beans yield about 6M and wheat 4M. My guess is you are growing and giving away about 600k kcals of roughage. 70lbs of tomatoes only has about 6000 kcal, so enough for one person for half a week.
Its not 72 experiments, its 72 plots. This is normal for agricultural research, as a control for soil variations within the test area. i.e. you dont compare several big plots, you compare lots of little ones to control for natural variations accross the field such as proximity to a river.
This is very important. Farmers with thousands of acres still divide it all into subfields that are around 2500 square meters that they manage separately. They are looking to go smaller than that, which computers allow them to do.
By manage separately the same tractor crosses over each one in a field, but each subsection gets a different amount of fertilizer, seed, and other chemical based on all the data they can get. Sometimes they even have more than one seed/chemical tank so they can apply different amounts of each in one pass.
When you have poor and good soil in the same field (all fields have this to some extent) you want to put the minimum money into the poor areas, while it is worth putting more into the productive areas. (People often ask about building up the bad soils - this is done too, but you can't really change the sand/clay ratio)
> I couldn't sustain my family for a year on a 1-acre garden plot even if I had the time to work it intensively and used nothing but recycled organic byproduct
Check out “The Market Gardener”[0] if you need help learning how to do far, far better than this. We need more, smaller farms. Biointensive farming and permaculture can save our planet.
Yes, Jean-Martin (JM) Fortier (Quebec) is a good example, though there are better / more comprehensive ones, and at larger scale too, see below. And JM is not even doing full permaculture, e.g. not using multi-height crops (i.e. ground covers through plants of a few more different heights to top canopy trees, 100 or more feet tall), so as to use more of the available sunlight and underground nutrients (shrub roots can go deeper than herbs, and trees even deeper, and what is brought up from deeper can be shared with shallow-rooting plants via compost, chop-and-drop, etc.). And he still makes fairly high profits per acre / person / year, i.e. overall. He has many videos about his work, both the technicals and commercials, on YouTube. Search by his name as well as for a great series titled Les Fermiers.
And some examples higher on the axes of land area as well as permaculture and / or regenerative agriculture, vs. "just" organic farming, include:
- Gabe Brown, 20+ years at it, 4 or 5000? acres, mixed grasses (grains) and broadleaf crops, cover crops, livestock (beef, pigs, etc.), land getting better each year, saves hugely on synthetic fertilizer and pesticide (see a chart in his Treating The Farm as an Ecosystem video), profits better too, and higher than his synthetic-using and tilling neighbors and state averages (ND, USA), and going up the value chain, so getting more of the final consumer dollar vs. middlemen. The average take for "conventional" US farmers is quite low, he says. Oh, and he does not need or take govt. farm subsidies, as many others do.
Has many videos too, search for his name. Check the comparative stats and photos.
- Richard Perkins, Sweden.
Not sure of area, but above a few acres at least, maybe 25. Mixed stuff again. High profits again. Videos again. Many years' good results again.
- Last but one of the best, Geoff Lawton (NSW, AU), long time permaculture expert (learned from Bill Mollison), doer, 66 acre Zaytuna Farm, is real mixed farm plus demonstration site, yearly trains many interns, consultant (to small orgs through to countries). Ditto for many of above points like axes, diversity, profits, improving over time, cost savings, etc. etc.
Also see, very significantly, Elaine Ingham, soil (biology) scientist, Ph.D., also founder of startup soilfoodweb.com (to consult and get her research
applied widely).
Almost all the farmers I mentioned above, quote her work with respect and apply it in their operations, and consider it key to their results. She (along with many other researchers, over years, not a sudden thing) has come out with some rather startling results that, as I said, are being applied by these guys and many others. A key result is that it is the quantity and diversity of the life in the soil that is as (or more) important to soil health and hence farm results (now and long term) as the actual levels of plant nutrients in the soil. And this is because it is the soil life (they use the term "biology" for it, but okay, go with the prevailing term the experts use) that makes the chemical nutrients available in forms that plants can actually use, via a deep symbiosis and mutual helping that happens between plants and the soil biology, which includes bacteria, fungi, archaea, nematodes, arthropods and small animals.
Another quite surprising / non-intuitive result is her saying that most or all soils on earth, already have many times more the amounts of nutrients than plants need, like 1000x more, including macro (e.g. N, P, K) and micro ones (like trace elements), so the limiting factor is really the soil biology, which depends a lot on soil organic matter content (all those critters need to eat), humidity and temperature, all of which are helped by organic farming, permaculture and regenerative agriculture practices like applying organic fertilizer (manure, compost, etc.), mulching, and cover cropping (according to her, more for the organic matter than for the nutrients per se).
Check her video below in which she talks about all these things.
Watch "The Roots of Your Profits - Dr Elaine Ingham, Soil Microbiologist, Founder of Soil Foodweb Inc" on YouTube:
Gabe runs his operation with only a handful of people, maybe 4 total, plus a few interns, who are more of a liability than asset, so also say Richard and JM - at least initially :)
And Gabe uses some machines for scale, including a few he and friends innovated / improvised, IIRC.
Another such farmer like Gabe, JM, Richard etc. above, is Krishna McKenzie, Solitude Farm, Auroville, Tamil Nadu, India. Englishman who studied as a kid in a J. Krishnamurti school in England, came to Auroville ~20 years ago, started Solitude with friends, and has been there ever since. Inspired by Masanobu Fukuoka and his book, One Straw revolution. Has met him. Mixed crops, fruit trees, grains (including millets), many vegetables including common ones, plus less-known but traditionally eaten high-food-and-medicinal-value indigenous local and Indian ones, some in regular beds, some intermixed in a food forest, again utilizing more layers of sunlight and underground soil than single layer traditional monoculture. Again, has intern program, video channel, trains others in the community, gives talks, runs a popular on-premise vegan and raw food restaurant supplied by the farm itself.
Nowadays doing more training work and helping others in the area to bootstrap community permaculture gardens, since there is much more interest in food security, local food, lowering food miles, traditional-but-forgotten-plants-as-food, weeds as food, etc., since the coronavirus pandemic started.
>Search by his name as well as for a great series titled Les Fermiers.
I should have said that Les Fermiers is in French - Quebec dialect, ha ha, they pronounce oui (French for yes) as way instead of wee, for example, but it has English subtitles, so English speakers can easily understand it.
Yes, JM Fortier (who I and another mention elsewhere in this post - the author of The Market Gardener), says that Coleman was one of his main inspirations.
I was going to say! First Fortier video I watched is about leeks and his technique looks identical to what Coleman showed when I visited his Four Season farm in Maine. That place is incredibly interesting for any aspiring gardener - so many techniques and inventions that were new to me.
Right now we over-feed the world, especially ourselves in the West. We produce an enormous amount of low-quality food, and malnutrition is driven more by external interference (misgovernment, wars) than by agriculture. Food is, as a percentage of people's budgets, cheaper than it has ever been.
That suggests that there's a middle ground, where we shift to more labor-intensive practices to grow some more expensive but better produce that's less hard on the environment, without dismantling the entire industrial system. People could introduce more fresher foods, while still growing vast amounts of highly-processed-maize-and-soybeans for people who can only afford that.
There are a lot of dimensions to that. It's not easy to prove that eating this way is necessarily healthier or easier on the environment. But we do know that the Western diet is bad for people's health, and we do know that it's hard on the environment, so it's worth considering alternatives.
I agree to some extent, except that lower cost food means access to higher quality lower cost food. That's a good thing.
Growing up in the UK in the 80s most people were eating a post war inspired limited diet.
> But we do know that the Western diet is bad for people's health, and we do know that it's hard on the environment, so it's worth considering alternatives.
The western diet is all things to all men. In my circle the "Mediterranean" diet is largely what people aspire to on a daily basis with everything else enriching their food experience on a less frequent basis.
There's no reason we have to make farm work unsafe or low-paying. It's a consequence of the state of agriculture a century ago, when we were constantly afraid of running out of food. We put into place a lot of systems to drive down the price of food and increase the quantity.
So yes, we should improve it. This is one suggestion for how to do so. It costs more money, but we no longer have to make price the #1 objective, not in a world where people are willing to spend $4 and up on a cup of coffee or pay a 50-100% premium for a dubious "organic" label (a term that has drifted very, very far from what it meant when Rodale coined it).
That makes more money available for farm labor, to improve safety and pay workers better. It would take only a small increase in costs to make a large increase in wages: they receive only a few percent of the final consumer cost of the product.
>There's no reason we have to make farm work unsafe or low-paying.
Okay. Who is paying for it?
Farming is razor thin margins already. Most people aren't on techie salaries that can afford organic food. Raising the price is just a tax on the poor.
Food cost does not need to go up when the cost of farming goes down. Regenerative ag does take more farmers which means more jobs. The shift to regenerative farming is already happening. Gabe Brown was meeting with General Mills a couple years ago. Now General Mills is promoting pilot programs. https://www.generalmills.com/en/Responsibility/Sustainabilit...
Inputs are drastically reduced or eliminated. That is where the cost saving comes in. There is room to pay more people when you arent spending the majority of revenue on fertilizer.
Farmers, particularly large ones, are pretty savvy about what is more or less profitable for them. If they could add labor and save more money on fertilizer than the additional labor cost, they'd probably already be doing it.
Source: I dated a literal farmer's daughter and talked with him a fair bit about the economics of his farm (corn, soybeans, and dairy, plus associated by-products) and farms larger than his. He was sharp on the numbers in addition to being sharp on the biology.
From stories that Gabe Brown has shared there are many farmers that are afraid to take a leap to an entirely different way of farming from one they know well. He recommends farmers do a trial field so they can prove to themselves that it works.
Watch any of Gabes talks on YouTube. They are usually to small crowds of farmers looking to improve their operation. People are learning but the easy path is to continue doing what you know. Gabe has said he would have done the same if he wasnt flat broke when he inherited his farm. He simply didnt have the money to buy inputs. His choice was find a different way or sell the farm.
By how much? Your link don't say anything about how much fertilizer usage is reduced. Nor does it mention how much formerly crop fields are now being used for ranch land.
The concept of self-sustaining farming and ranching is as old as dirt itself, with various implementations including crop rotation or fallow fields, but it typically means that the are of land dedicated to a staple crop (such as oats or wheat for the exemplar GM) drops dramatically, as would the profits.
Nothing in the linked literature disagrees with this notion or comments on the different costs (other than the grants for a farm that's trying it).
But, if the price increase is to give a better wage to "the poors" working in the farm, because we need more people working there to produce the same amount organically. Then, they would be able to afford those more expensive products right ?
Most of those razer thin margins come from stuff like monopsonies they might push down prices on behest of the consumer but obviously also will run with as much of the profits as they can.
Dont forget government subsidies for corn and soybeans that drive prices stupid low and trap farmers in corn and soybeans. Some farmers would gladly shift to more profitable crops but are stuck on corn and soybeans.
For most farmers corn and soybeans are the most profitable crops. They are easy to farm in large quantities, and they store well. Most crops that you think of as more profitable are worth more, but not always profitable - either because so much labor is needed that you cannot scale as far, or because they spoil so fast that you can't be sure of selling your entire harvest before it rots (Corn can be stored for a few years if you need to, lettuce is not edible after a week). Also there is the demand problem - even if there is more profit in some other crop that doesn't mean there is enough demand to sustain adding another farmer without prices collapsing.
Many of our farmers do sustain themselves (and often their families) on an acre or less in Kenya, so I would suggest that you contact your local agricultural extension school for some suggestions. :)
The library system is helpful as well. In Colorado (and elsewhere, as I understand it) some libraries have seed banks, classes on pollinators and nutrition, and potentially community gardens.
> The library system is helpful as well. In Colorado (and elsewhere, as I understand it) some libraries have seed banks, classes on pollinators and nutrition, and potentially community gardens.
I'm in Boulder county, and many offer(ed) those programs and seed banks but access to Community Gardens has always been limited here. The wait lists can be pretty long and during the pandemic and shortages people ran to local farms and bought out their CSA memberships and meat pre-sales (happening now actually for most livestock) in record timing.
California has it, too. UC Davis is quite involved in Biodynamics in the region and offers classes for winemaking using the practices. These fires have really put a strain on the local economy and programs so I'm not sure what it will look like after this, but I hope it prevails.
With that said, the results of this study are not really that surprising to me and follow my own observations: I did a Biodynamic horticulture apprenticeship in Europe and managed a Biodynamic farm in Maui.
The issue is with the subsidies that distort the prices and perverts the incentives to keep farmers dependent on such a vile system, and this is all over the Western world, and much of the East, in my experience. We should be encouraging our youth that are aware of the climate change they will face to get involved in restorative Ag and offering them low to no interest loans on land and equipment while systematically removing the subsidies for corn, soy and other non profitable crops that heavily rely on dangerous external inputs which only consolidates the Industry more in the hands of large chemical corps.
If I'm honest people should see the transition to organic/ biodynamic Ag as one of not just viable Soil Biology and ethics but also of Climate Science, Carbon sequestration from Ag can make significant in-roads in reducing the atmospheric carbon. Hemp is an incredibly amazing crop at capturing carbon from the atmosphere and building top soil, it sheds most of its foliage throughout the season and create a high canopy to reduce water requirements after 7-10 weeks after germination depending on regions and cultivar. It is a heavy feeder and will require crop rotation, but as seen with the green-rush of CBD products, these have massive Value added Market potential.
While I studied the significance of other plants throughout my apprenticeship none captured my attention as much as hemp and I mainly went to Europe as hemp was legal in the EU and many products were being made from it while it was still illegal in the US at the time (2011-2014).
With that said, I really hope COVID disrupted the paradigm we had been operating for so long and makes people look at these problems with solutions that some of us had been involved in and advocating for nearly decades now.
Your criticism of this study is that is is conducted on too small of plots (6 experiment groups on 12 acres = 2 acres per group) to be scaled up to real farms. However the real farms to which you sell synthetic fertilizer or fertilizer financial products in Subsaharan Africa are of similar sizes?
No, my criticism is it’s a very small sample size to get this result, is clearly run by an organization that has a specific mission and is trying to find results for that, and to point out that while interesting, this research has different results than the rest of the ag research world.
Basically all research is motivated to some extent, people do not choose hypotheses randomly, but on the basis of their own subjective perceptions of the state of knowledge of the field. The “rest of the ag research world” is not uniform and neither are they uniformly in disagreement with the research presented here. Finally, this is a relatively large sample size for prospective research. Many of the studies that purportedly demonstrate different outcomes are retrospective and unable to control for confounders.
For potatoes, about 1 ton of (commercial) fertilizer would be required, and a lot of water (around 2,800m3 of water), which is fine if you live in the mid-west with lots of rain, less fine in the desert portions of California.
Uk Gov. Statistics gives 9 tons per hectar, which is like 2.2 acres. Are we measuring different stuff? Surely yield in Uk can't be 3 times higher.
As for diet: yield of carrots and many vagetables is usually higher than for wheat, but yes getting any real variery from that hectar would be unrealistic.
A hectare is 2.47 acres, almost an 11% difference from 2.2. Also the 9 was an abnormally high year (I think the highest ever in the UK?). This year is down 40%, which is the worst since the 1980s [0].
>Are we measuring different stuff?
Apparently.
Also, why use UK numbers to compare to a story on US agriculture, especially without mentioning you switched countries? Can I cite numbers from Congo without noting it?
>Surely yield in Uk can't be 3 times higher.
Sure it can - variation in wheat production has well over a 50x variation among countries. Not every country has the UK climate, or even the uniformity that the UK has. The climate and rainfall in the UK are very well suited to wheat production.
Also, I just posted the values. And here's [1] another place you can look. From this place you can select countries to compare them. The US is ~1/3 the output. The UK has exceptionally high numbers, nearly the highest in the world.
I've gotten massive amounts of food out of small raised beds with nothing more than compost tea and "plant food". Is it really not possible to consistently produce good yields from tightly packed beds with crop rotation on a 1 acre plot [without pesticides/herbicides]? I know it wouldn't scale up with typical large-scale farming monocultures, but for a mixed family plot?
Aside: it seems we've long been able to feed the world (in terms of meeting caloric and nutritional needs) based on American farm capacity alone, it's just that nobody wants to pay for it.
I can get massive harvests of zucchini from two plants but it can't sustain a family for a year. Even more than a couple of weeks and the only thing it would sustain would be a mutiny.
The tribal wisdom for ecofolks in the 1970s was 2 acres to nutritionally support a family of 4 with environmentally friendly practices that didn’t involve potatoes, beans and cabbage every day...
Hoeing weeds. Bug picking. Fencing to keep out the wildlife. Watering in dry spells. Covering on frosty nights. Tilling, planting, soil conditioning, mulching, harvesting, processing for storage.
Everything from fungus and nematodes to weevils, mice, rabbits, birds, deer, and bears all want what's in my garden. I have seen berry and tomato plants completely stripped of all leaves in less than a day by caterpillars. You can spend a day picking Colorado bugs off your potatoes and start again the next day picking off the same number.
There is no end of work that can't be easily and cheaply replaced by a tank of chemicals and some petroleum-powered equipment to give better yields of better-looking food.
Interesting, thanks. I wonder how much of this will be replaceable by good robots that can use smaller amounts of electrical power. Bug picking seems like a good candidate, watering too. Fencing not so much, etc.
I live on a 54 acre property: I can picture 12 acres as about a quarter of my property. If I further divide that into 72 plots, I end up with a bunch of little gardens.
What works in a small garden plot is usually totally unscalable at crop production volumes. My experience (over decades) is I couldn't sustain my family for a year on a 1-acre garden plot even if I had the time to work it intensively and used nothing but recycled organic byproduct (compost and, uh, other stuff) as fertilizer. Even if we tried to reproduce the great Kampuchean agricultural experiment of the mid-1970s and put everyone to work in the fields full time we could not feed the world this way.
I don't have a problem with folks idly dallying in this kind of research, and I think useful practices could possibly be revealed, but scale and practicality need to be taken into account when interpreting results.