Note - skip to the bold if you don't feel like reading

There isn't a botanist forum is there? If so, please move it there, otherwise I think that DIY will suffice.

I just got my free copy of some anarchist magazine about an two hours ago, combined with the drugs I took just before it arrived...well we all know how that always ends up.

So here I am on the ever quest for self sustainability, I'm wondering how much land is required to grow enough food to survive (reasonably well). Also, by what function does that number change for additional people? I can't imagine that you need exactly twice as much land for two people.

First lets get units of messurement set. I hate how one Calorie = 1000 calories. Why not just use kilocalories? Stupid imperial measurements. But we almost never measure food in calories, just Calories, so lets pretend calories don't exist.

A normal person eats 2000 calories a day. That's 730kC a year. It might be different for me, I'm a vegetarian, but I have no idea what my calorie intake is. I just eat what ever I want and don't get fat (benefit of being a vegetarian).

I digress, lets say I wanted to be mostly self sufficient for food. I would still buy dairy as raising chickens and taking care of cows or goats is a shit load of work, at least compared to growing some corn. If it came down to it, taking care of hens isn't that difficult and I could always make soy milk.

I'm hoping to turn this into more of a discussion thread, rather then me asking a question and you guys answering. If it kicks off, I'll probably throw up a website detailing the information we accumulate so anyone can find it easily.

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Thread really starts here


Intro
Whether the government has just collapsed, there's a zombie invasion, nuclear holocaust, you're fed up of contributing to capitalism, you want to start an anarchist commune, you think it would be cheaper/healthier/fun, or whatever your reason is, there is definitely a plus to knowing how to grow your own food. I would like to design a system so that you could literally build a cabin in the middle of the woods and never have to confront civilization again. This is probably quite difficult to do, so lets just get as close as we can.

We want to grow enough food to live off of year round, and assume it is just you (alterations for additional people can be made more easily later).

Of course growing food in the Caribbean will be a lot easier then in the Northeast or Europe. But anything that applies to people living in unforgiving climates will work for everyone (the opposite is not true). So lets assume we are doing this in upstate New York (plenty of open land, cold as balls from October to April)

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Growing Options
The first thing we need to establish is do we go hydro or not?

Pros of going hydro:

Plants grow faster
Plants can be grown all year round
Less worry about insects/bacteria/rabbits
Uses 10% the amount of water
Requires 1/5 the space


Cons of going hydro

Cost
Requires special equipment and nutrient solutions
Requires electricity for lights/pumps/timers/ect
Not all plants can grow hydroponically


If you were just doing this for fun then things like electricity and special equipment isn't much of a concern. On the other hand, if you were living in the woods it would be very difficult to maintain your hydroponic setup. It would be built before you moved there so that snot a problem, but maintaining would be tricky.

You wouldn't have electricity.
Well you could always build it to run on solar panels or wind turbines, or perhaps you build a manual system that didn't need electricity.

You wouldn't have the special equipment.
This one is kinda of a killer. In 5 years when your water pump fails, what do you do? You can't exactly go to Walmart and get a new one when the world has collapsed. Ok, so you build a manual system instead. What about in a few months when you run out of nutrients for your plants? You would either have to stock pile a life time supply of plant nutrients, or come up with a method of producing it on your own. Is there a method for producing it on your own? I would love to hear about it because that changes everything. Lets assume you can produce your own plant nutrients for your hydro system, you will still want a proper soil field for growing things like wheat and leave the hydro for stuff like beans, peppers, cucumbers, and tomatoes.

Unless you can produce your own nutrients, hydro is out. At least for isolation status. For growing for fun or its an excellent idea.

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Crops

We need to select what crops we want. I am certainly no nutritionist and I'm sure there are certain plants/foods you need to make sure you don't get some crazy vitamin deficiency and go blind or have retarded children. I looked it up and 40 years worth of multivitamins would cost about $600 and weigh about 10kilos. That's really not that bad when you think about it and I'm sure you would some crazy bulk discounts. But not having to do that would be best.

My energy on the subject as run out for now so I'll leave you with these last thoughts/questions to consider for today:

Whats crops should we have?
What plants provide the most calories and protein?
What crops can't be replanted in the same soil year after year?
Is it realistic to grow wheat in a greenhouse?
How much land do you need to grow (with soil) enough food to live?
What is the best way to get fertilizer? (some sort of compost?)


Whats crops grow best hydroponically?
Could you survive solely on hydroponic foods?
What foods do you need that can't be grow hydroponically?
Can you make your own plant nutrients for hydroponic systems? (would normal compost work?)
How much land do you need to grow (hydroponically) enough food to live?



Last concern:
I realize that "back in the day" farmers worked very hard, performed back breaking labor, and had large plots of land to grow crops. But I figure that they weren't just growing for themselves, they were providing food for the whole town in exchange for things like clothes and books and metal tools and what not. The other thing I realize is they also had animals to help them plow the fields and today we have gas powered machine to do that for us. With our isolated "off-the-grid" system we won't have animals or machines and everything will be done by hand. How much work would this really be? I feel that growing food for just one person, even without the use of modern machines, can't be that difficult. I'm not sure I can make the commitment to waking up at dawn every day to physically work my ass off non-stop till the sun goes down. If the world collapsed do you think we would be forced to return to this type of miserable existence or do you think that our advanced 2008 knowledge of plants and growing food will make the task easier, despite not having fancy technology?

If you're wanting to live with a vegan diet, then you need around one third of an acre to grow your food, if you have the average vegetarian diet and want some animals around too then you'll need nearer two thirds of an acre in total.

Potatoes are a good crop to grow as they can grow in most places, have a good yield and can form a good base of carbohydrate for a good diet, a couple fruit trees such as apples etc are good too, beans, don't forget vegetables such as lettuce, carrots etc, have a good variety of veggies ..
If you're keeping animals, chickens would probably be the best as they can live on a relatively small amount of land, are quite friendly to people and can eat scraps of food etc - even if you don't want their meat/eggs they're good company and can eat up random waste etc ..

Greenhouses help quite a bit, a simple one can be made quite easily from spare parts ..
I made this site a while ago but haven't really done that much with it, there's some instructions for greenhouses here ; http://gardensnotguns.com/greenhouses
Side note - if you want I can give you an account there and you can do whatever you want with that website, I'm not really doing much with it ..

I recall reading that back in the olden days an acre was roughly defined as the amount of land needed to feed a family (of how many? I don't recall) for a year. Thats probably the bare minimum, and in my own figurings on the subject, I would want at least 5 arable acres (for crop rotation), and at at any given time would farm 1 to 1.5 just to be on the safe side.

As for what to grow, I'm not too sure. But, again, in my own musings, I would grow a variety of new world crops: potatoes, corn, carrots, beans, squash, and then maybe a cereal like winter wheat for a second harvest in mid summer.

Starches are pretty easy, and you can get complete protein from buckwheat and hemp if you wanted to go vegetarian.

Here's a good resource for nutritional value of foods: http://www.nal.usda.gov/fnic/foodcomp/search/

From what I gather, actual nutritional value is going to depend on the health of the crop and the makeup of the soil it was grown in. For that info you could go to a local farming cooperative, or maybe your area's FSA office (they could at least point you in the right direction).

USDA Plant Hardiness Zone Map (http://www.usna.usda.gov/Hardzone/ushzmap.html)
A bunch of books (http://www.ibiblio.org/london/agriculture/general/1/msg00093.html)

Also I highly recommend you read Walden by Henry David Thoreau

My favorite plan is a hydroponic greenhouse with the water circulating through to a big tank full of fish, shellfish, etc. Fish/animals in the water shit after you feed them, and the plants suck up the waste because that's what fertilizer is. You could probably get a damn good system going where you feed the fish something renewable and easy to grow, and you end up doing less labor because you aren't plowing fields. Key things to figure out would be the plants and animals in your system, along with overall size. I was also thinking you could keep a few chickens in wire-bottomed cages above a section of the water, so as to get eggs and fertilize the water more. Requires some more feed, but that seems pretty worth it.

Since you don't eat meat, I suppose this wouldn't really work for you, but if fish and eggs are ok you'd be good to go.

Side note - if you want I can give you an account there and you can do whatever you want with that website, I'm not really doing much with it ..

Thank you, but I already manage several websites and have all the hosting I need. So its really no trouble for me to make a site. But thanks. Cool site by the way, "Gardens not guns." I like it.

To PirateJoe: thanks for the links, some good stuff there

To Runaway_Stapler: brilliant idea! If I had more room in my dorm I would definitely try to set up a fish/plant system. Maybe over the summer.