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How Much Land Do You Need To Be Food Self-Reliant?

Marjory Wildcraft www.GrowYourOwnGroceries.com Being able to grow your own food is a cornerstone of true personal liberty. I also assert that knowing how to provide this most basic need for yourself is a part of being a mature adult. We certainly live in some interesting times and many of us are re-evaluating what is important. Liberty and maturity aside, there is the practical reality that we could be facing situations where food supplies are disrupted for months or years. And there are certainly viable scenarios where food is unavailable forever. You can only store so much before you run out. Certainly, being able to grow your own food is a critical skill. Even without concerns of disaster, growing your own food right now makes a lot of sense as the commercial food supply contains high levels of toxicities, chemicals, GMOs, hormones, and antibiotics. There is a huge amount of medical evidence

demonstrating that the rampant chronic disease in our population is primarily due to lack of nutrition. Over the many decades of conventional farming the soils have been depleted to the point that most of what commercial agriculture produces is only empty calories. Over the years, Ive worked with many different people from lone individuals, to preparedness groups, to missionary organizations, and universities that are all concerned with how to grow their own food. The most common question I get asked is how much land do I need to be able to sustainably feed for my family or group? Lets go over that word sustainably for just a second. Sustainability has come to have so many meanings we need to define it here. In this article, sustainably means you can grow food forever only needing minor amounts of inputs to your system over time. Over the years, you actually enhance the soil and productivity versus depletion and soil erosion. So how much land do you need? The exact answer to that question depends on several factors. And whenever you have a complex question such as how much land does it take, you can learn a lot, and make a pretty good estimate, by looking at extremes.

In this article, to demonstrate the alternatives, we will look at two extreme scenarios which cover the range of maximum and minimum land use. Lets first start off with the land required for a pure hunter/gatherer. I often hear this strategy from those concerned about a sudden collapse of civilization. Especially from single young men with no family whose plan is that once the shit hits the fan they will take their rifle and a few supplies and head out to the wilderness to live off the land. Lets look at the land needed for this scenario. Consider a hypothetical young man who heads out into the Texas Hill country after the rioting begins in Austin. He gets a good distance away and at his first camp he kills a rabbit and starts munching on prickly pears. If he is doing this in a sustainable fashion, he can only takes a few rabbits and cactus before he moves on. If he decides to stay and go ahead and eat everything wiping out the entire edible wildlife and plant population in an area he will still have to move on in a short while anyway. But lets say he just takes a few so there are enough breeding pairs and plant colony left behind to regenerate the food supply. Just how much land does

it take to support him in order live sustainably as a hunter/gatherer? How far does he need to roam before he can come back and eat there again? Since there are so few actual hunter/gathers left alive on the planet, and the few places where they do still exist tend to be jungles which look nothing like anything in North America, we will turn to anthropological data. The quick and easy answer is that traditional peoples used on average, about 10 square miles per person. 10 square miles is 6,400 acres and that is for one person. There are numerous studies and authors that cite this number and one of the most accessible is Jared Diamond, author of the popular title Collapse: How Societies Choose To Fail or Succeed. Another excellent source is Tending The Wild: Native American Knowledge and the Management of Californias Natural Resources which is a wonderful book detailing how sustainable wild-crafting is more about tending the land, rather than simply taking stuff. Californias lush and diverse landscapes were able to support some of the highest native population densities known in North America with the highest being almost 1.5 people per square mile living on the coast of the Santa Barbara channel. The plant and animal communities in the Santa Barbara area have

been largely destroyed by modern peoples and that density is no longer possible today of course. As another comparison, desert regions of California had roughly 1 person per 12.5 square miles. Ten square miles per person is a lot of land and not a very realistic scenario for most of us. And as I mentioned at the beginning, this is our first example of extreme land use. Before we head off into other more obtainable land use scenarios, lets pause for a moment to acknowledge that in addition to having access to a huge tract of land for living the hunter/gatherer lifestyle, you also need to have the many, many, skills of living such as tracking and hunting, trapping, botany, weather cycles, fiber and cordage, shelter, tool making, fire starting, tanning, and so much more. OK, so you wont be going that primitive. Clearly agriculture is much more productive in terms of producing food. Agriculture has gotten us the these high population levels so far anyway, hasnt it? Yes it has. And of all the types of agriculture, the good news is that small-scale intensive agriculture is definitely more productive than large-scale commercial agriculture. Growing your own food in gardens, food plots, orchards, livestock, and perhaps

a bit of hunting or fishing has the highest density yields possible and is the way to go for most people. If the hunter gatherer is the one extreme of requiring the most land, small-scale home-grown agriculture is definitely the other extreme. So how much land are you going to need for your families food supply using the small-scale intensive agriculture? The answer to that question was started back in the 70s by a very forward thinking man named John Jeavons. Jeavons has continued his research ever the decades and developed a system called BioIntensive Gardening. The Bio-Intensive system is the most thoroughly researched and documented method for sustainably growing food. The BioIntensive method has been implemented worldwide and is used to alleviate hunger and malnutrition. There is a wealth of detail in the entire Bio-intensive method, but the short answer to how much land you need can be summarized as approximately 8,000 sq.ft. for a complete diet for one person (you need 4,000 sq/ft. of actual growing space and at least 4,000 sq.ft. for pathways and access). That is also assuming you have four growing seasons per year.

So if you can only get two growing seasons, then you need to double the space needed per person. For reference, an acre is 43,560 sq.ft. So in a more southern climate, you could theoretically support about 4 people per acre. In the real world you are actually going to need more than the minimum 8,000 sq.ft. per person because youll have crop failures, accidents, and just general losses. Anyone who is already gardening or growing livestock knows of the many problems that can arise. But having that benchmark figure of 8,000 sq.ft. per person is a place to mark as a minimum on our scale of extremes. The absolute best reference for the Bio-Intensive method is the book How To Grow More Vegetables Than You Ever Thought Possible On Less Land Than You Can Imagined by John Jeavons. For another comparison, the average U.S. diet with conventional farming requires 15,000 to 30,0000 sq.ft. and is done in such a way that it diminishes soil i.e. it is not sustainable. So the extremes we are considering is a huntergathering lifestyle that requires about 10 sq. miles,

and the Bio-Intensive method, which can be done on about a quarter of an acre. If you are living in a suburban backyard, dont let the somewhat large size of a quarter an acre per person put you off. A large part of the bio-intensive method is used for growing compost materials to rejuvenate your soil. Remember, the Bio-Intensive system is sustainable and the foundation of sustainability is building and maintaining soil fertility. If you can gather compost materials from off-site, or simply purchase compost, then you really dont need the entire 8,000 sq.ft. per person. Also, if you are just starting, I highly, highly recommend you start small. The biggest mistake made by beginners it to plant too large of an area. Dont try to plant the entire survival garden in the first season! When I say start small, I mean something on the order of a single 50 sq.ft. or 100 sq.ft. bed. As you gain experience, and add more beds each season. Below is a photo of me in my home garden-rabbitry. I have about 750 sq.ft. of bed space going, but I could thin down my paths and fit in a total of about 1,200 sq.ft. of bed space. This is not a completely sustainable system as I import hay and wood chips

for mulch, and about half of the feed for the rabbits. But I produce at least half of my own food supply from this fairly small space. I point this out to encourage you to start with what you have. And remember, you want to start small anyway.

My experience is that 2 acres in a temperate region will completely wear you out and is enough room to comfortably support a family of four with a variety of food sources such as gardens, orchards, small

livestock, and wild crafting. Below is a layout of our homestead and the circled area is about 2 acres. Believe me, I get more than enough exercise working this area of land every day!

Note; drawing dimensions are approximate - not to scale

You can still do a lot in less area, and of course, everyone always wants more. Additional acreage is definitely useful for larger grazing livestock,

woodlots, wildcrafting, and general buffering. But on a day to day basis, it really is difficult to intensively work more than a few acres. Marjory Wildcraft is passionate about self-reliance, primitive skills, and growing food on a family-scale. She is the creator of a widely acclaimed video tutorial titled Grow Your Own Groceries. Marjory teaches people with no gardening or agriculture experience how to successfully grow healthy, vibrant, life-giving nutritious food. Over 250,000 copies of her video are being used world-wide. Her videos are endorsed and carried by such notables as The Permaculture Activist, NaturalNews.com, World Hunger Relief Missionaries, The Organic Consumers Association, Alex Jones Infowars, and The Weston-Price Nutrition Foundation. Marjorys website is www.GrowYourOwnGroceries.co m.