Keeping a useless ass lawn is the most American fucking thing lmao
Lawns are useful as a free area where you can do all kinds of activities like sports, social gatherings, religious ceremonies, an area to build large things, and also just hang out and look at all your plants.
My lawn is clover for the bees
Bigger than the pasture but you gotta mow it 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.
Plant clover. Doesn’t need mowing and puts nitrogen into the soil.
Mines all mint. It’s wonderful lol
Yeah I think if you got rid of the lawn and just had narrow paths with everything densely planted with “useful plants” then it would feel less like a homestead and more like a jungle.
What’s wrong with some greenery to frolick around in?
It’s fine but you can’t really play sports or have a picnic or a barbecue or set up a slip n slide or many other fun activities that lawns are good for!
Also a dense jungle of food-bearing plants like tomatoes is highly susceptible to disease. Tomatoes need a lot of airflow to keep their leaves dry so they don’t develop powdery mildew.
That farm could almost make 1 sandwich.
If you haven’t seen it:
Bonus:
The key is, subsistence farming is not small scale. It’s why subsistence farming is often described as extensive farming as opposed to modern intensive farming. Natural yields suck and very very quickly degrade land. About the only real intensive agriculture historically is rice paddies where you’d have large amounts of labor planting and tending individual rice plants for a very large yield by area and to a much lesser extent but still significant terraced potato farms. Everything else used tons of land.
The general formula is
land × labor = yields
In the west, it was mostly large land and small labor (amount of people, not work per person) in the east, it was mostly large amount of labor and small amount of land. The formula is still in effect, we just enriched the land with synthetic fertilizers and replaced manual labour with mechanized labor in the form of tractors and harvesters and chemical labor in the form of pesticides.
About the only real intensive agriculture historically is rice paddies
Amazonian, Aztec/Maya and some northern American pre colonial people practiced intensive agriculture to support large cities. Crops included corn, beans, squash, cacao, hot peppers, manioc, pineapple, potato, sweet potato, and a lot more.
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.
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 ^^
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.
I invite anyone who dreams of self sufficiency to start by planting exactly 1 row of chard. I tried it once after it was mentioned in an article in a gardening magazine. The article recommended, if you want to produce literally all your vegetables yourself that you plant 8 rows of chard.
The article didn’t lie, chard is ridiculously space efficient, easy for beginners and continuously produces leaves for harvest. I had maybe 6 big, healthy plants and was sick of chard just 1 week later. I just let them shoot and flower as they now owned that dirt.
I always wonder about these. My parents had 120 acres when I was a kid, and we raised corn, veg, 2 cows, and sooooo many chickens.
There’s no way you’re feeding cattle on less than a hundred acres, even if you dedicate most of it to pasture. We had to supplement our cow and calf (because you have to have a cow with a calf to keep milk production) with bales of alfalfa/hay every week and they still managed to keep 40 of those acres nice and trimmed.
However, you can definitely get a tremendous amount of corn out of a few acres - more than you can easily eat yourself. Chickens are an amazing use of space, you have 30-40 of them and give them the run of the place and you’ll have eggs for days and a chicken for the pot every month (depending on how your replacement rate runs, we had about 20 hatch and survive every spring).
You have to rotate your growing production regularly to make sure the soil gets what it needs, and it’s so much freaking work. A saying when I was a kid was “If you’re bored, there’s always a fence that needs mending”…
The best part was when the foods I liked were in season, because we had loads of them. The worst part was when I got soooo tired of canning :D
I’d do it again, but I’d prefer a close knit neighborhood so that I could trade things. All of our neighbors raised the same sorts of things we did… well, and/or meth… so we still had to go to the grocery store every week. Just not for squash, potatoes, corn, blueberries, etc.
The cornerstone needs to be potatoes. There’s a reason so many cultures use potatoes as their stable crop. Highly nutritious, stores very long, more pest resistant then grains, doesn’t need paddies like rice.
I’d agree with that.
Gotta do vertical farming with that sorta space
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.
I can’t find it now, but I’ve seen a great video of a fella with maybe a quarter acre with a smallish house but it’s entirely devoted to food. There are fruit trees and berry bushes around the outside, accessible to all from the sidewalk. Small corn and potato patches, plenty of of other fruits and veggies. I remember him grabbing some artichoke and a basket of random veg for the day’s meal.
Just a very dense garden. It was a great video tour, I wish I could find it.
Milking and threshing sound way more fun than yet another Zoom meeting.
But I want more like 10 acres of arable land and 20-30 acres of forest.
And I’d never do this in a suburb because the soil there is usually crap. They scrape the topsoil off and put back just enough to grow grass.
Milking and threshing sound way more fun than yet another Zoom meeting.
Whenever I think I can’t stand yet another video meeting, I think back on the (very brief) time I spent working on a farm. It was fun for a day or two, but after like 5 days I was ready to do whatever it took to get away from there. I got respect for farm workers, it isn’t easy!
When my anglo friends went to summer camp, my family always sent me to pick stuff. My siblings and I got to keep the money at least, but yeah. Farm work is freaking hard, even when you’re used to it. Esp when paid by the bucket (still one of the most common metrics)
I’ve worked a small homestead before and miss it terribly.
There are only 0.5 acres of arable land and 5 acres of solid land per person on the planet. (or 2k and 20k m^2 respectively) So you may, if you use that land to feed and provide lumber to at least 20 people.
Is airable land also waterable even though it’s in the air?
Gladly.
