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 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.