The little teeny farm fantasy pops up again and again, Nathan Lewis says, but, while little teeny farms make for wonderful hobbies, they make for terrible farms and terrible cities:
Some people have been pushing the notion that a family of four can be sustained with a 3000 square foot garden.
Oh really? That’s about 50×60 feet. Which is actually a pretty large garden, by hobby garden standards.
Let’s think about this.
A square mile has 27.878 million square feet. There are 640 acres in a square mile. Each acre has 43,560 square feet. Thus, 3,000 square feet is 0.0689 acres. This is about the size of a typical “suburban backyard garden,” if you use most of the available space.
The highest calories per acre are probably attained with grains, such as wheat or rice. You aren’t going to get there with lettuce and asparagus.
One of the highest naturally-obtained grain yields per acre that I know of is Masanobu Fukuoka’s farm in Japan. Using all natural techniques, he averaged 1,300 pounds of rice per quarter-acre, which is probably the highest natural rice yield in the world. That’s 5,200 pounds per ace. Rice farms in California can do up to 9,000 lbs per acre of rice, with chemical fertilizers, irrigation, GMO seeds, optimal climate and so forth.
For 2007-2008, the average U.S. wheat yield per acre was 41 bushels per acre. A bushel of wheat has 60 pounds. So, that’s 2,460 pounds of wheat per acre. That is with every sort of chemical fertilizer, genetically-modified seed, pesticide and so forth. (Single farms using corn can do much better. The record for a single farm in 2002 was 442 bushels of corn per acre.)
The average wheat yield per acre in the U.S. in 1899 was 12.5 bushels, or 750 pounds. This represents professional farmers with refined traditional technique but without chemical fertilizers, GMO seeds and so forth. Clumsy amateur farmers would do well under this.
Since I will assume that the prospective gardener will not be using chemical fertilizers or GMO seeds, let’s take the 1899 average. Thus, at 750 pounds/acre and 0.0689 acres, we get 52 pounds of wheat.
There is some loss as the wheat is processed into flour. However, let’s just use that figure. At 1,700 calories/pound, that’s about 88,400 calories of food energy. With four people in the family, that’s 22,100 calories per person. At 2,500 calories per day for an adult (could be higher especially if outdoor labor is involved), that’s 8.84 days’ worth of food per person. I suppose kids will eat a little less.
So, we can see that your little 3000sf garden certainly will not feed a family for a year. It might feed a family for a week, and that’s only if they like plain bread a lot.
Let’s say you are an ultimate natural farming master, like Fukuoka. Then, your 3000sf garden would produce about 358 pounds of rice in a year. I’ll spare you the math, but it works out to 61 days of food per person per year.
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What could be possible, and what most of the “little teeny farm” advocates are really talking about, is producing fresh fruits and vegetables. They aren’t really talking about producing grains, beans, meats (usually), dairy or oils, which can amount to 80% or more of the typical diet. Can you produce enough lettuce, tomatoes and zucchini in your 3000sf hobby garden to give/sell some of it to your friends and neighbors during the summer and harvest season? With a bit of basil and thyme? Sure, and why not? If you already have a suburban backyard, you might as well grow zucchini or blueberries instead of grass. This is fun. That’s what makes backyard gardening a fun hobby. But, there’s a difference between having some fresh zucchini in August, and feeding a family for an entire year.One reason I call this a “hobby” is that it doesn’t make a good business. Let’s say you want to grow lettuce in your suburban backyard hobby garden, and sell it to your neighbors. Great! Who wouldn’t love local, fresh-grown lettuce instead of something from 3000 miles away? Let’s say you sell lettuce for $2 a head. If you sold a thousand heads of lettuce, you would have gross revenue of $2000. Think about the labor and expense involved in growing and harvesting and selling (don’t forget the selling) a thousand heads of lettuce, from your suburban backyard garden. You better love lettuce. For this, you get $2000 of revenue, per year, before covering your expenses. It probably works out to less than minimum wage. You would only do it “for fun.” That’s why I call it a hobby.