Edit:

This is not intended as “how to grow all your food you ever need at home”.

It merely provides the vegetables.

You still have to get your grains (and therefore the majority of your calories) from somewhere else.

geteilt von: https://lemmy.ca/post/22193783

78 points

That’s a big 0.1 acre lot.

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32 points

Or it’s a 20 x 20 house.

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11 points

Comes out to 4350 sq ft, vs 40,000 for an acre. So, a tiny bit more than 0.1 acres, but not quite 0.11.

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3 points

An acre is 43560 and a tenth of that is 4356.

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2 points

Sigh, imperial measurements. I forgot it was 208x208’, I had calculated it at 200x200’.

Seriously, imperial measurements are just awful.

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7 points

Two room and a bathrood house, and shed.Nor garage, or drive way.

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4 points

Eyeballing looks like the house couldn’t be more than 18x30 feet, or ~540 sq ft. Probably less in reality. Tiny home territory. Smaller than most single wide trailer homes. The doors as drawn must be for hobbits. Fun picture just the same. I love the urban homestead explosion and hope it never stops.

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-2 points

It appears big because it’s well used. Also, the house is small-sized. Might depend on your family circumstances.

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1 point
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41 points

Shit like this looks cool, but most people don’t have even a tenth of the time needed to maintain it…

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7 points

It’s common in India to provide a quarter and salary to rural people for help with maintaining such a place. They usually have experience with farming and happy to live without worrying about wages, food and a roof.

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11 points

In the US, that’s called “rich”, normal people can’t afford servants here.

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1 point

Gotta be rich if you own land in acres

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35 points

Might as well link to the actual source which has a lot of great content.

The Backyard Homestead: Produce all the food you need on just a quarter acre!

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8 points

thanks!

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3 points
*

Good linking. The book says it’s for a quarter acre, not a tenth. This was on reddit the other day (and it’s credited as such). Exact same wording and everything.

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32 points
*

That is not enough food to sustain a person, but a great way to cut down on grocery needs!

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28 points

Is it efficient land use, though?

Keep in mind, we have to be able to feed 10 billion people. Homesteads like this are of course better than just plain grass, but compared to a farm, the output per area is probably really low. So there’s still land being “wasted”.

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20 points

You can’t compare this sort of thing to actual farming though, because that’s not the point of it at all. The point is supplementing from other sources like farms, reducing the need for intensive agriculture, and potentially (with enough people shifting to home gardening) reduce the size of farms needed for veg growing, freeing that space for other things.

It doesn’t have to be as efficient as a big farm to be good for the people consuming it as well as the environment (grass is worthless and veg have to be shipped if not grown locally)

We can’t let perfect be the enemy of good.

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14 points

Homesteads like this are of course better than just plain grass, but compared to a farm, the output per area is probably really low.

I would’ve thought that as well, but, at least according to some studies referenced by the Edinicity project, small urban farming apparently results in significantly higher yields compared to industrial farming. If the figures referenced are correct, then it would seem small urban farming could be quite viable as a source of food for significant amounts of people.

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9 points

I think the idea is that is an alternative to lawns, patios, driveways etc on already residential land, not a replacement for crops on already agricultural land. In fact, if all farmland was replaced with plots like this I don’t think there would be enough people on the planet to live on them!

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6 points

In exchange, the vegetables are really fresh.

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0 points

just buy a ton of land and farm equipment forehead

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-1 points

No.

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10 points
*

You might be able to survive if you grow just potatoes in those 8 beds and feed the 6 laying hens on weeds and scraps from the other plants.

You can also convert 3, the “tea herbs,” into more potato beds.

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13 points

Potatoes are great from an energy input position, but if you were doing this without potatoes and your neighbor was doing just potatoes, I think that might be enough for both.

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1 point

No, you cannot source all of your food that way. Only the vegetables. You still habe to get grains from a machinally-farmed farm. It says so in the description (4).

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0 points
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Im only referring to raw human survivability.

Whether this amount of growing space could produce enough calories per year to keep 1 human at “barely alive or better” caloric input.

In my estimate, you would need to devote most of the land to potatoes, and rely on eggs, rabbit meat and likely some wild foraging for the rest. It probably is feasible if you do the above.

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31 points

Literally explains that this is insufficient.

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Don’t let perfect be the enemy of the good.

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1 point

Then we should be promoting good instead of unrealistic perfect.

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1 point

Don’t let half measures be the enemy of the bare minimum.

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