thoughts on an eight-acre farm

Enlarge Image Image Gallery Taken from the Maine Land Advocate/$3.00 a year/P.O. Box 653, Bangor, Maine 04401.

Taken from the Maine Land Advocate/$3.00 a year/P.O. Box 653, Bangor, Maine 04401.

When I first came to this land (Vermont), I thought I needed 100 acres and that I'd like to put a house right in the middle of it. The grim realities of economics, of course, dictated that I would have had to work at the yetch office job I then had for about 20 years in order to amass the capital to buy a chunk of land that size . . . to say nothing of paying the taxes on the property or financing the construction of a house.

Now when I wanted that 100 acres, I had no idea what an acre was. I thought that a family vegetable garden needed to cover at least one acre. But I know better now . . . and I know better on more than just purely economic grounds.

Back when I had my heart set on a hundred acres, I never stopped to ask myself, "A hundred acres of what? What will I do with it?" I have since lived for a time on 100 acres of scrub second growth that was mostly useless. Even getting a kitchen garden out of it was a backbreaker.

Now I live on eight acres. It is a much more reasonable piece of property for a "homestead" than the 100 acres I once thought I wanted. Eight acres is large enough for an economically viable vegetable farm . . . or at least so report travelers from the mountainous regions of Europe.

Our property has that ever-important southern exposure and deep loam (at least it's deep by New England standards). It has some scrub pine on it . . . the result of 20 years of non-use.

Eight acres, we have found, is a controllable amount of land . . . small enough to keep taxes and mortgage down to a manageable level. And an hour a day with bow saw and axe will take all that scrub pine out by 1975.

Of course the old-time farmers around here will talk about the need for a woodlot, once those pines and the scrub hardwoods on our eight acres are all culled. OK. Let's talk about it.

For a sustained yield of firewood for an average farmhouse in this area, one needs—say—20 acres to cut over. (That's onehalf cord of firewood per acre per year.) At $500 per acre, this means an investment of $10,000. Interest alone on this land—at 8%—is $800 a year. Add in $100 for taxes and we find ourselves paying $900 annually for the cutting rights to 10 cords of wood. That's $90.00 a cord for standing wood! A poor investment. There must be a better way.