Farming for self-sufficiency
(Page 11 of 18)
January/February 1974
By the Mother Earth News editors
Cobbett says you can keep a cow alive and productive on half an acre by feeding her on Swedish turnips and cabbages. Plenty of commercial farmers nowadays are keeping a cow on half an acre plus a considerable amount of brought in fertilizer and food. Personally I should want to see at least two acres per cow if I was buying nothing in from outside: no hay, no dairy cake or corn, and no fertilizers. There would be plenty of room on those two acres for other things as well as the cow though: you can run a sheep with every cow without starving the cow and the products of the cow could help substantially towards feeding a pig which need take up hardly any land at all. Sally and I reared our family of four children for eight years on five acres of very poor land, and the only things we had to buy in any quantity in the food line at least were wheatmeal for bread, sugar, tea, coffee and certain spices: there was lighting of course (in our case paraffin) and anthracite for the Aga. We cut most of our fuel, though, from the surrounding forest. It is true that we bought some foodstuffs from outside for our animals, but it is also true that we exported a lot of animal products: our exports of calves, weaner pigs, fat chickens, ducks and geese more than paid for our imports of feeding stuffs.
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I would say, then, from my own experience, that a family with four children could live very well on five acres of good land, buying very little from outside, but only if they managed their affairs very carefully. Of course, if they lived like Thoreau did, on beans, or like Punjabi peasants do, mostly on wheat, they would have no trouble at all and would have a surplus for sale. Without any artificial fertilizers you should grow a ton of wheat on an acre, and it takes a child a long while to eat his way through a ton. But I am thinking of a rich, full and varied diet.
Balance is all important in this, and to achieve this balance is very difficult. It would make the problem immeasurably easier if there were even one or two other families, within easy walking distance, doing the same sort of thing. For example, if a family keeps a cow she will not give them milk all the year round because she will be dry for part of the year. So the family must keep two cows. The two cows will then be in milk for most of the year together and the family will have far more milk than it needs. If there was another self-supporting family nearby though, either one family could keep two cows and keep both families in milk, or each family could keep one cow and supply the other family when their cow was dry. Again, if you kill a pig or a sheep, and have not got a deep freeze, you cannot eat all the meat unsalted before it goes bad. If you share this meat between two families you can, at least in the winter-time. If there were four families you could eat all the meat in the summer-time too, at least in the case of a sheep or a small porker. There are all sorts of ways round this, of course: you can turn milk into cheese and pork into bacon; but for the rich full and varied diet, without an excessive amount of labor, a little specialization helps enormously. If you wish to mechanize, and grow your own hay and your own wheat, you will need either to own or to hire both a binder and a grass mower. If you have a neighbor, he can grow the hay for both of you and you can grow the wheat. You each need half as much machinery. The road back to Birmingham? There is a lot of difference between growing only hay and not wheat, and putting on Nut No. 365872 a thousand times a day on some machine. There is specialization and specialization.
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