Farming for self-sufficiency
(Page 12 of 18)
January/February 1974
By the Mother Earth News editors
The answer to the question of how much produce you can grow or rear on a given piece of land varies enormously. A countryman, or a good gardener, will grow a great amount on a small area of land while a beginner, or somebody who does not have enough time to devote to the job, will grow practically nothing worth while at all. I have a half-acre plot at this very moment which I planted with brassica (plants of the cabbage family) in the spring, and it was well cultivated, manured and fertile. It is now nothing but a mass of weeds and rubbish, and the slugs and pigeons have destroyed what little there was of the brassica plants which had survived the weeds. This was because I was forced, by circumstances, to spend most of my summer away and was just not able to keep down the weeds. Cobbett says: 'you ought to depend more on the spade and the hoe than on the dung heap'. Suffolk men say: 'A good hoeing is worth a shower of rain.' Bad land will yield a fair crop if that crop is kept constantly hoed and weed-free: the best land in the world will yield nothing if it is not. It is far better to have a small acreage of land and really 'do' it well, than have a large acreage and scratch over it. It takes very little land to grow the vegetables for a family, if that little land is 'farmed' to the utmost.
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So it is very hard to say what is the minimum amount of land needed for a family which wishes to be either wholly or partially self-supporting in food. Do the children want to keep ponies? Will they keep a horse or two for ploughing, or will they use machines? Or will they confine themselves to the spade? If they have machines they will not be self-supporting, because they will use oil. But if they use machines they will have more time to devote to their cash-getting craft or profession, and will be able to pay for the oil and for the machines. Maybe, though, they don't approve of machines. Maybe they think it is immoral to use machines that have to be made by unhappy people in huge factories which they themselves would not consider working in even for one moment. Maybe they don't care. I've got a tractor myself-and I wouldn't spend one minute of my life working in a tractor factory. But I've got horses, and horse implements also, and know very well how to use them.
But if a family controls an acre of good land for every member of that family, that is very well indeed. If the family has access to a little common grazing, or can collect wood in a forest or woods held in common, or catch fish in the sea, or derive wealth in fact from outside the borders of its holding, so much the better. If the family holds more land than that, then that family ought to be exporting a surplus of food for feeding townspeople, who cannot grow any food at all.
Now comes the question of what to grow and what animals to rear and fatten and otherwise exploit on the holding. Nothing is more boring for the farmer or worse for the farm than monoculture, or only growing one crop. Most of the commercially farmed arable land of England now is devoted to monoculture, barley being the crop. The same crop can be grown year after year on the same land by the addition of larger and larger amounts of artificial fertilizers, and larger and larger amounts of pesticides, fungicides and chemical weed killers. As the years go by the one crop always takes just the same elements out of the soil, and the pests, fungi, bacteria and weeds that like to infest that particular crop become more and more strongly established and the farmer has to call in the chemist more and more to combat them and farming becomes hydroponics and not true husbandry at all. The modern agribusinessman is dealing with an inert sterile soil, rendered lifeless and barren by monoculture and inorganic chemicals, but made to grow crops-and large crops too-by the addition in an inorganic form of the chemicals that the crop needs. Whether this process can continue for ever nobody yet knows: certainly it has already continued long enough for many people to have made large fortunes out of it, and for large urban populations to have been fed. It is not true farming at all because the soil itself is contributing nothing to the growth of the crop except holding it up: all that the crop needs is coming from the phosphate and potash mines of various parts of the world, and the giant factories that extract nitrogen out of the air. When the fossil fuel of the earth is exhausted this process will stop of course, and men will have to get back to real farming.
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