this post was submitted on 16 Jul 2025
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From John Seymour's excellent book "The Self Sufficient Life and How to Live It"
Layout for 1 acre.
Also, layout for urban garden
And a layout for a 5 acre homestead
I love that book!
The interesting thing about Seymour's one acre compared to the prepper fantasy in the meme is that he doesn't try to pretend an acre is "self sufficient". He optimizes the space for crops that make a big difference to his quality of life - fresh vegetables take up almost half his diagram, for example - instead of putting in a few tiny plots of grain and a duck pond. He has a cow in the same space as the meme does but notes he'll have to buy fodder for it because that's not enough land to feed a cow - but he's cool with that because fresh milk is so important to him..
The difference between an actual farmer and an online bullshitter, I guess.
I know this is what the solarpunk space is for, but it really is frustrating to have to separate prepper weirdos from actual self sufficiency discussions.
At least for me the frustration is that it isn’t always easy to explain why a certain image or idea gives you bad vibes. The modern petty fiefdom obsession with lawns and land and wasted urban density is very very icky to me, but these illustrations, some of the other posts on here, they do speak to a certain fantasy that I myself have.
It might help that where I am, a lot of rural housing is smaller 4-5 floor apartment buildings where each floor is typically occupied by one sibling and their nuclear family. So a homestead for me, conceptually, wouldn’t be my prepper enclave with 3,000 each of guns, cans, toilet paper packs, and flashlights, it would be a family area with a whole lot of fresh vegetables, fruits, herbs, composting, a few chickens, and pleasant places to sit around.
And it’s not a fantasy for me at all, because I have pieces of that, so I know how it works. Chickens, solar panels, herbs. A bit more than that in my family home, where my relatives live (I just visit).
Cattle is a bit far fetched for me, lol. Chickens will eat most organic waste and give you eggs, they’re great and convenient. Cattle are a whole other thing.
This is the missing middle I hear people online (especially from the US/Australia/Canada) complaining about. This makes so much more sense to me than borderline nonsensical suburbia.
Yep, it's a treasure! I wish there was a slightly more tropical version sometimes, but the advice generally applies well and lots of things grow very easily here.
It's such a funny coincidence that the layout of several elements is the same that I feel like the meme one must have been inspired by the illustration. I did want to highlight a more realistic take on this concept, and since he puts those 3 layouts right by each other in the book, I also wanted to include them. Like you say, the difference is in focusing on practical realities of the space and getting the most out of it.
That's a small farm.