From what i know this is actually pretty bad set up with the garden because it destroys the soil
this post was submitted on 16 Jul 2025
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I invite anyone who dreams of self sufficiency to start by planting exactly 1 row of chard. I tried it once after it was mentioned in an article in a gardening magazine. The article recommended, if you want to produce literally all your vegetables yourself that you plant 8 rows of chard.
The article didn't lie, chard is ridiculously space efficient, easy for beginners and continuously produces leaves for harvest. I had maybe 6 big, healthy plants and was sick of chard just 1 week later. I just let them shoot and flower as they now owned that dirt.
what the fuck kind of super space efficient micro-farm has dedicated LAWN space‽‽
That farm could almost make 1 sandwich.
Gotta do vertical farming with that sorta space
Not with the price of energy these days! I can just about grow enough to feed my axolotl on a diet of fresh worms.
No you gotta have kids and make them do all the work. We have giant hamster wheel turbines that we use for our kids for "exercise time" before bed time. Best way to get those wiggles out and also power your grid. The best part is, the kids are so tired afterwards, they sleep right thru you playing your boombox all night
Bonus:
The key is, subsistence farming is not small scale. It's why subsistence farming is often described as extensive farming as opposed to modern intensive farming. Natural yields suck and very very quickly degrade land. About the only real intensive agriculture historically is rice paddies where you'd have large amounts of labor planting and tending individual rice plants for a very large yield by area and to a much lesser extent but still significant terraced potato farms. Everything else used tons of land.
Hm, the Edenicity guy makes the opposite case here that small scale farming is actually quite viable (in the context of the viability of cities being self sufficient by growing their own food in urban areas) due to much increased yields compared to industrial scale farming based on studies referenced by David R. Montgomery, and it seems fairly compelling.
Thank you for that video - it gave me a few interesting articles and a new book for my reading list 😁
And one of the points in that video is there's a huge difference in the carbon footprints of different types of urban agriculture - actual urban farms make efficient use of resources, whereas home gardens and community gardens don't.
And even then, those urban farms are not "self sufficient" the way prepper fantasies like this meme promise - they rely on external inputs like fertilizer and building material and irrigation.
Which is, yeah. I love competently designed urban farms. I love competently designed home gardens. The image in my post is neither.
The image in my post is selling a rugged individualist, manifest destiny, pioneers breaking sod in the prairie image of homesteading - the lone smallholder supporting himself and his family solely through the production of his land - which has rarely been true and, when it was, really sucked for the people stuck doing it.
Small scale farming is viable. Rugged individualism is crap.
I'm totally on-board with calling out the rugged ultra self-sufficient individualism, I just didn't want people to come away with the idea that industrial scale farming is the only viable way to farm based on her second tweet. But you're absolutely right that home garden's aren't the best use of resources though. I'd actually forgotten that section of the video, and only remembered the latter part that I linked to until watching it all the way through again just now.
Glad you also enjoyed the vid! He makes some cool stuff ^^
In terms of food production it’s absolutely viable. It’s not economically viable though because farming has extremely low margins that can only be made up at scale.
Also, most modern machinery isn’t useful on a small scale, though there are some exceptions. So small scale farming will be quite labor intensive. So the OP here is kinda right that most people don’t want to put that much labor into it.
This is why I think small-scale robotics is going to be important to future small-scale farming, but we haven’t quite gotten there yet.
At a small scale you can take advantage of advanced irrigation, physical pest barriers, advanced fertilization, and even human or AI based individual plant diagnosis and weeding.
With what money. Cause your not making any selling that stuff and you're going g to spend the majority of your time tending it leaving out external sources of income. My parents have 5 aces and are currently doing their fourth round attempt at something like this. It doesn't usually last more than a couple of years before the effort isn't worth it anymore.
400 square feet is 20x20, which is much much smaller than the lawn we can see here. I understand her point but you could use this space far more efficiently. I'd like to see some actual math here since we know the overall size (1 acre), with calories per sqft and all that
An acre of entirely corn is approximately 15 million calories, and a family of four needs minimum about 3 million calories a year, so I'd give about it about 6 months before you murder each other from every-meal-is-corn psychosis
The image is 950x940 px, and an acre is 209x208 feet, so overall scale about 4.5 pixels per foot. "Lawn" is 250x310px = 55x68 ft or 3800 square feet, although the actual lawn-looking space is larger and several parcels. The fruit tree orchard is about 40x60 feet, chickens 30x30. The big cow is 15 feet long, which seems kinda big. House, excluding garage, is 32x22, which seems like a small 1 bedroom apartment.
1 acre = 43,560 sq ft
If we assume the lawn is like 2/3rds of this plot then that's 14,520 sq ft of cropland, which is better than the estimate, but also a singular cow requires 1.5 to 2 Acres of Grazing Land. To have the cows, pretty much all of the crops would go directly to them.
This is why I'm an advocate for edible bugs for your chickens and you if things get bad enough
Yeah chickens in general are a way better solution. Better for the climate, too.
This seems like an opportunity to cite ‘The Martian’ and estimated crop area of potatoes per person required.
Yes please
I always wonder about these. My parents had 120 acres when I was a kid, and we raised corn, veg, 2 cows, and sooooo many chickens.
There's no way you're feeding cattle on less than a hundred acres, even if you dedicate most of it to pasture. We had to supplement our cow and calf (because you have to have a cow with a calf to keep milk production) with bales of alfalfa/hay every week and they still managed to keep 40 of those acres nice and trimmed.
However, you can definitely get a tremendous amount of corn out of a few acres - more than you can easily eat yourself. Chickens are an amazing use of space, you have 30-40 of them and give them the run of the place and you'll have eggs for days and a chicken for the pot every month (depending on how your replacement rate runs, we had about 20 hatch and survive every spring).
You have to rotate your growing production regularly to make sure the soil gets what it needs, and it's so much freaking work. A saying when I was a kid was "If you're bored, there's always a fence that needs mending"...
The best part was when the foods I liked were in season, because we had loads of them. The worst part was when I got soooo tired of canning :D
I'd do it again, but I'd prefer a close knit neighborhood so that I could trade things. All of our neighbors raised the same sorts of things we did... well, and/or meth... so we still had to go to the grocery store every week. Just not for squash, potatoes, corn, blueberries, etc.
The cornerstone needs to be potatoes. There's a reason so many cultures use potatoes as their stable crop. Highly nutritious, stores very long, more pest resistant then grains, doesn't need paddies like rice.
I'd agree with that.
The acreage per cow is very dependent on where you are. I have a friend with a mother who just wanted to raise cows in her retirement (and reap the sweet tax breaks of having a 'ranch'), and they support roughly 1 cow per acre with slight supplementation of food cubes during the winter. Go out to someplace that's famous for cattle like west texas, and suddenly it's a lot less,but they have so much range out there that they can let the cows go nuts.
yeah i think people don't understand the scale needed to support a family's worth of cow versus a family's worth of corn or wheat or rice
I think you're absolutely right. I suspect people, in general, don't really have much grasp of ag. There's mega industrial, and they understand that. There's backyard/community, and they get that, but livestock? That's probably outside the exp of probably 70% of industrialized nation people.
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
And a layout for a 5 acre homestead
That's a small farm.
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.
I can't find it now, but I've seen a great video of a fella with maybe a quarter acre with a smallish house but it's entirely devoted to food. There are fruit trees and berry bushes around the outside, accessible to all from the sidewalk. Small corn and potato patches, plenty of of other fruits and veggies. I remember him grabbing some artichoke and a basket of random veg for the day's meal.
Just a very dense garden. It was a great video tour, I wish I could find it.
Probably not what you were thinking of, but this is a project to plant quarter-acre food forests all across Africa - both to provide for people and prevent desertification.
now this is solarpunk
That's fantastic; I love it.
Milking and threshing sound way more fun than yet another Zoom meeting.
But I want more like 10 acres of arable land and 20-30 acres of forest.
And I’d never do this in a suburb because the soil there is usually crap. They scrape the topsoil off and put back just enough to grow grass.
There are only 0.5 acres of arable land and 5 acres of solid land per person on the planet. (or 2k and 20k m^2 respectively) So you may, if you use that land to feed and provide lumber to at least 20 people.
Is airable land also waterable even though it's in the air?
Gladly.
Milking and threshing sound way more fun than yet another Zoom meeting.
Whenever I think I can't stand yet another video meeting, I think back on the (very brief) time I spent working on a farm. It was fun for a day or two, but after like 5 days I was ready to do whatever it took to get away from there. I got respect for farm workers, it isn't easy!
When my anglo friends went to summer camp, my family always sent me to pick stuff. My siblings and I got to keep the money at least, but yeah. Farm work is freaking hard, even when you're used to it. Esp when paid by the bucket (still one of the most common metrics)
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how many stalks of wheat is a reasonably year's supply in the modern era? 126 stalks of corn would easily be enough for a family that also has other food sources
that also has other food sources
No idea how reliable this is but suggests that 1/2 to 1 meter squared if crop is needed for a loaf of bread: https://www.thenakedscientists.com/articles/questions/how-much-wheat-make-loaf-bread
No idea what the scale is in that picture, but it'd be a lot more efficient to grow potatoes or some similar riot veg if space is a concern.
This comment has a super rough scaling algorithm, and using it I'd eyeball the grain patches at 20x50 ft each, so 2000 sq ft or about 185 square meters, which, if the grain was wheat, would make between 185 and 740 loaves depending on yield.
Which is frankly more than I expected, though given how much effort it takes to process wheat into bread flour, I'd go with corn or potatoes 100%.
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