challenging question - what do i need to feed 30 people?

Discussion in 'Designing, building, making and powering your life' started by qis, Jan 2, 2009.

  1. qis

    qis Junior Member

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    I have got a challenging question that has me a bit stumped. I appreciate your ideas how to answer it. My question is this. If I want to provide all the food and fibre needs of 30 people, full time, how many animals, and how large a vegetable garden and food forest do I need? Perhaps a simpler question is how many animals and how many plants do I need to feed and clothe one person, and then I can multiply this by 30. The land is fertile clay with good rainfall. I have 70 acres, and would like at least 5 acres of it to be wilderness.
     
  2. sampsms

    sampsms Junior Member

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    Re: challenging question - what do i need to feed 30 people?

    work out what you would need to feed one(yourself )and then multiply by 30 and add one..
    there might be an extra turn up..
    go to our wwww and learn free stuff permaculturevisions dot com
     
  3. qis

    qis Junior Member

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    Re: challenging question - what do i need to feed 30 people?

    There's a step between what you consume, and what it takes to produce it. It's not so hard with chooks. One chook produces 300 eggs per year. I consume just under one egg per day. So you'd need one chook per person, maybe 35 chooks for 30 people. I'm finding it more tricky when it comes to things like meat and veg, where I consume only part of something. For example, what proportion of a cow, and how much wheat from the field, did it take to make my spag bol? It's got my brain in knots.
     
  4. ho-hum

    ho-hum New Member

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    Re: challenging question - what do i need to feed 30 people?

    Qis, fair question.

    Is it possible for one person, from their individual labours, to feed 70. Nope, hypothetically, yes. You have mentioned land, you havent suggested a specific place on the planet. Let's assume we are talking in a western sense, where folk can gather and contribute. It might work, but sooner or later some skinny looking type will snatch every silverbeet leaf on the place because they are 'vegetarian/vegan' and ummmm they need their greens. They will pedal off into the wide blue concrete bit safe in the knowledge that they and their aquaintances are saved, and it is so much cheaper to steal from a producer than eat at the supermarket.

    What is doable on 70 acres is that you can 'import/supermarket replace' enough for an extended family unit to have some degree of self-sufficiency.

    I believe what should be considered here is just how little you can support your family and their expectations on. If you can achieve that.... then you may be able to assist the '70'. If you have 70 acres, feed yourself and share the bounty.

    cheers,
     
  5. trimnut2

    trimnut2 Junior Member

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    Re: challenging question - what do i need to feed 30 people?

    The answers to this question will be interesting. In a subsistence situation you will not be able to feed/fibre thirty people on the area you have available.

    Qis Where are you? What is your rainfall? What is your experience in labour intensive agricultural regimes? What sort of regimes would you be using? Are any other people working the land? What capital do you have?

    Assuming 65 fully irrigated acres in the southern Australia you may be able to sustain 10 people assuming pre-oil era agricultural productivity and informed practices. You would need to know exactly what you were doing. Most don't: assuming that you can multiply one to feed thirty is naive, food spoilage and crop failures destroy that sort of planning.
     
  6. foggyforge

    foggyforge Junior Member

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    Re: challenging question - what do i need to feed 30 people?

    if it was me- i would move somewhere where there are other groups i could work with.Groups of people one could rely on in emergency .Like villages in the past ,and present all over the world.Have redundancy in your design (in case something goes wrong)Very few small groups succeed on their own for long,starting from scratch ,without experience .(i read,heard discussed -B.Mollison -mp3 recording of '83PDC- viewtopic.php?f=5&t=5805 )
    Dont let me talk you out of it tho-just be prepared , :D
     
  7. cecilia

    cecilia Junior Member

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    Maybe now isn't the time to get into fibre

    I think you can just 'harvest' fibre from the hand-me-downs from the rest of the western world, who will probably still be around and fashion-shopping for the next few decades. You could send them herb tea or something in exchange. It could become a one-year full-time job for an inexperienced westerner to make a t-shirt from scratch. I once spent 2 months making a gown. Very luxurious, to be able to do that.
     
  8. springtide

    springtide Junior Member

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    Re: challenging question - what do i need to feed 30 people?

    Hiya - great question - hope it is partly hypothetical.
    Firstly the reading i have done would suggest 1/3rd an acre per person but is is a huge amount of work and as suggested some people are not going to want to do this long term.
    If this was to work i would suggest keeping it simple eg if you had a choice of 10 acres of permacultured garden or 15 acres of "no-dig" then go the no-dig cos there is less work. Carting water round etc - get a nice wind mill and header tank etc. Try to go part vegetarian - you can use the 1000 kilos of straw to produce 100 kilos of cow to make 10 kilos of ppl as motivation - meat less often will make life easier. Corn flour rather than wheat flour as corn is easier to handle. Veggie patch in sections with chickens in the middle so you can release them into different areas to do your weeding and turn over the soil. Try to keep things centralised with cattle on the outskirts so farm ppl can return to the ranch for all meals so they talk to eachother regularly - this should help stop them feeling isolated and undervalued in the "community" so they don't get pissed off - it will only take a match and a bad day to sink your ship.

    If you want to be self-sustainable you should get these people and figure out what level of sustainability vs modern civilisation you want eg. 5 computers with internet? any televisions?, microwaves to help with cooking?, modern agriculture gear to help collect and preserve food, refrigeration???, etc?. A few people have suggested producing extra and trading - this is a good way to go. don't just rely on your group - consider your neighbours/ outer community they will give you some measure of protection from the big bad world and give your people someplace to go for an afternoon without getting cabin fever.

    Chicory for caffeine and concentrated grape/fruit juice or honey for sugar and alcohol - the problems you can get in society without these are often worse than the ones associated with their presence, this is a moral grey area you may cross and history would say that they can assist social cohesion which is where most "communes" (sorry) fail - then lack of skill and motivation - then lack of money and council approval.
    If you are perhaps waiting for some kind of crash then keep it under the radar, if you have some like minded people and just want to escape the rat race then it will have to be well planned an look good otherwise the gov't will shut it down.

    Good luck and give us some more info - there are a lot of clever people out here willing to help (give me a few more years and i might be one of them) :D
     
  9. Hamishmac

    Hamishmac Junior Member

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    Re: challenging question - what do i need to feed 30 people?

    Agree with Springtide's part vegetarian suggestion. If you can persuade the meat eaters (like me....yummm) to cut meat intake by half, either by reducing portion sizes by 50%, or only eating meat half as often, it is the equivalent of half of them giving up meat altogether and turning veggie, which would make your overall calorie production targets less. Also, requirements will vary depending on whether your proposed tribe are lean fit fighting machines used to 1800 calories a day, or are, er, a bit more challenged in the trouser girth department, where if the expected 3500 calories a day are not provided, riot, anarchy & chaos ensue.

    Cheers,

    Hamishmac
     
  10. trimnut2

    trimnut2 Junior Member

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    Re: challenging question - what do i need to feed 30 people?

    Yo Springtide: What were the sources for your 1/3rd of an acre figure? My research points to 10 fully irrigated crop hectares as about the level to sustain a family. Your figure is probably well under a 10th of that.
     
  11. springtide

    springtide Junior Member

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    Re: challenging question - what do i need to feed 30 people?

    1/3 rd of an acre is a number that kept on popping up in a LATOC forum for veggies and chickens - after having a few large veggie patches (where you end up with 20 kg of tomatoes all in one hit) it seemed probable - and a bit un reliable i will admit. - Not meaning to sling it back but i grew up on 10 acres, your info of a 10 hectare/25 acre farm is pretty big - i don't see how traditional manual farmers (200 years ago) could manage semi-intensively 5 acres each (family of 5 into 25) - do you mean that the extra land is used for cooking fuel and livestock - horses, farms and associated feeds?

    I will try to find the source of my figure as it has stuck in my head - not a figure i want to underestimate!

    back with more soon 8)
     
  12. trimnut2

    trimnut2 Junior Member

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    Re: challenging question - what do i need to feed 30 people?

    Thanks springtide. Your "drift' is where I was coming from. To reply directly to your point: veggies and chickens on a 1/3 of an acre probably wouldn't be "sustaining" in any other sense than for a proportion of the immediate food requirement that area would produce. The figure I mentioned comes from looking at both Asian and European experience. The extra land was for associated subsistence activities: livestock, fodder production, cooking oils, fruit and drought food securities.

    The related subject of what area can one person successfully manage and be productive is of intense interest to me. Again looking at both European and Asian experience it would seem that 10 crop hectares is manageable by a family. Small farms at these sorts of figures were common around both Sydney and Melbourne. Although not at peak production one small example of this sort of activity still exists locally, sadly not for much longer. The children have all left home and life rolls on.

    The possible underestimation of this issue give me the horrors, which is why I raised it. Sorry for that. To my mind getting that fundamentally wrong is not something I feel at all comfortable with. I also wanted to highlight two related issues: few people have any idea of physical work and, how to organise a small farm along productive lines.
     
  13. springtide

    springtide Junior Member

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    Re: challenging question - what do i need to feed 30 people?

    I had a look around and found this https://thesietch.org/mysietch/greenspree/2007/07/17/self-sufficiency/ i pasted most of it below. Taking a guess from when we used to collect firewood i think 7-10 acres of bush (good rainfall) to cover heating and keep some sense of native habitat. then a few acres for animal feed, then an acre for olive oil and grapes/vinegar, then double or tripple the below estimate for bad seasons and simply because it is sooo tiny (i would also double that again for a "no-dig") then a small dam, house and yeah you get to 25-30 acres pretty quickly and this is with good land, shallow soil of lower rainfall could double this.... 0.11 of an acre just sounds a bit rediculous but it probably (hopefully) includes hot houses and dynamic lifter.

    Has anyone taken notes like - 1250mm rainfall, near Melbourne, good soil, no dig layered veggie bed - 20 tomato bushes - 1 crop - got 125kg?

    I suppose you would want to spend the first year or more just preserving stuff and getting an idea of the land (and your abilities) before taking 30 others along - but if it happens i would love to see an online journal.


    Self Sufficiency
    17

    07

    2007
    How much land do you need to be self sufficient? Again inspired by Red State Green’s recents posts I decided to do some research on my own. Prior to this, in a comment on “A matter of national security”, I used some somewhat high output figures I found on another site that basically said about 0.11 of an acre would be all that is required for a family of four. I decided to find some better numbers and also instead of just going by 2000lbs of food per year per preson, use the recommended portions of the CanadaFood Guide.

    Assuming everyone followed Canada’s food guide, and using chicken for meat and dairy alternatives and/or trading or somehow offsetting the cost of purchasing some of the food, this is how I see it breaking down (weights of food taken from https://www.stambaughfamily.com/equiv_1.html):

    Food Guide per adult male:

    10 servings (1/2cup) of vegatables and fruit. Lets say your servings are 1 cup of tomato, 1 cup of spinach, 1 cup of carrot, 1 cup of cabbage and 1 cup of potato. That corresponds 74kg of tomato, 50kg of spinach, 55kg of carrot, 110kg of cabbage, and 83kg of potato per year.

    8 servings of grain products. Lets use 4 servings of oats and the equivalent in flour of four servings of bread. That corresponds to 21kg of oats and 20kg of wheat flour per year.

    2 servings of dairy. Lets assume soy drink, 1 cup ea. or approx. 23kg of soya beans per year.

    3 servings of meat and alternatives. Let’s use chicken for all three (75g ea.) That’s 82kg per year.

    More after the fold.


    These calculations when applied to food guide amounts for an adult female and two 9-13 yo children result in:

    222kg of tomato
    150kg of spinach
    165kg of carrots
    330kg of cabbage
    249kg of potato
    71kg of oats
    68kg of wheat
    138kg of soya
    246kg of chicken

    Outputs per acre for these crops, taken from various sources and hopelessly approximate (there are no authoratative datasets that I can find but I mostly used the following site: https://www.gardensofeden.org/04%20Crop% ... cation.htm), shape up to the following space requirement for our fictional family:

    0.044 acre for tomato
    0.030 acre for spinach
    0.019 acre for carrots
    0.053 acre for cabbage
    0.036 acre for potato
    0.070 acre for oats
    0.024 acre for wheat
    0.145 acre for soya
    0.006 acre for chickens (minimum, not free range and not counting space for growing feed, if required)

    That equals 0.427 acres, not too bad, about 0.1 acres per person. Of course, it doesn’t make sense to try and grow EVERY part of your diet your self, the 0.145 acres for soya for milk alternative is a little excessive and trading with a local dairy farmer might make more sense. Without the soya and say doubling the chicken as a trade for the milk, you get 0.288 acres! The space required to grow feed for your chickens, might increase the total to about 1/3 of an acre, but using even a small portion of your land to produce a more valuable commodity like say more tomotoes could easily cover the costs of buying feed from another grower. This does not count feeding table scraps peeling to you chickens which they love and reduced the need for grain feed.

    So it seems by this simplistic exercise that a maximum of 1/2 an acre should give you everything you need to be self sufficient food wise. Of course, there may be higher yield crops out there and this does not take into consideration mixed gardening which can increase output per acre as some crops can use the same piece of land during different times of year. Nor does it take into account the possibility of using permaculture and greenhouse techniques to boost productivity.

    Realistically, a family of four growing just their vegetables on about 1/4 acre (about a 100?x100? plot) would be a huge amount of their food supply and quite manageable if you were willing to put in the work! Of course city dwellers and some suburban homes may not have a 100×100 plot to work with, but those of us who do should be taking advantage of our resources. From a cost standpoint the food costs for these veggies (using Strong’s Market prices):

    222kg of tomato $483.96 + taxes
    150kg of spinach $1584.80 + taxes
    165kg of carrots $178.20 + taxes
    330kg of cabbage $283.80 + taxes
    249kg of potato $323.70 + taxes

    For a grand total of $2,854.46 + taxes, I don’t know about you but for a few hours (or more) a week and the cost of a few packets of seed and tools, I’d say it’s a pretty good return.


    It still seems tiny... :rolleyes: :rolleyes:
     
  14. qis

    qis Junior Member

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    Re: challenging question - what do i need to feed 30 people?

    thanks everyone and thanks springtide!
     
  15. janahn

    janahn Junior Member

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    Re: challenging question - what do i need to feed 30 people?

    hello qis,
    after a quick glance, and i say quick, not one respondant asked, what is your annual average rainfall, is it summer, and or winter, what is your climatic zone. in the absence of such knowledge you may as well ask gw bush. and may i add soil type is more or less only a minor part of the equation.
    Leo Mahon permaculture design institute "janahn forest biomass project" food fuel and fibre. ps the other pertinant ? is how much labour do you have. a system designed for one person to work is different to 3o people
     
  16. openeyes

    openeyes Junior Member

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    Re: challenging question - what do i need to feed 30 people?

    Hi Everyone,

    Some very interesting responses. Having tried producing enough for two adults in three different locations I have found that most scientific production levels are way beyond what I can produce year after year. Now I maybe not a very good gardener but I think I am at least average so my estimates go quite a lot higher.

    If you just want veges then yes half and acre can feed a family - my uncle has lived in a small town in New Zealand for 37 years and feed his family all veges/fruit from his garden - and still does even though they have all left. His self planted walnut tree is a beautiful sight!

    But adding enough chicken/beef is quite another matter and then to add oil/butter/nuts adds many acres even with multi use areas.

    I would think 2.5 acres per person would be a minimum if the area was farmed intensively and with many years experience for close to self sufficency. I would doulble this to account for drought and to make a little extra for buying clothes and things you are not going to produce. Of course remember 70 acres would require at least 10 people for intensive work imho.

    An excellent book is called "Ten Acres Enough" by Edmund Morris from around 1864. This gives and excellent account of what is required for a family and how he achieved it - well before tractors! It also includes information about the depression of that time and how that affected his earnings.

    Start gardening now, start fermenting now, start preserving now and you will at least have some skills.
     
  17. janahn

    janahn Junior Member

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    Re: challenging question - what do i need to feed 30 people?

    from my own experience, the first step is earthworks, dam, windmill, tanks, pipes and taps. on 50 acres out of 100 that i am intensively developing in a 650 mm rainfall zone, west of the great divide in qld, i have spent $30,000.00 to set the water capture and storage system up. by year 7, (now in year 4) i expect to comfortably feed 20 people year in year out. may 1-2% will be traded in, say salt and spice. milk production is perhaps the most crucial integrated component. oh, fencing is another $20,000 on top of that.

    shall drop you a line when my web site is reconstructed. Leo Mahon
     

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