Finally, we are getting to something really interesting – how much land would a person need to be self-sufficient with food and firewood? It does, of course, depend on a lot of the previous factors, but let us talk about a moderate climate and moderately fertile soil, like I talked about at the end of the previous post.
I was not actually thinking about this whole issue that much until a few years ago, when one commenter on Affinity brought up the concept of vertical growing of vegetables at home. In their opinion, vertical farming was supposed to be an agricultural revolution, including this small-scale home version. I have immediately expressed deep skepticism about this idea, and in the years that followed, I feel fully vindicated. Vertical farming boomed off big way, and then busted, as I expected. Not to mention that most of the startups that I saw were growing salads and herbs, neither of which are foods; they are condiments.
And thus, there is one thing that I feel confident in saying right off the bat – the land use needed to feed one person is probably a lot more than an average city dweller’s idea. And one of the reasons for this is that most people actually have no real first-hand experience growing anything except perhaps that bonsai/orchid they got for a birthday from a clueless relative, which then hung on for dear life for a few months before it inevitably died.
Talking about my own experience in my garden, I estimate I’d need at least 500-600 m² of arable land for food, and ten times that for wood. However, I am currently heating the house for three people, not just one. With a domicile for one person only, it could probably be reduced to 2000 m², arriving at 2600 m² total. This counts only the production areas; there would need to be more for the house, the storage spaces, animal sheds, paths, etc. Let’s not count too much and round it up to 3000 m² overall, for just one, very thrifty person.
We shall see how I personally would use said land in order to meet my food and firewood needs.
All numbers are, and will be, estimates. After all, I am writing blog posts, not a PhD dissertation.
These calculations are fascinating.
Most people eat an omnivorous diet of both plant derived foods and animal foods. But for ease of calculation, the two most informative calculations would be what one person needs on a vegetarian diet and what they need on a carnivorous diet, such as if their only land is only good for pasture and firewood.
Then people can calculate omnivorous cases by mixing the two extremes together.
For a carnivorous diet for one person, I imagine one would raise either sheep or goats, although perhaps pigs or chickens would be easier to model, depending on what data you have locally for the analysis.
In the Middle Ages, some monasteries also kept fish ponds, so one could also live on fish.
The old standard in America, based on good bottom land with water, was 40 acres and a mule, or 162,000 m2. That covers everything, including house, bunch of kids, and pasturage for the mule.
I guess it depends a lot on how efficient your house is, and where it is, and what form of heat you’re using, but the estimate for firewood seems a little optimistic. 5000 square meters comes out to less than 1 1/2 acres, and after space for the house and outbuildings and gardens, and grazing area for livestock if you’re a meat eater, including freedom from shade, I think it would be difficult to grow a sustainable woodlot in the remainder.
Of course it depends too on how versatile your piece of land is, as well as where it is. If you live in a tropical area where the sun shines down and things grow fast, and the soil is rich, your chances are better than someplace like here in Vermont, where the seasons are fairly short, the sun low, and the winters cold.
Also, if you’re thinking in terms of actually doing this, as opposed to speculating about what might be possible, you likely have to calculate how long it takes to establish the system. Again, it will vary with climate and location, but it takes time to grow woods, and if you start with woods it takes time to convert part of into fertile land.
it’s certainly an interesting exercise, but thinking about getting it to work makes it clear why communities with shared resources and trade exist. Because it would all be easier if you found a sunny, arable acre for a big garden, and could trade some veggies for firewood from the guy down the road with an acre of woods on a stony hillside.
@Matthew Currie, I recommend reading previous posts in the series.
While you and people in the past mostly tackle/d bad harvests with storage, forest can be beneficial as emergency food supply, bark bread and lichen gruel are better than nothing. However this kind of forest use may require a lot of land and it would have been often commons in the past.
@Ice Swimmer, I think you posted under the ronk topic :). Forest as an emergency food supply is also highly dependent on the composition of the forest. Bark bread can be made, AFAIK, only from birches. And lichens are very fickle and sensitive to the environment. IMO, they could help only in a year when harvests fail due to an overabundance of rain, not vice versa. And, as you said, it would require scouring a huge area to feed one person only. I remember reading somewhere that in Finland in the Russian Empire, whole areas of birch forests were stripped bare in a famine, although I might misremember that, and it could be Russia proper.
In Finland and Scandinavia, pine was the favored (as well as the most accessible) choice for edible bark, although birch and rowan were also used. And yes, it is only marginally edible at best, when processed by baking in oven.
In the 19th century there was some scholarly interest in edible lichens as a potential food source for the rural poor. Not coincidentally, this was an era when emerging timber industry was rapidly making forest trees themselves commercially valuable, so that forest use was increasingly regulated, privatized and organized to maximize timber yields. There was also increasing push to end the traditional land-intensive slash-and-burn agriculture and replace it with either timber forest or permanent cropland.
In the late 1860s there were weather anomalies resulting in widespread crop failures and food shortages all over northern Europe. In Finland this escalated into a major famine, largely because our national government, autonomous under Russian Empire, did not want to go in debt by investing in food relief. Unlike in earlier centuries, now it would’ve been logistically possible to avoid that famine by importing grain from the increasingly globalized food system. Instead, a campaign was organized to advise the rural poor on how to identify, harvest and process edible lichens from the forest. It did not work well in practice, in part because the officials overestimated how edible the lichens actually were, and underestimated how much work was needed for utilizing them.
Ah, nothing like a government. If a famine does not occur on its own, they can organize one.
In this case, the problem doesn’t seem to have been so much government incompetence, as ideological obsession with austerity -- a common fig leaf for rightwing economic policies that also disregard the welfare of poor people. Incidentally, we have a similar problem with Finland’s current rightwing government (in office since 2023) and its devastating welfare cuts. This has brought the entire economy to the brink of recession, as people are scared of spending the money they might need later for survival.