Part 9 - The Four Food Groups

In the previous post, I explained the need for a long-term, isolated, defensible, sustainable compound. The one aspect that prevents me from undertaking an immediate search for the right property is the size of it. (Money will prevent me from buying it, but that'll be addressed later.)

Size requirements are dependant upon two things; 1) how much land do you need to sustain food as a resource, and 2) how much land do you need to live on. This post strictly deals with the first issue.

In other words, if I want to be able to live, long term, in an isolated area, I'll need to grow/raise my own food. How much space does that require?

Thus, I need to figure out how much room I need for the four food groups: Cattle, Pig, Chicken, and Vegetation.

The last one is easy, so I'll start there.

A family of four can get great use out of a composter of 3 cubic feet. Between waste composting and livestock manure, enough fertilizer/soil will be generated to ensure a healthy garden or pasture. (Of course, this assumes the right balance of nitrogen and carbon in the compost.)

My maternal grandparents used to have a garden in their backyard in the prairies. They grew enough carrots and peas to keep me, my sister, and all the cousins well fed... until we were told we'd eaten enough. Oh, and it was enough for them, and whoever they could feed. That was just a backyard garden. What I'm saying is, with the right mix of vegetables, and whatnot, you can grow enough food in a garden to keep yourself well fed for a long time. To keep things simple, and this will make more sense after the next post, I'm going to decide on one whole acre be dedicated to gardening. Holy crap, you say, that's a lot of land for a garden! Yes, but as I said, next post.

(Fruit trees would be carefully placed around the compound, so they don't require space set aside for them.)

In my research on livestock, I have determined that the "critical path" for space is with cattle. Cattle produce not just meat (beef!), but also dairy and leather. On top of that, they require the most space. A 1000lb beast needs about 1 acre of pasture. That 1000lb beast will also produce about 4 tons of manure per year; a pasture of 1 acre needs about 10 tons of manure per year. Also, that 1000lb animal will yield about 430lbs of meat. To get a sense of how much meat that is, a family of 4, each eating an 8 ounce steak every night, would take just over 7 months to eat that much. And that's just beef.

You can only have so many bulls around (one), so any male calves will typically be butchered for veal. Sad, but true.

A cow will also produce an average of 20 litres of milk per day. Per day. Regardless of what my next post reveals, 20 litres of milk per day is almost unusable. So, for dairy purposes alone, I wouldn't want more than 2 cows at any one time (1 being a back-up in case of disease or any other unavoidable circumstances).

So, how many critters are we talking about here? For my compound, I'd want to start with 1 young bull and 4 heifers (or a couple heifers and a couple cows). Gestation period for cattle is 40 weeks, and they need 45-60 days to "rest" before rebreeding. A cow needs to be retired at around 12-14 years old, and a bull needs to be retired after about 8-10 years. (By the way, the limiting factor on the bull isn't age so much as size; they can get quite heavy and really do some damage during mating.) Between 12-16 months of age, the cattle will be 1000-1300 pounds, and are then ready for processing. Using all those numbers, I'd come up with a plan for maintaining the size of the heard based on needs.

What we really want to know here, though, is how much land will I need. Well, I said a 1000lb bovine will need an acre of land. If I plan on starting with 5 cattle, that means I need 5 acres, right? Wrong. 5 cattle on the same 5 acres would strip it down over time and I'd be left with 5 starving animals. What I would do is have at least 2 pastures (more on that later) of 5 acres, and rotate the animals between them, allowing 3-4 weeks rest for each pasture before letting the beasts graze there again. Cattle can't just eat grass, either, so I'd have to have some land to grow other types of feed, as well.

So, let's say 3 pastures of 5 acres each, plus another acre for feed growing - and the acre for the garden - and we're looking at 17 acres for livestock and farming.

But wait. What about the other livestock? I had mentioned the Pig food group and the Chicken food group, earlier.

That's right, but they don't need any additional land. As pigs and chickens have different dietary needs than cattle, and different grazing patterns, I can put each of them in one of the pastures not used by the cattle.

So... pigs, eh? Pigs seem to be the easiest to care for. They are also the most like humans. They need shelter, food, water, and attention. Yes, attention. They can be slaughtered when they reach 240 lbs, ideally. Females can first become pregnant between 8 and 18 months, and males become sexually active between 8 and 10 months. (Gestation is 16 weeks, and a litter can be 6-12 piglets). Pigs will each just about anything (including wood... so I have to be careful when making structures/pens for them). Pigs usually live 10 years, but that would be unlikely in this situation considered they're made of bacon. I'd only need a few pigs on the farm to sustain infinite bacon.

From what I've read, chickens seem to have complex dietary needs (protein is very important; soybeans, peanuts, sesame, safflower, sunflower...), and yet some of my research shows that free range chickens can have healthy diets, just let loose in a pasture, because they eat a lot of insects. Egg layers are effective for about 3 years, and chickens tend to live 7-8 years, but chicks hatch from the eggs (under the right environmental conditions) in only 3 weeks. After 3 years, I'm sure most of the chickens would end up on a plate or in a bowl. Sustaining a chicken population shouldn't be too difficult. Fish meal is very important for egg production, so the land would benefit from being close to water where fish can be caught and processed.

Now, buying these animals is another ballgame. A head of cattle could run about $1,000 per head; a pig runs under $100; a chicken under $10. All told, for just the livestock, I'd need to drop about $6,000.

... But it's the land that's really going to cost me. (More on that later.)

At least now I know how much land I'll need for food: < 20 acres.

Next post: The Human Genome Project.