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From what i know this is actually pretty bad set up with the garden because it destroys the soil
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
Keeping a useless ass lawn is the most American fucking thing lmao
Lawns are useful as a free area where you can do all kinds of activities like sports, social gatherings, religious ceremonies, an area to build large things, and also just hang out and look at all your plants.
Bigger than the pasture but you gotta mow it lmao.
I mean, yeah, but it's also a pretty central part of this yard plan, so the yard is kind of functioning as a pathway here. If you imagine a bunch of lil paths going in various directions instead of plain grass it doesn't seem unreasonable.
Plant clover. Doesn't need mowing and puts nitrogen into the soil.
Idk what kind of wimpy clover you've got, but the kind around here grows as tall as the grass. Definitely need to mow.
Here's one that tops out at 6 inches.
What kind of wimpy grass do you have? The stuff near me will grow over a foot if you let it
oh no, ground cover that's more than half an inch is so scary
there's like 300 plants called "clover", the kind in my yard will get to ass-height if i let it.
Mines all mint. It's wonderful lol
Yeah I think if you got rid of the lawn and just had narrow paths with everything densely planted with “useful plants” then it would feel less like a homestead and more like a jungle.
What's wrong with some greenery to frolick around in?
It’s fine but you can’t really play sports or have a picnic or a barbecue or set up a slip n slide or many other fun activities that lawns are good for!
Also a dense jungle of food-bearing plants like tomatoes is highly susceptible to disease. Tomatoes need a lot of airflow to keep their leaves dry so they don’t develop powdery mildew.
if you're subsistence farming you won't have time for slip n slides
Maybe if you’re using 18th century farming technology. In the modern day we have things like drip irrigation and tractors. Even a 1940s tractor is more than enough for a 1 acre plot.
that increases your operating costs enormously though.
Not really. Drip irrigation is pretty cheap. As are old tractors.
The expensive part is buying an acre of land.
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.
About the only real intensive agriculture historically is rice paddies
Amazonian, Aztec/Maya and some northern American pre colonial people practiced intensive agriculture to support large cities. Crops included corn, beans, squash, cacao, hot peppers, manioc, pineapple, potato, sweet potato, and a lot more.
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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.
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this post was submitted on 16 Jul 2025
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