On Wed, 10 Dec 2003 03:57:10 GMT, (Richard Lewis)
wrote:

Strider wrote:

There is no good answer to the question without more info. It
generally took at least 40 acres to barely keep a familiy going here
in East TN in the 19th century (before hybrid seeds, commercial
fertilizer, and the internal combustion engine).

That's the key topic of dissent that I have raised every single time
this thread has come back around. It is impossible to raise all the
food you need on "blah acres" because, if the situation comes to be
that you have to try to do it, you will in effect be reverting to
medieval stats and not modern ones.

By modern standards, one might live on whatever acres etc, but when
you *have* to do it, you won't have all the modern amenities.

That's the key problem with anyone who cites the "half and acre" or
"one acre" bull etc.

ral

Strider


Jeez, I don't see that at all. The guy is keeping his day job. He can do it
from home via a satellite link up. He just wants to know what he would need
to keep himself in food and off the treadmill of consumerism. Noble goals,
although the slant towards isolation is a bit worrying. I have no idea
what to tell him other than it probably won't take much land and if he does
it right it shouldn't involve an excessive amount of work. It seems he
wants to mimic a Walden experience, not the one that lives in the popular
imagination of going into the woods and being a hermit, but the one of
Thoreaus true intention, i.e. "I wished to live deliberately, to front only
the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to
teach, and not, when I die, discover that I had not lived."


g.c.