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.

The rough numbers I recall for medieval farming are generally all in
the range of 10 bushel/acre (that's grain yield) -- there's obviously
some variation due to crop/grain. However, the numbers I saw looked
like more variation due to weather, etc -- there were numbers ranging
from 5-30 bushel/acre, for most everything. But I think most were 10+
bushel/acre, pretty consistantly (downgrade to 7 or 8 if you're more
paranoid...or even 5... assuming you're comparably skilled in
primitive farming as our forefathers).

Let's call a bushel 50 pounds. It isn't 50 lbs, but rather varies
with grain, but let's call it that for ease of calculations.

On the low side, a farmer might need 3,000 calories/day (more when
working hard, less when waiting for crops to grow -- When you're
working hard, it might be more like 6,000). A pound of grain is about
1500 calories (again, they range around this value), so you need about
2 pounds of grain, per day, per person.

10 bushel/acre is about 500 pounds/acre yield. Or somewhere around
250 days worth of food.

In a really bad year, you're yield may be half that. In a really good
year it might be three times that.

Let us not forget that you need to keep seed. The number I've seen
for medieval farming are to plan on planing between 10% and 25% of
what you plan to harvest. This may sound low, but remember that
you're growing open pollinated crops (not hybrids), and have to deal
with losses due to wildlife.

Speaking of wildlife, don't expect crop losses to be linear with crop
size. If these losses are spread over the yield from a large field,
rather than a small one, will make a drastic difference (i.e. expect
the animals to damage about the same amount of crop, regardless of
field size...)

Take your yield above and multiply by 0.75, and you can eat for about
that many days. The obvious advantage of low-balling your numbers is
that you should be able to produce a surplus, which is all the better.

Even then, you'll want extra room to grow "vitamins" (i.e. veggies, of
a wide variety), and will perhaps also want some room to grow meat
animals, and perhaps a milk cow or goat, or twelve...

Don't forget that it is recommended that your diet not be less than
something like 10-15% fats (though most people today, run over the 30%
recommended upper limit). That milk, butter and cheese can go a long
ways towards helping your balanced diet.

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

With hybrids, it's not uncommon to get 75-150 bushel/acre corn
(actually, I think I've seen 75 for Dent, a open pollinated).
Medieval style, expect more like 10...

Though perhaps we might do a bit better, if we use what we know about
modern agriculture (despite having primitive tools).

--
Charles Scripter * Use this address to reply: cescript at progworks dot net
When encryption is outlawed, bayl bhgynjf jvyy unir rapelcgvba.
Note: my responses may be slow due to ISP/newsgroup issues