GardenBanter.co.uk - View Single Post - Self-Sufficiency Acreage Requirement?

12-12-2003, 09:32 PM

In article ,
says...
Did you take a look at how much time was spent on this project? I
don't doubt it took every minute he admitted to. If you think self
suffiency is for you think about the amount of effort just to grow
enough food to starve.

If you translate this to a real life situation where you have 10 hours
a day worth of other work to do just to survive, its clear that this
type of arrangement is only for desperation mode, and even then you
probably cannot do it alone.

I think this is a very good summing up. I took part for nearly three
years in a project that was 4 people on some 200+ acres trying to live
self sufficiently.
You work work work work work, and you get absolutely nowhere, fast.
You just can't grow your own grains - unless you have a bunch of people
and suitable land, make cheese, sugar, beer

, have a sufficiency of
fruit and veg all year round (even in Northern New Zealand) and even
growing your own potatoes for all year round is a pretty hard slog
without help.

Not to mention the fact that you just do NOT generate a cashflow that
way.

"No problem, I don't need money", you think. So how are you going to buy
petrol, how are you going to pay if that expensive solar water heater
gets a leak, or your power plant batteries suck the kumara (NZ
expression for die) or if your car has an incident?
How are you going to cope if you get sick at a critical time?

People who genuinely live in a self-sufficiency-farming situation out of
necessity, not by choice, have a very low life expectancy, take that
into consideration.

If you really try to grow and make all your own food, you won't have
time to think about outside work, so you won't be generating an income.

I bowed out of that project I was in after 3 years, and bought a cattle
ranch 1 mile down the road. The two who stayed are still scrabbling
(courtesy of social welfare payments) and barely eeking out a life,
nearly 20 years later. Desperately poor ...

Sorry, but I define quality of life differently. "Back to nature, by
living in a subsistance environment, gaining wisdom, health and
happyness" is an idea that has been shown to be romantic nonsense in my
not so humble experience. Nearly everybody I know (and there were quite
a lot of old hippies in the valleys around here who tried) has dropped
out of that particular lifestyle.

Not that these observations are going to be of any help to a person
committed to the experiment: I am sure I won't change their outlook :-)

All the same, and all the best, -Peter