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

15-12-2003, 02:29 PM

(Tallgrass) wrote:

It's not that hard to burn that many calories when using hand tools,
bucking bales, turning soil by hand, and especially if cutting lumber.

It was once a common topic on the misc.survivalism group....how many
acres would it take to grow a year's food and all that. The bottom
line was that if you plan *nothing but a veggan diet*, you pretty much
have resigned yourself to a slow death.

Most of our folks had heard or believed that it was possible to grow
enough food on an acre, but it never stood up to scrutiny.

I have a feeling I just started the argument again on these
cross-posted groups as well. You gardening folks have fun

We on ms had gone so far as to plan out and critique pretty much every
possible diet and analized the requirements vs the benefits etc and we
came out with, at most, two possible ones (nothing but grains and
beans etc) and dozens of proven impossible ones.

One person, using a minimum 3,000 cal a day diet (necessary to produce
those taters after all....gasoline engines don't last long in a
survival situation) would have to eat between 12-15 pounds of taters
per day depending on the type to get the necessary cals.

Of course, as that one fellow pointed out above, you won't be trying
to live on potatoes alone. We added spinach, onions, apples, corn,
beans, cabbage, lettuce, carrots, peas, squash etc etc etc in equal
amounts and in pretty much every case, the required poundage simply
went up. (We tried that menu above and it came out to approx
seventeen pounds a day if I recall correctly.)

""If you add corn to that diet of taters in equal proportions, you
come
out with a diet that consists of 17 large ears of corn and 13 potatoes
to make 3000 calories a day. Want to know how much that weighs?""

It's thus not a question of how much food you have to grow, it's a
question of how much food you have to eat and *NOBODY* can live by
eating fifteen pounds of veggies a day.

Right about now, someone on the gardening groups will be typing out an
irate "but my family did it during the Depression and I grew up just
fine". Problem is that their families, just like the Irish, the
Europeans, and the Russians (all limited diets) all survived by eating
massive amounts of fat. Why do you reckon fried foods were and are so
popular in the US? Why do you think the Russian moms will stand in
line for four hours to buy a pound of lard sold as "sausage"? Linda
H. hit that nail on the head.

ral

Most people will not eat all of that in carbohydrates, tho, but make
up a fair amount of those calories in animal fat. Bacon, butter,
gravy, lard used in cooking.

One can find caloric requirements of particular job types. It is very
interesting to read.

Linda H., M.D.