How Many Acres Of Typical Land Would It Take To Grow Enough Vegetables And Fruit To Feed A Person For A Year?
Posted by admin on February 27, 2010
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this is a good question, but I can think of other questions that would need to be answered first:
how varied would you like your food to be? like just beans and rice, or would you want meat?
would you be trying to just get by with enough, or would you want to be able to eat whatever you wanted?
In England during the Middle Ages it took approximately 40 acres to feed a family adequately but the figure is dramatically lower today due to:
1. Mechanization, fertilizers, land management and new crop varieties producing higher yields.
2. Synthetic fibres, plastics and chemical dyes reducing the demand for non-food crops.
3. Automobiles and railways reducing the amount of food needed for draft animals.
The Irish could grow enough potatoes on 1/2 acre to feed 10-12 people a year, you just have to like potatoes. Thats why so many died in the famine. One acre will feed 4-8 people with a great variety of food for the whole year. The American Indian grew the same amount of calories per acre as we do now, without all the chemicals we use. The three sisters planting is a great thing. Corn, beans, squash all working together to make more than grown alone. The same with tomatoes and carrots, they work great together.
Well that would vary greatly depending on the type of vegetables and fruit you were growing.
Say strawberries…the plants kinda stretch out before growing the fruit. Not very efficient. Potatoes grow underground, allowing alot of spuds in a small amount of space.
Corn doesn’t take a lot of space, but one plant generally doesn’t produce much.
An apple tree will eventually grow high, allowing one tree to produce a lot of fruit. But if it’s younger, it won’t produce much.
Too many variables to give a straight answer I think.
I’m a small farmer, on a permaculture farm (that’s your source…me the farmer).
First, this question ENTIRELY depends on what plant zone you are in. I grew up in the Pacific Northwest, of Washington. It was plant zone 8. I could grow dang near anything. Even in the winter, I still had pasture for my livestock.
I now live in Idaho. I’m in plant zone 4B, borderline 3. There are bairly 90 days in which to plant, grow and harvest your crop, before a hard freeze, or snow will hit. Here the ground freezes several feet down to resemble concrete…nothing grows here at all in the winter, not even pasture.
You also cannot live off just fruit and vegtables alone. You need grains and legumes to provide complete protiens for your body.
An incomplete protien will feed your body. It takes a complete protien to allow your body to heal itself, and to allow children to grow. Example would be rice and beans. Eaten together, they are a complete protien. Individually, they are an incomplete protien. The other source of complete protiens of course are meat, dairy and eggs.
If the person has to grow their own grains, and legumes, along with their garden, and fruit orchard, they would be able to do so with an intensively farmed 5 acres (in the correct climate). Your grains of course are going to take up the lions share of your crop. You will need abut 3 acres of grains.
You need about 1/2 acre of fruit AND nut trees. Nuts are very important for adding viatimins and minerals to your diet
You will need about 1/2 an acre of “perminant garden.” Those are the food items you do not plant every year. Items like raspberries, ruhbarb, apsperagus, your herbs, strawberries, blueberries, mushrooms, ect.
You will need about one acre of actual garden. About 1/3 of that is going to be taken up with your corn patch. Another 1/3 will be your potatoes (grow several types). The final 1/3 of an acre will be your intensively managed garden. There will also be overlap, as you will have some of your squash and pumpkins growing in your corn patch.
Some people will think I’m in error, and going too large, however I’m not. If you are growing your own foods, and eating only fruits, grains, vegtables, and nuts, you need a LOT of food. The amount of energy you will expend to plant, grow, harvest and preserve all of your food will be staggering. One person doing it alone, even with meachnical help, like a tractor, is still going to be expending about 5000 callories themselves during planting, harvest, and preservation times.
I know, because that is what my husband and I do on our farm. We grow/harvest/preserve most of our foods ourself.
~Garnet
Homesteading/Farming over 20 years
We had 5 acres, and had apple trees, oranges, lemons, grapefruit, also grew mangoes, chillies, mandarines, loads of eggs, fresh from the chooks, pigs, dairy cattle, lambs, ducks etc., it depends on what you are looking for to complete your survey, you can do it in suburbia too, tomatoes, cucumbers, capsicums etc., I think it all depends on where you live, what soil type you have and how much you are time you are willing to spend in the garden, but its a very interesting question!
you couldnt just live on veg and fruit. it depends so much on what you grow and how. i think an acre is the size it is because thats the land you need to feed a family, but thats no help. i guess an allotment of 1/4 acre would be enough for one person if you used climbing beans as protein source.
It would take much more if the person ate a lot of meat. For example, cows eat enough to need their own field, pigs need their own vegetables. I’m not a vegetarian myself, before the tomatoes start flying at me, but I also don’t eat too much meat during the week.
1-2 for trees;with the lag time to mature. If you learn to can, ancre should do 4 1 person.
Ilived on a farm….with fruit & nut trees….you can barter for extras…also you can do free range chickens for eggs(potien) or meat.
The veggies dont take much room mate. but thats soil in usa.
I liked Bohemian’s reply so much that I copied it and am going to keep it for when I can afford to start my own homestead. Thanks.
These people are largely full of crap.
You can grow a vegetarian food selection on approx. 0.44 acres of good land, according to Cornell University, if you’re careful about it. There are such selections for equator to about middle-alaska in light band; it’ll take some research.
http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/oct07/diets.ag.footprint.sl.html
The current typical American’s food footprint load, including area left to meat, is approximately 2.1 acres. Traditional Victorian wisdom was that two acres would feed a person.
Accounts for the food production benefits of hydroponics and aeroponics vary, but commercial greenhouses in Israel are seeing an across the board growth change of 5-7x. In the cases of certain specific plants, that can be radically higher; tomatoes generally enjoy a 20:1 output boom, passionfruit a 25:1, strawberries 28:1, etc, if you’re growing trellised (which means they’re filling a 3d space instead of a 2d space, hence the huge numbers for those and other vine fruiting plants.)
LED five-band lighting seems to create generally a 15-20% growth win. In a few cases, such as kelps, algae and mosses, that can be much higher.
Growing indoors allows you to nearly eliminate disease and pestilence, which can have an enormous impact on productivity and cultivar availability, but this is intensely plant-specific. You’ll nearly double a perennial strawberry crop with this and bud clipping.
So, I mean, it depends on a lot of stuff. Are you an average person, or a commercial grower? Do you have big equipment? Indoor or outdoor? Climate controlled? Trellised? Water reformed? LED light supported? Carbon dioxide supported? Are you using fertilizers, and if so which kind? What’s your growing mechanism and grow strategy?
Et cetera.
If you’re just farming your back yard, and if you’re largely vegetarian, if you’re an amateur not doing anything fancy, and if you’re in one of the larger population centers in the United States, Mexico, Western Europe or a similar climate, a good rule of thumb is two acres, and don’t expect to produce meat.