The video below discusses animals that can work with whatever type of land you have. We know the garden and orchard never stop.
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The reality is that this guy supplements his income with YouTube proceeds.
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He absolutely does. That is not to discount the validity to what he is saying about legitimate ways to be more self sufficient.
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We definitely maximize what our farm produces. Even in plant and animal waste.My only regret is I wish our hay was straw instead.
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@clarkinks
If he actually did what he claims, he would beat all acreage efficiencies attempted by Cornell University (the leading authority). My perception is that his video is nothing more than self-promotion and should be ignored.
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Much of the information i found useful. Self promotion is a motive i think many on YouTube and other social media websites have in common.
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I think Cornell/USDA has a big element of self promotion for their videos as well. My point is “experts” focus attention. They by definition will not observe everything.
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@dannytoro1
My opinion is that you are conflating the USDA, Master Gardener organizations, and the Cornell studies on crop efficiency.
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Just the thumbnail is enough to know it’s not a serious video. Just some, witting or not, cosplayer.
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There should be serious discussions about maximizing land use in urban and suburban areas.
Many do not realize old urban neighborhoods have very rich soil since the soil is likely not to have not been worked and depleted for 100 and some cases, 200 years. My house was built in 1900. The soil here is awesome. I’ve built many infill homes on old neighborhoods lots and the soil in these places are always better than the area farms.
Abandoned tracts covered that have been covered in Kudzu for 30 years are great as well.
Quality is more important than size. I could probably survive on .2 of an acre.
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No. I follow a few USDA channels. But I am saying they do not cover everything. They do not have the funds, staff or resources to. I am just willing to hear out other folks experiences. In truth though I tend to follow nursery grower content the most. As they are by default more generalist content.
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I find even when some localities are receptive; they usually have a lot of restrictions. You have to be mindful even if you do a public project; there are always killjoys that will get in the way. It is just human nature a few ruin good things for others ; sadly.
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ive seen real videos on youtube and elsewhere that have claimed to be self sufficient on less than a acre. the science is solid. if you do a mix of livestock and really put all your time into it, it absolutely can be done despite what the so called experts say. ive been trying to do it just part time and i know if my wife and i lives depended on it i could do it. as much as i have growing here i definitely can find room to grow more by micro managing it all. ive always said if folks in the cites just planted all the old abandoned lots and removing the ornamentals and planting crops instead, alot of food could be grown. if people need to eat, they will find a way. a vastly under utililized protein resource in cities is pigeons. they breed and grow quickly and are easy to keep in outdoor pens. traps for them are easily made. there are a few guys on you tube that catch wild ones and sell them mostly to bird hunters who use them for training their dogs. a coworker of mine was shooting them off his birdfeeder with a pellet gun and eating them. he said they were tasty..
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the way i amend my soil here is compost on top of my soil around my plants. our weathers too cold to get reliable amounts of compost so i mound chicken bedding in between my veggies in my garden and raised beds and around my fruit trees in the spring. it also help keep the weeds out. the rest, instead of piling it i spread it over a large sunny area no more than a ft. thick. it breaks down alot quicker that way than in a pile. i sometimes dump some urine on it to help it along. after a season, i then scoop it into a pile with my tractor now ready to be used.
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Those are also much more likely to have unsafe levels of heavy metals or other highly persistent forms of pollution.
There’s definitely a case to be made for better land use in the suburbs, and that better use including some forms of food production (to my mind: poultry, fruit and berries, herbs, limited vegetables), but I think once you cross over into true urban the land is better used as, well, urban land. Same going the other way, once you cross over into rural the land is best used as rural land.
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At the 1:36 mark, the true purpose of this video is revealed haha
But anyway, I would challenge the author of the video (not that he’d be willing to debate in good faith) to provide justification for why the capacity surviving on one acre is itself worth while. Why one acre? Why surviving without a grocery store? It’s so arbitrary.
If something bad enough to shut down the food supply, odds are you’re already dead. And if you’re not, you’d wish you were. And even then if not, enough other people would be dead the you’d have access to plenty more than a single acre.
Not like you’d have the tools and the power and the fuel to use such land if things were bad enough for the food supply to be gone, but I guess we’re ok with make believe for the thought experiment. And it’s not like you’d have the physical security to produce your own food in such this hypothetical situation either. Heck, I’d be willing to bet real money the the author of that video himself is probably on blood pressure medication or statins or whatnot. Surely he doesn’t imagine in the fantasy scenario where the food supply is destroyed without somehow affecting land availability, that the pharma industry would just be fine and dandy.
I realize I’m attacking the premise of the thread more than anything else, but I just don’t get it. In what world does the grocery store cease to exist but the pharmacy, the police station, the hospital, gas stations, tractor repair business, county deed office, power company, animal feed mills, salt mines, mason jar and pressure cooker manufacturers, etc all keep functioning just fine?
The idealized goal of “self sufficient” is extremely circumscribed to a single activity. Just seems extremely weird.
Why self sufficient in a single, very specific, step in the overall process? And why not more sufficiency, or just competence, in the steps closer to the actual finished product? I could spend hundreds of hours growing wheat and turning it into low quality flour that will spoil and is only available certain times of year, or I can put a few minutes into turning high quality flour into excellent bread. And then make some ham and bacon from affordable store bought large cuts. And make freshly pickled beets and sauerkraut every week, be it summer or winter, with store bought veggies instead of trying and mostly failing to grow those crops which are problematic at best in my climate. That’s something the actually makes people more sufficient and, more importantly, better off and healthier and happier. This is why I’m convinced a lot of the stuff sufficiency stuff is actually really toxic. It’s actively harmful in many cases, pushing poor people of sparse means into wasteful or pointless endeavors trying to live out a fantasy when they could be leveraging things in the real world to live better lives.
You don’t need an acre. You just need a kitchen, a fridge, a freezer, and a kitchen scale. Just that covers 99% of what you need to be able to make most of your own food. Food which is made using raw inputs from the store, because that’s what stores are for and what they do best. Better than you. So do what you can do better.
But hey, the guy needs to sell his book, so I guess whatever it takes to dupe people into buying into the toxic narrative.
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