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permaculture - Re: [permaculture] New Simplicity Book and thoughts about Footprints and Local Food

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  • From: Toby Hemenway <hemenway@jeffnet.org>
  • To: permaculture <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [permaculture] New Simplicity Book and thoughts about Footprints and Local Food
  • Date: Fri, 29 Aug 2003 16:59:00 -0700


I think that working toward a goal of supplying your needs from actively
using 1 acre of land per person average is a very intriguing goal.

A couple of years ago a participant in one of my courses had a writeup from a guy who had attempted to grow all or most of his own food for somewhere around a year. Seems to me he was affiliated with Ecology Action but I may be misremembering. He kept track of his labor and inputs, and the amount of labor was truly staggering, somewhere around 140 hours per month (again, I'm doing this from memory, so it may be slightly more or less). That's 4-5 hours of work a day, seven days a week for the whole year, just to be self-reliant on food.

It was a very sobering reality check on the practicality of being individually self-reliant, since as much as I like gardening, I would like to spend some of my life energy doing something other than growing my food. Obviously, part of the answer is to do it with others rather than alone, but it's still going to be a lot of work. There does seem to be some kind of economics of scale working here. I think I'll continue to buy a lot of my food from farmers and other people who enjoy farm work more than I do, and do what I love to earn the money for it.

Toby





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