permaculture

[Toby Hemenway <hemenway@jeffnet.org>]

> 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