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.