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Comment by owenversteeg | Hacker News Reader

As pointed out downthread, you can indeed feed a family on one acre of land, and many people do actually do this.

The problem with your math is that it assumes the 3k lb yield from gp comment is for potatoes. Your crop yield depends a lot on the crop. Aparently you can get between 10-30 tons of potatoes per acre (that range is from beginner yields to expert) which would be 7-21 million calories per year. Plenty of room, then, to grow a number of other crops to eat a balanced diet.

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Potatoes (if you eat the skin) and milk would theoretically be a balanced diet, supplemented with fish/occasional meat it was pretty much the Irish diet pre-potato famine.

Boring as hell after a while but it'd keep you alive.

You can also get pretty complete with potatoes and oatmeal.

During the famine, ireland produced way more for/potatoes then it required to feed it's people; they were just taxed to all hell.

Currently the US produces about twice the calories it requires. There are so many calories produced in forms of corn that the industry has made huge efforts to find new ways to use those calories (hfcs, ethanol, etc) in order to justify corn industry practices. The one liner is that we need to be able to feed the people, but obesity is at an all time high. People need more nutrition, not more calories.

Taxes were not the main contributory factor. "Ireland continued to export large quantities of food, primarily to Great Britain, during the blight. In cases such as livestock and butter, research suggests that exports may have actually increased during the Potato Famine. In 1847 alone, records indicate that commodities such as peas, beans, rabbits, fish and honey continued to be exported from Ireland, even as the Great Hunger ravaged the countryside." https://www.history.com/topics/immigration/irish-potato-fami...

Thanks for the clarification. I was actually meaning that they were being "taxed" in terms of food sent to the rest of the UK and not in terms of money. Even with the article you linked, it's not clear to me if "exports" means they were forced/taxed into sending food, or if they were willingly exporting food for money in lieu of eating... Or something else

> they were willingly exporting food for money in lieu of eating...

The "they" who decided to export were not the "they" who starved.

Most Irish didn’t own property and were tenants. They didn’t “export” in lieu of eating, the English landlord exported the fruits of their labor and left them to starve. The English were very concerned about the Irish and their moral fiber, so they allowed them to persevere rather than get hooked to charity.

Others couldn’t pay their rent and were evicted. Millions of Irish didn’t flee to the slums of NYC, etc for kicks.

For this reason the Great Famine is sometimes characterized as a genocide perpetrated by the British landlord class.

Ireland could not affordably import food, due to the Corn Laws.

You can maybe keep a small family alive on an acre, but not really feed long term. With such little space you need to dedicate nearly the entire plot to high caloric crops such as corn.

Each year, I grow an increasing amount of my food from less than an acre. Corn is not an efficient way to get calories in an organic system, it requires too much nitrogen. As others have mentioned, potatoes are much better. And beans/peas, which require achieve their nitrogen requirements via bacterial symbosis. If you really want to go efficient, grow Azolla. I once calculated that a person in a temperate climate could produce most of their nutritional requireents with a plot roughly 25 square meters. Azolla doubles in mass every 2-3 days in ideal conditions and draws everything but trace minerals from the atmosphere.

Wikipedia seems to think that Azolla might be neurotoxic.

Yes and no. When stressed, it produces a neurotoxin.

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