Comment by raptorraver | Hacker News Reader

Comment by raptorraver | Hacker News Reader

I'm starting to sell my city apartment this week and we are going to move to the country side to start a small scale farm! I've worked in the farm all my youth and this summer we lived on the place and did some small scale gardening.

I don't have any (at least many) false thoughts about how cool and romantic it will be. It will be hard and frustrating at times but waay more fulfilling than the current tech job. We're planning to start scaling little by little, year by year, me working still remotely. The main reasons we're doing this are that I've dreamed about this past 15 years and to raise our kids in a healthier surrounding and teach them how to grow food and take care of animals.

For anyone having similar dreams checkout Richard Perkins' educational job in the regenerative agriculture space. He has written excellent book Making Small Farms Work[1] and he has active Youtube channel[1] as well as internet courses.

[1]: http://www.ridgedalepermaculture.com/blog/new-book-making-sm... [2]: https://www.youtube.com/user/mrintegralpermanence

I work full time (now remotely) and live on 32 acres of woods and fields. It used to be farmed but hadn't been for a while when I bought it 12 years ago. My initial idea was to grow produce to sell but it didn't work out.

Here are some of the problems I encountered: 1.) Deer - we are overrun with white tail deer. If I don't surround anything I grow with 6ft welded wire fence, it doesn't last a week. I have set up electric fence wired in many different configurations, but the deer seem to figure it out. Usually just as I think I found something that works. 2.) soil - we don't have quality top soil and amending the soil take time and money 3.) rodents - initially we had great success with raised beds (4ft x 8ft) but after several years they eat the roots (really bad in terms of carrots and potatoes) and pretty bad for aquash and beans. We have cats, but they can't kill the rodents fast enough. 4.) time - working full time and trying to pull everything together is really hard. When a crop is ready it needs picked and doesn't care that you are trying to meet a deadline at work. Especially for crops like peas where it seems you have a three day window to pick them at their peak. 5.) time2 - I have equipment so that I can use diesel fuel instead of muscle power. This allows me to get a lot more done, but there are two type of equipment, broken and about to break. I find it impossible to have the time to fix everthing. My back hoe has a broken hydraulic line for over a year now. 6.) selling produce - nothing in more annoying than the customer at the farmers market that comes at the end of the day and tried to buy whatever you have left at a huge discount. Also, there is a fine line between collusion and competitiveness when it comes to pricing at a farmers market. There seems to always be a guy that buys a stall once because he has too many tomatoes and sells them at a price I would lose money at if I had to match it. 7.) seasonal animals are easier than crops because you have more control. We lost all of the produce this year because of drought, but did well on eggs and free range chicken. I'm thinking about a small number of pigs or lamb next year. We don't keep anything but egg layers over winter.

One thing to mind is that I work damn hard at physical labor. My parents are in good health in their eighties, but I don't see me getting there. The toll on my body is very evident to me. I really hope I don't live that long as it won't be pleasant.

I do love growing things though. we have a beautiful orchard of pears, apples, plums, and cherries. Rasberries and blueberries that I can pick at any time. Probably the highest quality chicken and eggs you can find. Great parties when the sweet corn comes in.

Thanks for the breakdown on this. Very interesting infor.

I realized the equipment issues with my lawnmower recently. I had to maintain the lawnmower in order to maintain my house. Then you have to maintain the tools that maintain the lawn mower that maintains your house.

It's a spiral of complexity.

Couple of questions on behalf of some friends who are dabbling with produce on their property:

1) I have heard about how tremendously troublesome deer are, but have also heard good things about the "impossible to purchase in quantities less than a ton" Dippel's Oil ... has that worked at all for you?

2) So the rodents are burrowing under the raised beds and up to get to the roots? I didn't realize they would go that far down. How far down are the "walls" of the raised beds?

I will look into that, I have not heard of it. The problem with a lot of sprays is that they need applied on a regular basis.

Our raised beds contain about 15 inches of soil. The rodents burrow up from the bottom. You can't see them, but there are tunnels all through there. I've thought about putting hardware cloth on the bottom, but again I'm back to how much do I want to spent in order to make growing produce even more expensive.

One other thing I forgot to mention is that you need to be proficient with a gun. A .17 or .410 is adequate. Racoons, are my nemesis. If they get in a coop, they will kill a crap top of chickens and only eat the heads off of them. We free range our chickens and have several small coops they go into at night which we close up. I'm a light sleeper and can hear the racoons drop down on the roofs from the trees. We need the trees and bushes to protect the chickens from the hawks and eagles. Owls are another more minor problem as are the coyotes. Foxes as well. Having good dogs helps a lot.

Also, for the love of god avoid Guinea fowl. They have the survival instincts of a brick. They are also very loud. We bought 30 as an experiment and sold them off to a chef as soon as we could. There were only 12 left at that point.

We have 10-acres and have similar problems.

The amount of time and physical labor to get anything done is crazy. We have rodent problems, too, and our collection of six-towed barn cats do the best they can. Chickens do an amazing job on rodents, BTW. Chicken and duck eggs fresh from the farm are amazing.

We had an opossum get into the barn last night and killed some of our ducks. Normally these aren't hard to get rid of but this one was very aggressive and I had to shoot it. Earlier in the year it was raccoons and they were able to break into a cage and do an amazing amount of carnage.

Bugs got to our pear and apple trees this year before we did so that was a bust.

I've been trying to get bees going but mites are killing everything.

Oh, back-hoes. Mine is new but even new farm equipment has problems. I cut the end off one of my fingers working on our tractor/back-hoe earlier in the year. Which is fun since my day job is software.

So, yeah, farming isn't for the faint of heart.

Can you get (or make) raised beds with a floor under them? That should keep the rodents from being able to tunnel. (Unless they can chew through the floor...)

I've thought about raised beds on stilts like houses at the beach. I hasn't made it past the thought process though.

Do you think a small robot that is like an extension of yourself help you in a small farm?

I am working on a small acreage/homesteader farm robot. It is not sensors or measuring nitrogen in soil etc. but it’s suitable for replacing 10-15 man hours/week (a seasonal part timer I usually have to employ) for a 1-5 acres farm. Small acreage = sub 100 acres in California. But the first package deal will be for homesteaders and also starting with medicinal herb co-op.

Yes, Richard Perkins knows and has done a lot of good stuff over years in this space, at his permaculture mixed farm in Sweden. I mentioned him and a few other successful people in the regen ag space, like Gabe Brown and Geoff Lawton, with brief descriptions, in the recent thread about a long-running no-till no-herbicide farm here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24827234

Edit: Also, Aanandaa Farms, started and run by a couple of ex-city-job professionals, the Guptas, in the Morni hills near Chandigarh, Punjab, is another good example of success, this one in India, although there are many others in India as well. They too have good instructive videos about starting and runnning a small-scale permaculture farm on YouTube. I believe they are starting a PDC (Permaculture Design Certificate) course in the near future too, which may be a combination of online, and learning time on their farm.

Another well-known long-running (20+ years) successful permaculture / regen ag farm in India is Krishna McKenzie's Solitude Farm, Auroville, Tamil Nadu. Again, mixed crops, herbs, fruit and other trees, multi-layer. On-site farm cafe with raw / local / vegan food. They also know well about and use local edible weeds as food, further reducing work and increasing efficiency - no need to even plant them, let alone cultivate! He has a video or two about that too, along with Nina Sengupta, who wrote the book Edible Weeds of the Auroville Region. He also does talks, local outreach and education, and has a good video channel on YouTube about it all.

Mentioned it before too, in that same recent thread:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24876047

For anyone interested, Richard Perkins has an annual Regenerative Agriculture Masterclass, which is coming up in the near future. Sign up here to be notified of details:

https://regenerativeagricultureonlinecourse.com/

Just got that link from his email newsletter, which I subscribe to.

How much land does one need to become self sufficient? Let's assume that means producing enough biomass to generate the resources necessary to have a surplus of food or money.

It depends on your growing zone but 10 acres is typically suggested.

(There are many opinions so I don’t put one particular source here.)

It depends on how you use it, but at least a couple of acres. Potatoes are quite efficient, and rabbits and chickens can pretty much live off left-overs and patches of land that are otherwise unused. That would be a rather boring existence, though.

3-4 acres should be more than enough for the basics for a _small_ family, if you accept to buy the more exotic items from a store, and that you will probably never grow fat.

It's kind of a 'how long is a piece of string' question. You could probably do it on 2-3 acres but you're going to be making sacrifices that you wouldn't need to if you had 10-20.

The typical term is 'homesteading' and there are tons of resources for it. My aunt does it and is part of a collective and it's nearly a full time job.

Thanks to the collapse of the USSR and with help of our inept corrupt leaders (Gorbachev and Yeltsin and their US "friends") destroying all the industry and economy, millions of ex-soviet citizens know exactly how hard it is to become self sufficient.

I worked really hard on our family "farm" all my childhood and that's maybe the only thing that helped us survive. Although we did experience hunger from time to time.

It's not even a question of land, it's a question of how much work you can put into that land. It's a backbreaking work every day.

It's a good option if society collapses and there's no other option to survive. Otherwise, it's just not worth it. Millions of current Russia population hate working on the land because they already have that inoculation from 90s.

I think most are targeting the supermarket supported form, where you grow some vegetables and spices on your own. Russia is probably hard land, because most regions have long winters.

Our agriculture (Ger) is completely dependent on workers from abroad. If you send the average office worker on a field, he will probably collapse after a day or two.

Friends of mine have some chickens and that alone causes so much work everyday... They give away the eggs which is nice for us. Selling them wouldn't even pay for the fuel to transport them anywhere. Same with most other kinds of produce.

> supermarket supported form

"Self sufficient" where you buy things from the supermarket is just greenwashing cosplay. Just like a "self driving" car where you can't take your hands off the steering wheel.

It is, but self sufficiency is nearly impossible. To pay for tools and machines, electricity and water you would need to sell parts of your produce. That is hard if you do not scale up to a level to compete with highly advanced industrial agriculture.

Of course you could scrap the electricity and get your water from the nearest river, but I doubt many people would want to put up with that.

Self sufficiency is possible if you are given 5-10 acres with no taxes. Even then eventually you will need to trade your animals with someone else just so your breeding stock doesn't get inbred too much.

Most people wouldn't want true self sufficiency if they could have it. I admire people who "go into the woods" for years (they are generally more hunter/gathers than farmers); but even as introverted as I am, I still like to have a larger group of people around me.

> Self sufficiency is possible if you are given 5-10 acres with no taxes.

Where do you get the iron for your implements? Or are you going to use wooden hoes?

Where do you get medicine, when you need it?

Where do you get clothes?

Et cetera.

Wooden hoes. No modern medicine either. You have to make sacrifices for true self sufficiency.

For clothing, you grow it. Between Flax, wool, furs, and cotton you can grow something anywhere (except near the poles). Having to grow clothing and shelter more than doubles your needed land area in some places.

OK, but then, how do you make your wooden hoes? With wooden tools? Wooden knives and saws? How do you sew your clothes? With wooden needles? Sooner or later, don't you need some metal somewhere? If you don't have it, aren't you essentially living a Stone Age existence?

pretty much stone age. Anything more than that depends on civilization. Even stone age depended on civilization for the most part.

Well also Russia is not such a nice environment to grow land... cold winters and hot summers - it must be hard be a peasant there!

Russia is huge and USSR was even bigger. I didn't specify where I was born (on a southern border). The climate is very good for agriculture.

Sill it requires a lot of work. And I doubt that it is possible to be 100% self-sufficient.

There're many things farmer needs that are produced by other people. From tools like shovels to water pumps to animal fodder (which is also very expensive).

It's a nice thing to try though, to prepare oneself for some nasty events. When COVID-19 started I was thinking that if the world comes to an end, at least I'll be able to survive somewhat longer than others with my skills. I know how to grow my food. Didn't do it for a long time, but it's hard to forget the basics.

Indoor hydroponics. No question at all. It’s the only way to be self sufficient in a harsh climate.

I prefer to aim for community sufficient, rather than self sufficient. You probably won't do a good job of being entirely self sufficient. A small healthy community could be, or almost.

Historical evidence shows this to be factual.

Although not at present-day population levels.

My relatives who run a farm (some tens of cows, pigs, chickens, various crops for sale and food) do it on I believe around 25 acres of farmland plus a few acres of forest (for firewood). They are able to sustain a family of 5 people (3 grown ups, 2 school age kids) this way, plus hire a few seasonal/part time workers.

It does require quite a bit of machinery though- several tractors plus all the attachments (plowing, harvesting, cutting etc).

A quarter of an acre will give you plenty of food to fill multiple freezers for the year. Some vegetables have a very high yield (potato, tomato, carots). Hens/eggs also have a very good yield, most farms used to have hens.

It's nowhere near self sufficiency though. The amount and the variety of things you eat today is tremendous and coming from many places, you're not going to cultivate a fraction of that at home.

If you're talking bare subsistence, 1-2 acres of wheat should be enough to feed a family in grain/bread.

How much land does one need? Tolstoï wrote a short story with this title on this topic: https://www.online-literature.com/tolstoy/2738/

You're asking the wrong crowd. Go talk to an Amish about this, you'll get a lot better answers.

You might get better answers but probably not optimal ones? I imagine the avoidance of technology leads to inefficiencies that most people would want to avoid.

Maybe the permaculture people, or intentional communities that seek to be self-sufficient (as a community); perhaps kibbutzim hold useful knowledge here?

Depends on which inefficiency you want to avoid. Do you want to not use modern machinery, or do you want to pay for modern machinery? Each approach has a cost, in different ways.

Amish do not avoid tech, they test it and see pro/cons and then they take a decision if it will get adopted or not. They have a lot of tech enthusiast that will try new tech and then the elders will decide to keep it or not. And they strive for self-sufficiency 100%.

This question was addressed on HN recently with much talk of potatoes and how much yield one needs to survive. Might be worth searching.

1 acre per person not including oil and grain and fiber.

Also his latest book Regenerative Agriculture. Mostly composed of varied farm enterprises with financial details amd so on. Pick and choose the enterprises that appeal to you and work with your land... e.g. market garden, tree nursery, pastured eggs and mushroom cultivation.

https://www.regenerativeagriculturebook.com/

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