How Much Land does it take To provide enough food
For one person to live…Part Two
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Recap
In Part One of this series it was established that on average a person requires about 2,000 calories a day if male, about 1800 for females. On average that would be four to five pounds of food....a day.
................ about 2000 lbs of food per year,
How much land does it take to grow that?
look at the middle of the chart above the 190 grams of meat per day and you’ll see that this converts to about 0.45 hectares, which is just a bit over one acre.
By using conventional agricultural methods it requires one acre of land, on average, to support one person for a year.
As an aside...the United States current population is about 330 million people. The amount of land under cultivation is about 915 million acres. The United States isn't likely to be short on food any time soon. As a matter of fact we EXPORT a bunchaton of food to the rest of the world.
BUT...just for giggles...is there a better way?
Glad you axed that question....consider this.
Aquaponics can produc 35,000 pounds of edible flesh per acre in one year.
That same acre can also produce 100,000 pounds of vegetables in that same year.
do the math...and that's 135,000 lbs of food from one acre in one year.
Each person requires a bit less than a ton a year so
One acre by conventional farming can support one person a year. That same acre using aquaponics can provide enough to eat for more than sixty.
One acre = 43,560 square feet.
divide by 67.5 = 645.33 square feet.
to put that in perspective...
25.4 x 25.25.4 = 645.16
so there you have it...
a small area, only twenty five foot on a side.
can provide you with enough food to live on
using aquaponics.
BUT WAIT!
think out of the box..
don't be square
get a CUBE
go three dimensional.
Quadrasect the Square and you have four squares 12.7 foot on a side.
Then stack em...
How bout this....
dig a hole in the ground...four foot deep...twelve foot on a side...
make it water proof, fill it with water.
and stock it with fish.
Then make three more levels of grow beds,
stacked on TOP of the pond..
separate them by...oh...say four feet.
Whatcha got?
Twelve feet high?
Is that right?
Is it possible to grow all the food you'd need in a cube twelve foot on a side?
(not counting the basement)
BUT WAIT!
There's more
maybe
Suppose you put solar panels on the tippy top
(over the top-crop)
then mounted LED growlights above each growbed
(and batteries and stuff as needed)
(fish don't need light so much so don't' light them up)
How much would the efficiency increase if the 'grow beds'
were working 24/7/365?
I suspect that the 'grow cube could be smaller'.
How small COULD it get?
WHAT COULD BE GROWN
Fish :
- did you notice the crawdad? why not other types of shell fish too?
Only see food?
I call
fowl:
quail..and other types of feathered critters.
Meat AND Eggs..
Guinea Pigs?
Be Creative. What type and how MUCH food could you raise in a very small space?
another opinion
how bout this?
according to the video one 'stacked' container is worth about bout 7% to 20% of a commercial outdoor farm's production.
a forty foot shipping container is about eight foot wide.
Put five of them side by side forming a square forty by forty feet.
that would mean five 'stacked' containers would be worth 35% to 100% of an out door acre.
Why not stack em
HIGHER?
five wide by 4 high = the out door production equivalent of 140% to 400%.
All in a cube 40 x 40x 40 foot.
on less than 1% of an acre.
Imagine what could be done if the containers were stacked rilly, RILLY HIGH
(don't try this at home...exterior steel reinforcing might be required)
Wait, you're saying there is no problem.
How will governments survive if there is no problem to offer a solution to?
BTW Is that why the government pays Mom not to farm some of her land?
https://www.fsa.usda.gov/programs-and-services/conservation-programs/conservation-reserve-program/index
Is that why the government pays Mom not to farm some of her land?
yup
yup, a solution to a problem that does not exist.
I also like the bug idea as well.
you left out how much fish food you would need to grow 35,000 pounds of fish. It will be more than 35,000 lbs of feed required.
Even with LED lights indoor farming is really only profitable if you grow cannabis or microgreens, assuming a large local demand for microgreens, so as long as that is trendy. Also assuming that your cannabis operation does not have to compete with giant corporate greenhouse operations and electricity is cheap.
You will never be able to adequately light a larger space than the amount of room the solar panels takes up because energy is always lost in the process.
Profitable?
How SWEET!
You thought it was to be done to make money!
How cute.
nope.
the whole idea is to be self sufficient...to be off the grid.
now tell me about your obscession with canabuss.
no, I am just a big fan of aquaponics. The people growing 35,000 lbs of fish were obviously doing it to make money.
1 oz cannabis wholesale, in the UK, was about - $190/220 (it was hypothetically very- top quality).
x 26 per plant x 10 plants....
All very hypothetically, of course..
I love math games/scenarios like this, especially when applied to real life situations...extra especially when applied to survival-like topics. Fascinating and clever, Everitt. Really enjoyed it.
The problem, of course, would be fertilizer...City people have no real idea about how to garden, especially if their lives were dependent on it (which one day they very well might) and even country boys like me HATE composting...lol...
The problem, of course, would be fertilizer
Shirely you got the part where this is a closed ecosystem?
The only outside inputs required is energy (from solar cells)
and topping off water lost to evaporation and consumption?
You mean to tell me that you don't know where the fertilizer comes from?
Are you SURE you're not a city boy?
nope, he does not understand, the problem is the fish food, that is where your fertilizer comes from, it's not a closed system at all..
except for energy the system COULD be closed...some of the plants that the fish poop feeds could feed the fish. The fish guts (when the fish are harvested, could feed black soldier grubs, which in turn could feed the fish)
yeah I know...It's a bit complex.
Now get off my lawn...I'm gonna let guinea pig tractors cut it... and fertilize it...and then harvest the guniea pigs (and the quail) and feed them to the black soldier ants and feed their grubs to the fish and feed their poop water to the plants, and......
endless circle..
NO WAIT...it's not a circle at all.
it's a moibus strip.
you should check out the numbers on rabbits if you haven't yet. one of the best doomsday preppers on the show doomsday preppers had a rabbit based lifestyle
start at 14:15 for the rabbit guy
soldier fly larvae would be an excellent food for the fish.
guinea pigs...make rabbits look like nuns..
I would probably need two or three for a good meal though, that's a lot of gutting and skinning. You would need an Incan woman to go with them. Did you see the part where he was making his own rabbit manure natural gas?
cavys (guinea pigs) weigh anywhere form a couple of pounds to about seven
Pretty much a meal.
fun fact..there are no wild ones....like horses they are all domesticated.
unlike horses none are feral.
methane is the product of biological decomposition...either in your gut (fart) or in a compost pile.
If you're pulling food out, you're gonna need to put nutrients in. Since there is nothing that is 100% efficient, you need to put in more nutrients than you pull out in food, and then deal with some waste too.
Nothing is perfect, but plenty is good enough.
Oh, I know where it comes from alright. I just don't enjoy handling it...lol...
We used to have to hand shovel tons of it every 8-weeks when our broilers went to market and the tractor couldn't maneuver in the corners of the barn where we needed to get at all the deepest piles of s**t...lol...
You could use the water from the pond as fertilizer? Aquaponics? Great source of nitrate
Next time someone queries me for eating meat I'll simply show em this article
good idea.
Great Article sir.
Even we can call this research..
this is out of range for normal peoples..
a simplified set up could be made with a container for holding fish and floating Styrofoam blocks on top that you plant greens in. all you really need is an air pump for the fish.
Right...
I wouldn't attempt aquaponics without a good understanding of the chemistry of plants and of aquariums.
A fun exercise in “what if” thinking as long as you toss out the Laws of Thermodynamics.
damn....all those people who are using aquaponics are breaking the law.
who knew.
No they’re not. Say you can grow one lettuce with one square foot of sunlight. Put solar cells in that one square foot, use the electricity to power LEDS, and you get less light energy due to inefficiencies (those pesky Laws). Your process will actually grow less lettuce not more.
Here’s another perspective... https://www.treehugger.com/green-food/vertical-farms-arent-going-to-solve-our-food-problems.html
actually it will grow more.
because the 'one square foot' is TALL...as tall as you want it to be.
the lettuce is stacked...one on top of the other.
The Solar cells are on the outside.
the LED are calibrated to provide the exact TYPE of light that best suits the vegatable in question.
PLUS
the growing season is 24/7/365.
it's happening.
you must have missed that part when you watched the video.
The energy to power the LEDS is generated from an area bigger than than the original one square foot of solar or is generated from fossil fuels or nuclear. The Laws are still in effect.
As Bucky Fuller suggested, the smallest perpetual motion machine is the Universe. Some of these food growing schemes are 21 Century versions of perpetual motion machines.
I’m all for feeding everyone. The inputs need to be sustainably sourced and the non-edible outputs need to be reused and not turned into pollution. Food should be produced locally and in a decentralize manner.
I just don’t see some of these vertical schemes as being much more than clever marketing to people who don’t understand basic physics.
I’ll continue to grow my food horizontally, using natural sunlight, harvested rain water, and compost. The only infrastructure I need is a bit of open land and a few hand tools.
Dependence on another energy intensive system to produce industrial food does not empower people to live free of the possibility of catastrophic failure of such a system.
The title of the post is
How Much Land does it take To provide enough food
For one person to live
The smaller the 'footprint' the higher the tech required.
Some people have more of a 'bit of land' than other do. For those who don't there are technical options.
How much land depends on what you are eating. Here’s an alternative... http://growbiointensive.org/grow_main.html
hypothetically speaking - if i was to have grown cannabis plants using 24hour light , hydroponic feeding systems...
...I would have got over 26 ounces of product per plant, instead of 5/6/, doing the same thing conventionally....
....Or so I've heard....
odd that you should mention weed , growlights, and enhanced plant production.
In my search for information I kept finding weed.
very annoying..
The whole industry was built on it! lol
Free market entrepreneurship...follow the money....
as may be.
but I've been trying to find out how much production increase would occur if I put LED lights above my growbeds....can't find any specific numbers.
Not that I think I'm gonna be into veggies much anyway.
Meat, fish and eggs probably.
I'm thinking fish, fowl and small mammal (rabbit perhaps?). Use the veggie beds for water purification and waste disposal .(veggies is what food eats)
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