Land required for vegan self sufficiency- some questions & food for thought...

[Guest guest]

How much land does a vegan require to be self sufficient in food?

 

An often quoted figure, attributed to the Vegan Society, is that one person on a

plant based diet could be self

sufficient on one fifth of an acre of land.

 

However I'm not so sure how helpful such a figure is- it's one of those 'how

long is a piece of string' type questions-

 

There are many variables to take into account, here's a few I can think of;

 

What is the land quality? What type of soil do you have? What condition is

it in?

What's it's aspect? Sun paths at different times of year?

Are you on a slope? How steep?

What are your first and last frost dates?

Do you have an independant water supply? What irrigation techniques do you

plan to use?

Is it 'virgin' land that requires clearing and initial cultivating?

Any pollutants or contamination that need to be dealt with?

What weather patterns do you encounter?

Prevailing winds? How exposed are you?

In what part of the country/world are you intending to grow?

Do you intend to add season extending structures such as polytunnels &

greenhouses?

What do you want to grow? Have you audited/analysed the nutritional (eg,

protien,

carbohydrate, fibre, mineral, vitamins (including vitamin B12))contents of your

chosen crops? Which are heavy feeders, which are light feeders?

Will you be planting annuals or perennials (including tree crops)?

What do you want to eat? What do you like?

Do you have a big appetite?

Are you a raw food vegan?

If not, have you factored in the land/energy required to produce the fuel to

cook

your food?

What's your lifestyle? How much time/energy do you have? Other commitments?

How fit are you?

Do you enjoy gardening?

How intensively do you intend to manage the land?

Are you using machinery/power tools?

If so have you factored in the land/energy required to fuel such equipment?

How experienced/knowledgable are you as regards food growing?

Are you using permaculture techniques and strategies such as increasing edge,

stacking, succession, using multifunctional plantings, using zonal planning,

etc,

etc?

Are you returning your own wastes (ie, humanure) to the soil?

Are you growing organically?

If so, are you growing vegan organically? Have you factored in space needed

for compost crops and green manures?

Are you growing 'conventional' organically? Have you factored in the land

required to graze cattle or grow fodder in order to obtain their manure

outputs? What about transporting it to your land (dung miles???)?

If neither, have you factored in the 'embodied energy' and land needed to

produce the various chemicals & pesticides you intend to add?

 

------------------------

One fifth of an acre of prime fertile rich agricultural soil in a sheltered

river valley with a long growing season, worked by a young, strong, fit,

experienced

person 7 days a week following a well integrated and thought out cropping

plan, is going to be a very different proposition to one fifth of an acre of

exposed, thin and acidic Welsh hillside being managed by say, a

single parent suffering from health problems and trying fit growing activities

in

with things like holding down

a job, commuting, raising a family, etc, etc!

Two people managing two fifths of an acre, or five people managing one acre are

completely different scenarios again, whatever the land's condition!

Then there are all those other human needs that need to be met- clothing,

shelter,

warmth, transport (not to mention emotional needs including the company of

others!!)

 

Sometimes perhaps we need to be a little careful about quoting figures without

placing them in any sort of context... Just some food for thought, I would

welcome

any responses or comments...

 

Graham Burnett

www.landandliberty.co.uk

 

PS. I've produced a small checklist of issues to think about when 'reading your

land' at http://pages.unisonfree.net/gburnett/SEEOG/page13.html

 

There's some other possibly useful checklists at

http://pages.unisonfree.net/gburnett/SEEOG/page4.html

[Guest guest]

I haven't come across a good permaculture answer to this question. I'd like to

see some for different questions, from garden of eden quality land and growing

conditions to near desert with depleted soil.

 

Biointensive gardeners have worked on the question some. Some of the results

are in the book One Circle: How to Grow a Complete Diet in Less Than 1000

Square Feet, by David Duhon. Their prototype diets are designed for the

Pacific Northwest of the US, so the growing conditions match fairly well

for much of the UK. The one place I have found that reliably has the book

is http://www.bountifulgardens.org . They also have the Mexican and

Kenyan diet plan pamphlets mentioned below.

 

The smallest diet they came up with was for a woman(125 pound) and used 550

square

feet in an 8 month growing season. All the nutritional requirements were

met with potatoes, sunflower seeds, onions, turnips(root and greens),

parsnips and garlic.

 

The smallest area for a man(150 pound) uses 855 square feet. The nutritional

requirements were met with filberts(hazelnuts), potatoes, collards,

parsnips, and garlic.

 

To get a more appealing diet for a couple using 2800 square feet together,

the crops they used were wheat, garlic, sunflower seeds, potatoes,

onions, parsley, turnips, collards, parsnips, and filberts.

 

They have also come up with some alternate designs, and some designs

which use warmer climate crops for Mexico and Kenya.

 

An advantage of several people working together is that you can get more

variety, especially if you would like to have some tree fruits.

 

In his work, as well as related work by John Jeavons, who wrote

How to Grow More Vegetables than you ever thought possible on

less land than you can imagine(6th ed should be out soon), they do give

information

about creating and maintaining soil fertility which requires some

additional land.

 

Improvement can be gained by using the season extension techniques of

Eliot Coleman. Although this requires extra infrastructure in terms of

green house and row cover, it spreads out

the labor of harvest time, much more evenly, and keeps food fresh since

it can be harvested daily. It also doesn't require any fuel to heat the

greenhouse.

 

Similarly to Graham, I'd like to see the self-sufficiency issues extended

to include

the items he listed plus more such as

 

Fuel for heat, transportation, soap making, clothes making,

dehydrating food if needed in climate, light etc

Wood for repair, share of new building, furniture, toys, tools

Medicinal, dye, culinary herbs

Additional planned food to share with guests, account for average wildlife

damage,

stockpile for bad years, and swap with people who grow other things

Consideration of extra calories that might be needed for an active gardening

lifestyle

Food or other items for income

Cloth for clothes replacement as well as other cloth needs

Paper, toilet paper

Fibers or other items for containers, house hold items, craft items for

family or sale

Oil crops for soap making

Flowers for beauty and honey and beeswax(I realize some vegans use honey

and beeswax

and others consider it nonvegan)

 

Beyond the basics, one might also include fuel for generating electricity or

items to generate income to buy items that help generate electricity.

 

Crops might vary widely depending on how one is solving an issue.

For instance if you are using boats for transportation, growing wood and

waterproofing materials could be different from growing bamboo for

a bicycle frame plus some cash crops to buy the rims and tires.

 

A lot of thought can be put into what you could grow to make the items

you use every day or what might be grown to get cash to get the

items that can't be grown in your area when there is not a good growable

alternative.

 

It's also interesting to approach the question from another angle. Say

I have 1/4 acre of land around my house. How much of my food, fuel,

and compost crops can I grow for my family? And I would focus on

these since they are daily needs. I can't find my notes, but I think

that the average person needs about 2 pounds of cotton per year

to replace their clothes, so growing this somewhere else, and

shipping it would have less of an effect than shipping the day's

food supply every day.

 

Another thing to look at is what positive side effects there might be

by growing most of one's own food. It could be that some of the

things needed now wouldn't be needed with a different lifestyle.

For instance a person planning might ask, " What kind of herbs

could I grow to substitute for migraine medication? " But what if

they looked at a broader picture and asked a different question?

" What if I gardened, ate healthy, exercised, worked for a health-

oriented non-abusive boss 2 days a week, and didn't have migraines...

what would I plant under those conditions? "

 

Alternative solutions could reduce fuel needs too. If a house was

designed to reduce heating and cooling needs, and if more efficient

stoves or solar ovens were used, less land would be need to grow

fuel. For efficient stoves from local and recycled materials see

the work of Aprovecho http://www.efn.org/~apro/ . For

solar ovens see http://solarcooking.org/ .

 

Or if I ate 60% of my food raw instead of 40%, how much less fuel

would I need to grow?

 

To me it's important to look at what you are trying to replace.

It can be important to choose the level of replacement. For instance

if a person is working to replace the unhealthy typical western diet with

an unhealthy similar vegan version, they are likely to be doing less

environmental and personal damage yet they could improve this greatly

and likely use a smaller amount of land. For example, deep fried tempeh

with a side order of french fries is a level of improvement over a

cheeseburger and fries. Vegetable bean soup could improve things

to another level. Most vegans are aware of the land saved by using

plants for food rather than animals. But the tempeh and fries meal would

take more resources than

carefully chosen ingredients for a vegetable bean soup. One reason for

this is that oil crops tend to take large amounts of land. Plus a person

who eats lots of deep fried tempeh with fries tends to need more

medical resources than a person who eats healthier meals.

 

Some people who are looking at more aspects of the amount of land it

takes to live a vegan lifestyle are Jim Merkel and Erica Sherwood.

At present they are growing some of their food, and trying to buy

most of it locally, transporting it by bicycle. Info on their

work is at http://www.globallivingproject.org/ .

 

The only person I know of who has tried to grow a complete vegan diet

for a person and collect data on it is Albie Miles. A summary of the

data from one season is shared at http://www.cityfarmer.org/albie.html .

He used biointensive gardening methods.

 

Sharon

gordonse