Quote:
Originally Posted by Carmen
A really important thread Baggywrinkle and a timely reminder. Another excellent method of gardening and farming is the permaculture system. Introduction to Permaculture by Bill Mollison is inspirational reading.
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It's his 500 gallon farm tank filled with stabilized diesel that catches my eye {sigh}
With gasoline down around two dollars a gallon stateside
I've been researching keeping a store here on the property. You don't really expect it will stay that low for
any length of time, do you? Gerald Celente is calling for
200 dollar a barrel oil again sometime down the road
We live on forest land which is unsuitable for tilling. About all it can be used for is pasture. That didn't stop me from trying. I figured that a 100x100 foot wheat patch had a theoretical yield of 900 pounds of wheat.
The two of us consume 150 pounds per year in bread.
That same patch sown into a three sisters garden (corn beans squash) had a theoretical yield of 1000 ears of bloody butcher corn and squash coming out your ears.
Another use for that 100x100 foot patch is meat chickens. Raising just over 100 chickens for the pot
takes about six weeks plus the time needed to slaughter
and can them. The yield is two chickens per week for a
year. This does not account for raising their feed. Our
thirty chickens eat about 150 pounds of feed per month
at a cost of about forty dollars. The cost to feed 100 chickens to slaughter age would run about 250 bucks plus the cost of the chickens themselves at about 1.41 per chick. Total cost is around four dollars for a chicken dinner not counting their shelter costs.
This is not even close to being food independent. These
are only supplements. The cost at the grocery for a
chicken can equal or even surpass what you can do it for
on your own. The advantage to doing it on your own is having 100 birds canned in your larder (would you REALLY want to trust all that meat to a freezer?) or a several year supply of wheat berries for your bread. Then foraging at the market for what you cannot grow
yourselves (salt).
Notice that this fellow is raising cattle. Goats can substitute nicely on much less land. Button quail take up
next to no room at all, and one 5000 gallon swimming pool can raise hundreds of pounds of fish.