The harvest is in. It’s time to take stock with regards to our experiment in self-sufficiency.
The total harvest of any nutritional substance (in pounds) was the following:
- chestnut flour: 28
- beans: 10
- potatoes: 20
- paw paw: 25
- kiwi: 0.3
- persimmon: 20
- Total harvest: 103.3
This is a nice garden harvest. Some of the harvest material—such as beans, potatoes, and chestnut flour—can be stored. Kiwi and paw paw cannot. We’re experimenting with drying the persimmon and using it later.
For purposes of argument, we’re going to look at all of them as a whole.
The total calorie content of the above is about 76,000. For an adult using a 2000 calorie/day input, that’s thirty-eight days. We’ve worked hard to live a little over a month. The daily requirements for protein, carbohydrates, and fat is similarly dismal. A yearly calorie requirement of 2000 cal/day for a year is 730,000. We’ve missed our requirements by about a factor of ten.
This means that we would have to increase our storable output by a similar amount. Total beans, chestnuts, and potatoes was 58 pounds. We would have to increase our output to a combination of 580 pounds. We could probably double our chestnut harvest if we just worked harder to protect it from the squirrels. We have a single tree that supplies the majority of nuts with two other trees coming online. So, let’s say we add additional third to about 144 pounds.
Right now, we’re using three hundred inches of trellis space to grow our beans. Increasing that to 3000 inches is not reasonable. But increasing it to a thousand inches might be. So, let’s say we can increase that by a factor of three to get 30 pounds.
Beans grow vertically. Potatoes grow horizontally. An increase in potatoes means an increase in geographic commitment. The good news it increases to the square. This year we used about 40 square feet so we had a yield of about .5 pounds/square foot. Not great but we had some issues this year that were unusual. Let’s presume we can get 1 pound/square foot if we’re paying closer attention. That would give us 40 pounds as is—or 1 pound/square foot.
40 square feet is essentially a 10*4 area. A 10*8 area is 80 square feet. So that would give us 80 pounds. Our total is now 254 ponds and 308197 calories—we’re closing in on half of what we need.
The chestnuts are a constant. They take a long time to mature and we don’t have the space. That means we have to look at the beans, potatoes, and possibly corn.
Corn has 360 calories/100 grams versus potato’s 93 calories/100 grams. (Both are dwarfed by chestnuts.)
Adding a hundred pounds of corn and doubling again the amount of potatoes and beans now gets us to 518,000 calories or close to two thirds. It also makes our total yield 464 pounds of material.
At this point we have two problems:
- We’ve run out of available geography for the garden. To increase this to scale requires we dedicate much more of our property to produce. It’s doable but not without a change in approach.
- The labor is now significantly increased. Not only is the labor of tending the garden increased significantly, the cost of processing the harvest has increased.
To lean on this last point a bit, let’s talk about chestnuts. A chestnut comes in a burr that is very spikey. Different varieties have different approaches to the burrs. Some chestnuts open the burrs and drop the chestnuts when they are ripe. Others drop the burr when they are ripe. Some blend the two. The squirrels love the varieties that drop the chestnuts to the point we’ve never gotten a good harvest. Instead, we tend to rely on the hybrid chestnut that leaves the burrs closed for a bit. This gives us a chance against the squirrels.
To process the chestnuts, we have to remove the chestnuts from the burrs, peel the nuts, and dry them for storage. We have techniques for this but they don’t scale well.
Potatoes are a bit easier. They need to dry a bit—they need to be “cured.” Then, it’s a matter of finding the right storage area. There’s a reason the potato had such an impact on Europe.
Beans have to be pulled out of the pod and dried. Again, individual labor procedures don’t scale well.
My point in this analysis is not to say this is a fool’s errand. We’ll never get more than 10% covered by our efforts and therefore we shouldn’t try. There’s more to the process than calories. We know where we get at least 10% of our food and 10% ain’t nothing.
But I do want to demonstrate the level of effort between producing a food supply and getting food in a store. There is a lot of work in between and some of it is not compressible. The world was lucky in the green revolution back in the twentieth century. New varieties of wheat and other crops increased yield. New farming techniques were able to get more crop out of the same acre of land. However, that effort was fueled by fossil fuels and fertilizers.
On our little plot of land, we try not to use much of either and rely instead on hand techniques. As I said before, these don’t scale well. Without mechanization people were dependent on large families and village approaches. Without artificial fertilizer people were depending on whatever the river floods brought or using manure and compost from whatever sources they had—including humans. It is certainly possible to be self-sufficient on a given plot of land. Five Acres and Independence is about just that. But it’s a full-time job and represents a great deal of risk. FAAI was written in 1935 in the middle of the Depression and the Dust Bowl.
It also means those indigenous peoples had to work damned hard to keep their village in food.
In my workshop, we talk a lot about worldbuilding. One of the considerations I have is how food is produced and how it gets to market—often not terribly well thought out in many worlds. That market in Central Idon’tknowistan has a whole lot of people behind it.
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