Book of the Week: The Mini Farming Bible
25 Jan 2016
This week I read The Mini Farming Bible: The Complete Guide to Self-Sufficiency on 1/4 Acre by Brett L. Markham. The book covers a lot in 500 page and provides a good place to start if you want to start growing things. The book begins with the basics of farming, including chickens for meat and eggs and then goes into detail on each type of vegetable. There are some sections on winemaking, vinegar and cheese that I skipped. In terms of calories per dollar, fruit and vegetables are expensive. Your best bet to maximize your calories per dollar is fast food and candy. If you can grow food cost effectively, you can live a healthier life. Also fresh food you grow yourself tends to taste better since you can harvest them when they are ripe, because you don’t need to transport them. Scale and Space For farming to be effective, it needs to be done at a certain scale. When things get bigger, the surface area to volume decreases. Your compost pile needs to be big enough, so it can heat up in the middle to kill pathogens. If it is too small, it’ll stay cold. A greenhouse also benefits from being bigger, providing more thermal inertia. Chicken coups need to stay warm. If you are going to keep 1 chicken warm, you might as well keep a dozen of them warm. To grow enough food for people, you need 1,400 square feet per person, or 4,200 square feet for a family of three. One acre is 43,560 square feet, so a of an quarter acre is 10,890 square feet. Most of the food will be grown in raised beds. About 700 square feet of raised beds per person. A raised bed is typically 4 feet by 8 feet, but it can be longer than 8 feet. That means a person needs 22 raised beds to grow enough food. That’s a lot of raised beds. Since you are trying to grow as much valuable food in a limited space, you should avoid grains, because you can buy them cheaply, they take up a lot of space and it is pain to process them. Yearly Food Requirements Crop | Per-Person Yearly Requirement
—|—
Vegetables | 456 lbs
Fruit | 365 lbs
Wheat, corn, oats and rice | 250 lbs
Total lean meats and eggs | 159 lbs
Average Crop Yields Planted Intensively Crop | Yield in Pounds per 100 Square Feet
—|—
Green beans (as a vegetable) | 100
Green beans (dried, as a protein) | 20
Beets (just the roots) | 200
Beets (just the greens) | 200
Broccoli | 75
Cabbage | 300
Cauliflower | 200
Carrots | 350
Chard | 550
Corn (on the cob) | 55
Corn (dried for corn meal) | 18
Cucumber | 360
Eggplant | 100
Kale | 120
Leeks | 500
Leaf Lettuce | 320
Head lettuce | 180
Muskmelons | 100
Onions | 300
Peppers | 120
Peas | 100
Parsnips | 290
Pumpkins | 120
Spinach | 130
Sunflower (shelled seeds) | 6
Summer squash | 250
Winter squash | 200
Tomatoes | 250
Watermelons | 180
Barley | 20
Oats | 10
Rye | 20
Wheat | 20
Self-Sufficiency Farming is really hard work. Just going around and water 22 raised beds is tedious. If it takes 3 minutes each, it’s already over an hour. Not to mention all the time planting and weeding. One of things that set my reading on this track of self-sufficiency was a Wired article about what to grow given different amounts of land ranging from a 3’ by 5’ balcony to a 40’ by 60’ exurban farm. There are things not covered in the book like growing mushrooms and keeping honey bees. Resources
Purchase The Mini Farming Bible on Amazon.com or check it out from your local library.