Today is Thursday the first day of June 2006.
Amazing.
Wasn’t it just 1976, or 1986 or certainly 1996 only a couple of days ago?
Lots of light these days, about 17 hours - dawn to dusk runs from about 4:30 am to 9:30 pm.
It’s great growing weather over here in the Pacific Northwest. Warm moist days and not too cold nights add up to a lot of grass. I was wondering the other day how much food you could grow on 2500 square feet (assuming that would be a fairly typical lawn size for a city home). Using a 45 bushel per acre yield - you could grow about 2.5 bushels, or 375 cups of soybeans, instead of a lawn. So you could eat a cup of soybeans a day, with an extra few on holidays to whip up a small tofu turkey or some other special treat,…hmmm.
45 bushels per acre might be conservative, if you are a good farmer like these Ohio soybean farmers, you might be able 70 bushels per acre, which gets you about a cup and a half of soybeans from your lawn-turned-into-a-farm, still doesn’t sound very appealing considering a cup of green soybeans has about 60 calories.
I’d be curious to read about people’s experiences in growing their own food – how much land would be needed per person, possibly using greenhouses, hydroponics or other methods to increase yield. It’s interesting to think about how much (or how little) a person would need to live comfortably. I suppose comfortably is a relative term.
Food is so cheap and plentiful in the U.S. growing your own is probably not going to catch on soon. It’s fairly easy to see how we came to a trading system and mechanized farming when you start to think about how much work it would take to grow your own food.
I’m just guessing, but it seems conceivable that an acre per person would be a realistic amount of land to grow your own food. An acre is 43,560 square feet or about 17 times as large as the hypothetical 2500 square foot lawn. So…..if you think about how much time a small lawn takes to maintain and multiply that by 17 – that’s a lot of work. An interesting factoid is that the acre is derived from the amount of land one man could till in a day using an ox. So you better get yourself an ox too…then you gotta feed him.
A good way to envision an acre is to think of it as a football field. It’s not quite that big but close enough for thinking purposes. A football field is 300 feet from goal line to goal line and 160 feet wide. So a football field is 48,000 square feet vs. the 43,560 square feet in an acre. Take away ten yards in the length of your football field and you end up with 43,200 square feet…that’s pretty close to an acre. Now think about going out their with a shovel and a hoe.
I think I’ll be going to Safeway now.
