How much food can an amateur, off the grid subsistence farmer grow

Factual Questions
1

There are concerns among some on the ends of both sides of the political spectrum that in the near future infrastructure will break down and it is best to be able to grow your own food.

This is based on the belief that the transportation lines that transport food from farms to a nearby store will break down.

So if that is the scenario, what kind of yields would an amateur subsistence farmer who has no access to gasoline or fertilizer yield?

I assume if they have no access to semis and trains transporting food, they don’t have access to gasoline or fertilizer, unless they make the fertilizer themselves.

What kind of bushel/acre yield can be grown and harvested w/o heavy machinery or w/o chemicals that cannot be made in a persons backyard?

Also, if food can’t be grown on a professional (as opposed to amateur backyard) farm and transported to a store due to things like bandits and lack of infrastructure, why would a farm in your backyard be safe? Wouldn’t that just be razed during harvesting season? If society ever became so mad max-ian that we couldn’t even grow crops and transport them to stores (which would require pretty heavy levels of war, even Iraq is able to distribute food) why would a farm in someones backyard be left unmolested?

It seems the yields would be so low in both quality and quantity compared to what is made on a larger farm with heavy machinery and professional farmers that the subsistence farmers would just give up.

2

The problem with your first and second sentences is that humanity managed very well well into the 1900s without petrol. Horses and steam engines worked rather well. And grain is easy to transport and stores long term.

According to Wiki, in 1900 wheat production in America was 2.5 tons per acre, and modern varieties have improved that to 9.4. Even if you go with the lower figure, that’s a decent amount.

Since the alternative would be death through starvation, I rather think not. Farmers would defend themselves and their crops. Or hire people to do it (think Magnificent Seven). Law and order would quickly re-establish itself, if not in the same form as before.

In short, if you survive the period of disorder and have suitable land, growing food isn’t going to be a problem.

3

There are also concerns that Jesus Christ will return, take all the faithful to heaven and leave the rest of us here s food for the demons. Any of these doomsday scenarios is about as likel as the others.

A belief that is ridiculous, at best.

There is no possible way to answer that question as asked. Where is your farmer living? How much land does she have? What organisms and what varieties of those organisms does she have access to? What other infrastructure and technology is available? Does she still have use of electric pumps and synthetic pesticides, or have those magically vanished as well? What sort of social support is available during all of this turmoil? Is the economy still functional? How much time is available for the farmer to adapt the technology?

And those are only some of the more basic points that need to be clarified before we can start answering the question.

An amateur farmer living by herself in Northern Manitoba on 1 hecatare who only has access to maize seed, has no electricity or pesticides, no labour, no time to adjust and with no social support is going to produce approximately no food at all.

An amateur farmer living in Texas, with access to all the cattle breeds in the world, with access to unlimited labour, given 10 years to adapt and with full acess to electrical devices and pesticides and full social support will actually produce more food than a professional farmer of today.

And that’s the range of answers available to the question as you have asked: anything from “none at all” to “significantly more than under current practice”.

Well it’s a fantasy scenario with no basis in reality, so you can make any assumptions that you like.

Depends on too many factors to possibly answer.

Modern rice production techniques using no pesticides or petroleum can yield about 4 t/ha.

Well it’s your fantasy scenario, so you get t define all that. The scenario itself makes no sense. so it’s impossible to give even an educated opinion about what effects it might have.

Exactly. But how does it ever get to that point? What are all these bandits eating? They can’t just be stealing other people’s food, that just can;t work in the real world.

Why? The vast majority of humanity survived by subsistence farming for over 6, 00 years. Doesn’t that kinda prove that it’s a viable lifestyle?

4

I’m currently reading an interesting book title The Pursuit of Glory: The Five Revolutions That Made Modern Europe 1648-1815, the author actually talks quite a bit about agriculture and its evolution between 1648-1815.

What I found extremely important is the author does a good job of shattering any illusions we had about trade and commerce in say, 1648 Europe. The overwhelming majority of Europeans did not live in cities, and had to rely on what they could produce themselves or on what they or their neighbors could trade for within rough 3-4 days walking distance.

The idea that horse travel and wagons interconnected vast countries like France is a bit disingenuous, by and large the roads that weren’t “Royal Roads” were deep, mudded, dangerous and terrible roads that could actually reduce travel speeds down to a crawl if you were using a wagon. Rivers were a boon to anyone who lived near them, but only if the river was navigable and many rivers in Europe that are easily navigable today were useless in 1648.

There was certainly trade and travel in 1648 France, or 1648 Germany (or rather the states that made up the HRE), but for a huge proportion of the European population life went on essentially in isolated communities. The local nobility might get some small amount of products brought in, but usually these would only be things that had a high, high market value relative to their weight. It was virtually unheard of to ship food vast distances from one small village to another, simply because travel costs were so prohibitively high (France also had a system in which you would pay so many tolls that some products would see a 100% increase in price from start to finish just to cover the taxes the merchant had to pay along the way) that you couldn’t make a profit moving food.

Everything I’m saying has exceptions, and individual nobles and some of the monarchs understood instinctively that it was important to avoid widespread starvation. Usually they tried their best to make sure that didn’t happen, many times their best still meant doing essentially nothing because they couldn’t do much about it and thus thousands starved to death. For every noble or monarch who was enlightened enough to understand that their self interest demanded a stable, growing population of peasants, there were probably many more nobles who didn’t understand this and didn’t care much about the peasant’s lot.

To finally get back to the point though, assuming there wasn’t a crop failure, most of the time peasants 300+ years ago could produce a surplus and then some. However it was very often the case that they produced less than what they were capable of, mainly because most peasants were so isolated in their local communities that they could not trade or get rid of a large surplus of food. If you read the book I mentioned you’ll hear about how it was extremely common for farmers in some local communities to have surplus rotting in the fields while only a few hundred miles away people were starving to death. The overall food production of Europe, or its potential food production, was rarely a problem. However localized failures in production lead to famine because of the fact that travel and commerce were so primitive that you couldn’t use the bounty of one part of Europe to feed the other part.

In a post-apocalyptic situation I think you could survive on subsistence farming but you would need to understand some of the basic concepts of agriculture. You would want to maximize the utility of the land you had, which meant proper crop rotations to avoid letting the land lay fallow (prior to the agricultural revolution, farmers would leave large portions of their arable land unused for some growing seasons so the soil had a chance to replenish its nitrogen levels, using proper crop rotation you can actually use all of the land.)

5

I would suspect that under your scenario, we’d get a reversion from the specialization in place today back to a smaller, ‘well-rounded’ approach to farming.

For example, my Father-in-law has about 450 acre farm in Loudon County Virginia. Over time (we’re talking 25 years) he’s come to specialize on just cattle and grow food to feed the cattle (soybeans, hay, and clover mostly). He buys fertilizers, nitrogen, drugs for innoculations, etc from suppliers. In your Mad Max scenario, he’d probably trade some of his 300 cattle for horses (to pull plows and other jobs), start back up pigs, sheep and chicken raising, etc. He’d have to start rotating his fields from pasture to crops so as to make use of the ‘natural fertilizer’, if you know what I mean.

He has good water and no irrigation fortunately, so that wouldn’t be an issue for him, but would definitely be for others (especially in Calif central valley, which some call the vegetable basket of the country - they’d be screwed, as would the people who depend on that food.)

PS he has plenty of rifles and shotguns for protection - these days from coyotes and deer, but I suppose also from Waterworld’s smokers , from MasterBlaster, etc. And forgive if this is a GD-ish kind of comment, but I’d guess that lots of extended family that have ‘real’ jobs now would migrate back to those family farms (I know I would), so ironically, labor which is so hard for him to get now would end up being a lot easier to get ahold of.

6

I am just repeating stuff I heard, so correct me if I am wrong, but one problem that we would face is that everyone couldn’t do it. That is, if we were all using primitive farming methods, etc., there would only be enough arable land to produce all the food needed for a little over half of current world population (and without modern distribution methods, you’re really fucked).

That said, we have grown some tasty vegetables in our backyard.

Rob

7

Although keep in mind that while you can live off potatoes, you need to eat a lot of them. I’ve read that an adult male farmer needed to eat fourteen pounds of potatoes each day to get his basic nutrition.

8

In that event, nothing would be safe. People would die–lots and lots of people. It’s not like you’d go to the office at 8, work on a few spreadsheets, try out that new Thai place at lunch, then come home at 5 to water your beans and carrots.

But you do what you can to survive… maybe your backyard garden would have a good yield, maybe it wouldn’t. If not bandits, pests; if not pests, weather. But you’d have to try. If it doesn’t work out, well… if you can’t be a farmer, become a bandit.

Somebody would get the food in any event–either the backyard farmers would successfuly defend themselves or the bandits would take their crops–and whichever group gets it would have a vested interest in continuing the food production.

9

I don’t have any knowledge or expertise in this area, but my suspicion is that a subsistence farmer cannot produce adequate food to sustain himself or herself in the long term while being completely confined to one parcel of land with absolutely no contact with people from the outside. Archaeologists routinely find evidence of long-distance trade going back thousands of years. I suspect that there will be some combination of missing nutritional needs or missing tools or other items or substances needed to grow, process, or store food.

10

Barter!!!
I’ll grow corn and beans and trade them for a side of beef and a dressed hog. The lack of fertilizer and pesticides can be combated by going organic (green manure anyone) and fending off bandits is why we have the 2nd Amendment.

But in your new dytopia, what is going to happen to all of the urbanites in the US? Will rural areas form communes for mutual support? Has life stopped like schools and work and everyone is in survival mode?

11

some areas can become mad-maxian, but they cannot stay that way for long. Bandits need to eat and are hunted down by authorities and angry farmers and farmer-wannabes. The bandits who survive morph into “authorities” by themselves, in the gang / feudal sense.

12

Barter with whom? It seems to me that one of the axioms of the survivalist types is that they will constitute a small settlement isolated from the chaotic world around them.

13

What about plows and hand tools? Are you assuming you could get hold of what you need?

14

It would be strange to have NO access whatsoever to fertilizer. That’s why gardeners have compost piles. In former times people would collect the “night soil” (human shit) and either compost that (healthiest choice) or just spread it on the field (which can also spread disease as well as fertilizer). Domestic animals, particularly the ruminants, supply a rich source of readily compostable crap. So do chickens and the like.

While the quantity will certainly be lower, the quality could be the same or better, depending on weather, crop, soil, and other factors.

It is certainly possible to subsistence farm - people did it for thousands of years, and some still do. It IS an incredible amount of work - backbreaking labor in a good year, and you work twice as hard in a bad year for half as much. But it certainly can be done.

I’m assuming there will be some local bartering and perhaps some hunting to supplement things.

The next question is how to preserve the harvest through the winter and up to the next year when your lands starts to produce food again.

Also - that presupposes enough land to subsistence farm. How much is required depends on a lot of factors. If you live in a big city like New York or Chicago there won’t be enough land to go around and things will get very ugly… then very quiet. If you’re too close to such a city even if you have land you’re screwed by desperate people leaving the city to look for food and land. There will be a massive die off of people. On the bright side, overpopulation will no longer be a pressing global problem.

15

You can subsistence farm without a plow. It’s harder, but it’s been done.

Hand tools… well, initially you’d raid your local hardware/garden store. After that… hope someone either reinvents blacksmithing or flintknapping.

16

I know people can live off their own land, they’ve done it before and still do in some parts of the world. But the amount of time, effort and labor that goes into it makes it less efficient than buying products made in bulk by a professional farmer. So I can’t see any scenario where it would be a good idea. Either it would be more time consuming than letting a professional farmer do it, or if infrastructure is so beaten down that professional farms fail then your backyard farm doesn’t stand a chance.

My point about fertilizer is that if people feel infrastructure breaks down to the point where you cannot grow food on large farms and transport it to stores, then you probably can’t transport gasoline or industrial chemicals either. So whatever fertilizer you get would have to be made by yourself.

17

You’re assuming you have something to trade and the ability to trade it.

18

If your farmer can’t get fuel or fertiliser in then how is she going to get produce out? Remember the produce will be orders of magnitude more massive than all the fuel and fertiliser combined.

I don;t understand. It’s more time consuming to do *anything * than letting a professional do it for you. That includes washing your clothes, mowing your lawn and so forth. Nonetheless most people do wash their own clothes and mow their own lawn.

Can you explain why this is the case? The hill tribes of Cambodia, for example, had no transport infrastructure, yet their backyard farm worked just fine for millennia.

Once, again, it’s your magical world, so you get to decide the rules. None of it makes any sense in reality. It’s simply impossible to imagine a real world scenario where steam trains simply ceased to work. And while the steam trains run then people will be able to move as much produce as they desire.

19

We still have blacksmiths and flintknappers, you know. I was just working in my forge this weekend making a steel striker to use with a piece of flint I knapped to start fires. Getting the steel is another matter, but recycling it from old car parts, etc. is easy to do and commonly done.

FWIW,
Rob

20

There are people who are apparently sincerely preparing for societal chaos. That means that you can’t set the parameters by magic. The conditions have to be plausible.