Greenspree, our intrepid green home builder from Canada, has just posted a very interesting piece about just how much land a family would need in order to grow all the food they would need for a year.

How much land do you need to be self sufficient? Again inspired by Red State Green’s recent posts I decided to do some research on my own. Prior to this, in a comment on “A matter of national security”, I used some somewhat high output figures I found on another site that basically said about 0.11 of an acre would be all that is required for a family of four. I decided to find some better numbers and also instead of just going by 2000lbs of food per year per person, use the recommended portions of the Canada Food Guide.

He makes a couple of assumptions, but on the whole I think he proves convincingly that you can live off a rather small parcel of land. Even if you didn’t want to produce ALL of the food you would need, you could conceivably produce a goodly amount of food on a very small chunk of land (or even in containers on a balcony or window sill for you city folk). As someone who grew up on and around farming I can tell you, nothing is more heavenly than a fresh picked tomato, or cucumber right off the vine.

Check out the rest of this very interesting article here.