Jeff's blog

I have a knack for asking simple questions that have complex answers. With thoughts of sustainability and self-sufficiency on my mind for many months now, I’ve asked myself quite a few of these questions. One question related to these topics is ‘How much food is required to feed a small community, and how much land will that take?’ This is a seemingly simple question, but an important one if your intent is to build a small, completely self-sufficient community. What makes the answer to this question complex, at least for me, someone with absolutely no experience growing food, are the number of variables involved. I started Calorie Calculating to answer this question, and chose PeakOilDesign as the home of this blog because it seems a nice fit with the efforts being made here.

Please be clear on the point that I have no experience in growing food. The vast majority of content contributed by me will be book-learned. My posts at times will be me simply thinking out loud, and at other times sharing my newfound discoveries in the world of agriculture.

What I hope to accomplish in addition to answering this question is to create a formula that anyone can use to determine the volume of grown food needed to meet their caloric needs, whether that be a single homestead or small community, and how much land will be required. The purpose of the formula will be to give newcomers like myself a starting point. Its focus will be on what’s desirable, not optimal, and will not pretend to be a replacement for experience. The formula will take on two forms, one written and the other computerized.

I only recently started to answer this question using Google, the library and bookstores. What I quickly realized is that I will need to approach this topic methodically. An initial formula will be created that only takes a small number of variables into account. After that’s created a few more variables will be added and the formula modified accordingly. This will continue until the formula takes all variables into account.

My next post will be listing as many variables as I can think of. See you then.