How much acres of land is enough, and what to look out for when buying land.

[halphase]

I figured I make this thread to expand on the new homesteading thread that was made a short while ago to discuss things to look out for if someone is going to survey a land before buying it. the bureaucracy behind buying land, ways to get around said bureaucracy, spot problems that might become problematic in the long run, state zoning laws, what you can build on your land etc...

I know there are Mineral rights, water rights, zoning laws to consider, and buying enough land where you can put a fair distance from future neighbors who might cause trouble.

Maybe the land you buy looks nice on the outside, but perhaps the soil is to acidic to grow anything or there's mercury in the soil based on the hemlock trees that grow there like in dudleyville, pennsylvania. Regarding mineral rights, perhaps someone doesn't have the hose rights on their land so installing a sewage or electrical lines will be problematic and open up room for lawsuits by their neighbors.

Also I understand van life, tiny homes, homesteading were trends. What about shed life where a person buys a shed from home depot and puts it on top of the land they bought it on or park a trailer on top of said land until they can build a house.

 

[DavidS877]

In rural areas: 1. What can you build/can you build. 2. Do you have guaranteed access. 3. Water. 4. Septic. 5. Electricity. 6. Internet or Starlink.

There are several lots in my neighborhood which can't be built. When the development was planned septic tanks had many fewer restrictions. Now those lots are too small for the current septic requirements.

Another item, if you want to shoot, do you have a good backstop and what are the laws, is your property large enough for what you want to shoot and distance to neighbors property/occupied dwellings/highways/etc.

Some areas do not allow off-grid, so while you may plan to go all solar/whale blubber generators the local laws may still say you have to pay for electricity, nice scam the electrical companies have going there.

 

[Topsoil]

So you're standing on a piece of land, considering whether to buy it.

1. Is there a structure currently on the property?
   1. Is it livable? How much renovation would it take to make it livable? Has it been inspected? When was it built?
   2. Water management:
      1. Is it on a septic tank?
      2. Is it on city water?
      3. Is there a well on the property?
      4. Is there a river on the property?
      5. Is there a lake on the property? Does it have fish? Is the water potable?
   3. Power & heating
      1. Is it hooked up to the city's electrical grid?
      2. Does it have solar & batteries?
      3. Does it have a generator?
      4. Does it have a fire place? If so, when was the last time the chimney was repaired/inspected?
      5. Does it have central air? Does that provide heating, cooling, or both? Is it powered by gas or electricity?
      6. How is water heated? Is it gas or electricity? Does it have a tank?
   4. Where is the structure facing? Where are the windows?
      1. Are there large, west facing windows? If so, are there sunlight-reflecting curtains which can be drawn over them? (If not, the house will heat up like crazy in the afternoon)
      2. Are there windows located high up on the structure to let heat out in the summer?
      3. Are the windows vacuum insulated to keep heat in during the winter?
   5. Natural disasters
      1. Does it have a basement?
      2. Has it been built to sustain hurricane-force winds (if applicable)
      3. How would it resist a tornado? (if applicable)
      4. How would it resist an earthquake? (if applicable)
   6. Secondary & tertiary structures
      1. Are there any barns for animals?
      2. Are there any sheds for storage?
2. Neighbors & fencing
   1. Is the state an open-roaming state? Are you required to fence your property to keep other people's animals out?
   2. Is the land for hunting, where putting up a fence would ruin your ability to hunt?
   3. How large is the circumference of the land? How expensive would it be to fence it?
   4. How close are your nearest neighbors?
   5. Meet the neighbors, see what they're like.
   6. What kind of farming do your neighbors do? If they spray pesticides, fertilizers, or herbicides, some of it WILL end up on your land and in the shared water table.
   7. Go to the land early in the morning and late at night. Are there barking dogs? Industrial noises? Wandering vagrants? Poachers?
   8. What are the laws regarding trespassers? Are you allowed to shoot poachers?
   9. From @Harvey Danger: "Homeowner's Association (HOA). Sometimes they have rules you won't know about until you read their bylaws, sometimes their fees are high enough to matter. Most property listings will have an HOA yes/no field, sometimes with the fees too. However they'll rarely mention specific HOA restrictions unless legally required to disclose them."
3. Soil & plant life
   1. This is too detailed and dependent state-to-state to really summarize here BUT
   2. Is the soil hard packed clay?
   3. How acidic/basic is the clay? (there's home tests you can bring with you)
   4. Is the soil just bare dirt?
   5. What's growing on the land? Are there weeds? Trees? Scrub brush?
   6. What was the land used for before?
   7. Can you hear/see any insects, ideally pollinators like bees? A lack of insects is a bad sign, usually means dead land that won't grow anything.
   8. Learn to identify plants that are poisonous to livestock, and see if there's any on your land.
4. Water
   1. How much rainfall does the area usually get?
   2. Are they currently in a drought?
   3. Are there water usage restrictions?
5. Logging & pastures
   1. Are you looking to use the land to hunt, or to farm? Hunting works best on wooded land, but you can't farm on wooded land.
   2. If you're looking to farm but the land is covered in trees, you're going to spend a fortune (or an eon) clearing it.
   3. If you're looking to hunt but it's all pasture land, you can try to plant trees to bring it back but that's a decades long process. You aren't hunting on cleared land. Maybe your grandkids will.
   4. If you want to log, what kind of trees are growing on the land?
   5. How quickly do the trees grow?
   6. What kind of wildfire risk is there in the area?
6. Size
   1. "How many acres do I need?" is answered by "What do you want to do?"
   2. Livestock
      1. Hogs/goats/fowl can be run on wooded land, but basically everything else is going to need open pasture
      2. Exactly how much open pasture each kind of livestock requires will differ from area to area. Areas with higher rainfall can generally sustain more livestock on less land.
      3. Look up the Animal Units (AU) for your area and see how much land they require. Each state should release its own guide. Here's Montana's.
   3. Hunting
      1. This is determined not just by the land you own, but the land around it as well.
      2. You'll want to do research locally, but generally large areas of woodland (ideally with river(s) running through) are what you're looking for
   4. Logging
      1. I'll be honest, I don't know enough about logging to guide you here. If someone else has good advice, I'll add it here

 

[Farsided]

Also I understand van life, tiny homes, homesteading were trends. What about shed life where a person buys a shed from home depot and puts it on top of the land they bought it on or park a trailer on top of said land until they can build a house.

Nothing wrong with a cozy shed, just don't send pipe bombs to people or if you do, be in your bro's good graces.

If you can, get a shovel and dig a few holes, see what comes up. My mom's garden wasn't too terrible until you dug and get all kinds of gifts by previous owners.
Check for asbestos. Whether inside the house or as roofing material. Getting rid of large quantities of it is a pain / expensive / dangerous

 

[Meiwaku]

it's less about the acreage and more about the quality of the land. there's a smallholding on a quarter acre of land (i think in california) that out performs those on 100s.

Also try to get mineral rights and if you can't never let a geologist on your land, if you find rare minerals, tread wisely.

 

[Cirrhosis_of_Liver]

Mineral rights are hard to come by in oil-bearing areas, but that's just as well.

What you really aggressively do NOT want is a property with a surface option to build an oil well where you don't even have the rights. Nothing good comes of having oilfield workers around, let alone all the inevitable, mostly intentional property damage. Even having an active gas pipeline is a downaide, but Texas at least is spiderwebbed with those.


But yeah like everyone said, acres aren't that meaningful. I would say I think 5 acres is pretty small to hope to be "self sufficient" in a "subsistence farmer" sense. However, depending where it is and the quality of the land, that's enough to make a very comfortable living as a market gardener.

So, the most important thing to ask is what your goals are.

Do you want to go full Amish with a mule to pull a steel plow, two milk cows, an acre of vegetables, a fruit grove, coppiced wood for fuel, a a shadouf to pull river water up to your fields? That's super cool, but you're gonna need a significant amount of real estate with special qualities to pull it off.

Do you want to run a greenhouse to provide organic herbs to chefs in a major urban area? You'll have a much smaller footprint, but you'll likely need a very specific location, and you'll need to both know the byzantine regulations in such an area and be a very good businessperson.

Somewhere in between? Well. Somewhere in between.

 

[Pee Cola]

it's less about the acreage and more about the quality of the land. there's a smallholding on a quarter acre of land (i think in california) that out performs those on 100s.

Definitely. If you have good quality land located somewhere that gets decent rainfall, you can grow surprisingly large quantities of food in a relatively small space. Certainly enough for a small family, and more than enough for one person.

Spoiler: PL

I own a house on a town block in a medium rainfall area, and could theoretically grow more than enough food to keep me fed... I say theoretically because I'm currently busy fixing up the house because it was previously unoccupied for about 15 years, so as you can probably guess it needs a shitload of repairs on account of having zero maintenance done on it for at least a couple decades

This includes protein: chickens don't take up much space, and you don't need many to produce plenty of eggs (and you can trade the surplus with neighbors for whatever they're growing that you don't, assuming your neighbors have similar self-sufficiency goals).

As an added bonus, chicken manure is a great fertilizer.

 

[Pretend To Imagine]

Something to look out for that I learned the hard way: Have someone qualified look at any trees that are near the house or utilities. I had to have trees removed after I bought the property and it was expensive.

 

[DavidS877]

Something to look out for that I learned the hard way: Have someone qualified look at any trees that are near the house or utilities. I had to have trees removed after I bought the property and it was expensive.

Look at this guy in the self-sufficiency thread paying people to remove trees. I guess dropping a tree on your house could be a problem.

The interesting thing I learned is that in my area the electric company is responsible for not only keeping trees off the distribution lines at the street but also the feeds to the houses. I had one I was worried about and saw them working down the street and walked over and saw they were clearing a similar tree, I asked and they said yes, they deal with those too. 10 minutes later the tree in my yard was gone. Admittedly they didn't clean up, just dropped it in place and didn't wreck the lines doing it.

 

[Freshly Baked Socks]

It is funny when people consider this issue visavis Alaska.

Some people have strange notions about farming and ranching in or near the Arctic... when the real richness is in the natural wilderness.

"Enough land" may be just space to park your bones and tools at night when most all land is adjacent to or near massive tracts of federal land rich in fish and game.

 

[Pee Cola]

Something to look out for that I learned the hard way: Have someone qualified look at any trees that are near the house or utilities. I had to have trees removed after I bought the property and it was expensive.

Also take note of where trees are in relation to your home's septic system (assuming you have one installed). The last thing you want is tree roots getting into the soakage, or worse still into any of the drains.

 

[frari]

to grow enough food to be self-sufficent. It would depend on climate. But I remember reading you need 1/2 acre per person (for vegetarian diet), or 1 acre per person if you want animal protein in your diet as well. But I think this value changes a lot depending on where you look.

 

[Cirrhosis_of_Liver]

to grow enough food to be self-sufficent. It would depend on climate. But I remember reading you need 1/2 acre per person (for vegetarian diet), or 1 acre per person if you want animal protein in your diet as well. But I think this value changes a lot depending on where you look.

My stocking rate is a little over one goat per acre farm-wide. That is, one doe with kids, yearling, or buck. If everything works oit perfectly, and say you borrow a buck, that works out to about 100 lbs of baby goat per acre per year, or very roughly 60 lbs of cabrito. At a certain point, crowding becomes more of an issue than forage production, so I really think anything beyond 6 goats per acre is asking for trouble.

But hey, almost a pound of meat a day isn't bad! I think that's where calculations like that come from. The thing is, on a 100 acre plot by a river of prime farmland with everything going right for you, it really might be possible to do that. With a 1 acre survivalist farm, that's just not realistic due to problems of economy of scale.

Goats need too much space to be meaningful meat production on one acre. To a 17th Century peasant just thrilled to get to eat meat once a year on Easter, a doe and a buck on one acre is perfectly doable, but if you want animal protein regularly at such a small scale, you can forget red meat. Cows are right out. So are pigs, if you're not planning to feed them.

So you'll need to think much smaller. Chickens might be doable, if that acre is for chickens to forage on, not your entire place. A one acre fertilized tank could produce hundreds of pounds of fish a year, if you're in a warm enough climate. Tilapia yields can actually be pretty outrageous if you're somewhere it never gets cold.

But anyway, point being, I think a lot of people look what a medium sized family farm of 200 acres can do on a per acre average, and then think about their caloric needs.

There's plenty of places where half an acre will keep a family alive. Unless that half acre has some serious capital like irrigation, greenhouses, carefully designed intensive aquaculture, and large chicken pens, it's a hard knock life. Think "1830s Irish tenant farmer."

Now, if you DO have the funds to invest in all sorts of cool stuff, you can really do some fascinating things with tiny farms. It's the question of what someone *means* by "self-sufficiency." If you want to live like there's no outside world, you're going to want at least, I'd say, 5 animal units worth of productive land, plus enough woods of a type of tree that bears coppicing for fuel, a good well, spring, or year-round creek. . . The smaller you go, the more specific your needs become. If you want to be a self-employed agriculturalist who doesn't pay any utility bills, you can go smaller, in the right location, but that will probably put you quite close to population centers.


An "animal unit" is a cow and a calf through a year, roughly six goats.

 

[Slap47]

to grow enough food to be self-sufficent. It would depend on climate. But I remember reading you need 1/2 acre per person (for vegetarian diet), or 1 acre per person if you want animal protein in your diet as well. But I think this value changes a lot depending on where you look.

A North American backyard of potatoes could probably feed the family of five. The potato was the choice of subsistence farming peasants for a reason.

Survivalist people seem reject that idea wholesale though. It is not exactly fitting with the romantic view of it all.

 

[LemonParty]

So you're standing on a piece of land, considering whether to buy it.

This is the correct answer. It's a hard question to answer without the location dox.

Different state, different climate, different laws.

 

[Cirrhosis_of_Liver]

A North American backyard of potatoes could probably feed the family of five. The potato was the choice of subsistence farming peasants for a reason.

Survivalist people seem reject that idea wholesale though. It is not exactly fitting with the romantic view of it all.

Do you want to live entirely off of boiled potatoes?

 

[Pretend To Imagine]

Look at this guy in the self-sufficiency thread paying people to remove trees. I guess dropping a tree on your house could be a problem.

The interesting thing I learned is that in my area the electric company is responsible for not only keeping trees off the distribution lines at the street but also the feeds to the houses. I had one I was worried about and saw them working down the street and walked over and saw they were clearing a similar tree, I asked and they said yes, they deal with those too. 10 minutes later the tree in my yard was gone. Admittedly they didn't clean up, just dropped it in place and didn't wreck the lines doing it.

The trees were 50ft tall and 2 were in danger of dropping on mine or the neighbors house. The 3rd was in the power lines but the power company refused to touch it.

I would have had to rent a lift and take an unacceptable amount of time off work to do myself safely.

 

[Freshly Baked Socks]

Survivalist people seem reject that idea wholesale though. It is not exactly fitting with the romantic view of it all.

My problem with subsisting on potatoes alone, is the need to rotate crops or break new ground. Anyone who has grown potatoes more than once knows that potato scab is a concern which increases with each crop cycle.

 

[Harvey Danger]

snip

This whole list is good, but under "#2 Neighbors & fencing" also need to include Homeowner's Association (HOA). Sometimes they have rules you won't know about until you read their bylaws, sometimes their fees are high enough to matter. Most property listings will have an HOA yes/no field, sometimes with the fees too. However they'll rarely mention specific HOA restrictions unless legally required to disclose them.

 

[Slap47]

Do you want to live entirely off of boiled potatoes?

My problem with subsisting on potatoes alone, is the need to rotate crops or break new ground. Anyone who has grown potatoes more than once knows that potato scab is a concern which increases with each crop cycle.

Not at all, but Potatoes are the most land efficient crop and have nearly all of the nutrients you need. With them alone you are self sufficient. This should allow you to focus on other things.