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

[Cirrhosis_of_Liver]

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.

Like growing something to eat beside just potatoes?

 

[Pee Cola]

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.

Legumes are an ideal break crop. They're very good at putting nutrients back into the soil, especially nitrogen.

 

[Stan]

Bodies of water are probably most important to me, followed by the presence of arable land and forest that supports a decent amount of game. Electricity and internet hookup is nice too but can be difficult to get if you’re looking for something crazy remote. My moms place is only just now getting DSL.
Also in North Carolina you need at least 10 acres of farmland to pursue an agricultural tax exemption, and those tax savings can be quite significant. I would definitely check your local code cause it would suck to own 8.8 acres and owe residential tax on all of it as if it was just an extravagant lawn.

 

[Butterschmalz]

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.

This is from Amazon com. Prefab houses. US amazon got way more variety than the Canadian version. For permit you should check local laws. I wouldnt say no to one of those although building one would probably be twice as cheap.

 

[Prokhor Zakharov]

One thing many people don't check is air and water monitoring/quality records for the location or nearby. An area can seem nice, but if its downwind of a chemical plant that makes fertilizer, the air could be complete shit. It is in your best interest to have a comprehensive evaluation of air, water, and soil, even if you have already purchased the property, to ensure there isn't anything unexpected. If you find something bad, in most cases, you can still do something about it, you just need the right filtration/mitigation system.

Run the county/city/town's name through the EPA and state EPA equivalent sites for environmental incidents. Very bad things can happen in rural places with very little data except possibly in government databases. One example of this is the body of water near where my parents live in a rural area, seems like a nice little place, until you dig into the state governments database and find out it is a known body of water contaminated with PCB's with an indefinite ban on fishing and "limited" recreational use due to the levels of contamination. There are no signs, and absolutely no indication that anything is wrong with the body of water. I asked a few people that live right near the body of water about it, none of them had any idea, it was never disclosed to them when they bought the property. As far as I know, except for the state EPA, no one knows about it, since people from the area routinely fish on that body of water to eat what they catch without any idea they are eating toxic fish.

Knowledge is your friend (and if you know ahead of time, you can get the land for way less).

 

[Cirrhosis_of_Liver]

The Web Soil Survey also tells you about air quality.

If you're looking for land and not using that simple, densely-informative website, you're just wrong.

 

[ExsanguinateHorizon]

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

Depending on your state, hired loggers may automatically get ownership of the lumber. Check timber rights! Don't hire unlicensed workers mostly to protect yourself if something goes wrong. Don't be shy about shopping around for quotes for both loggers and buyers. Some places may even be open to offset the labor cost if you don't mind trading all or some of the wood.

 

[tehpope]

Some infographics:

Spoiler

These three might be from Self Sufficient Life and How to Live It by John Seymour.

 

[Otis Mallebrok]

I think a good rule of thumb is that you need a square meter or two per person per day, in a temperate climate with at least 600-700 mm of annual rain, and you need some access to fertilizer. With no fertilizer, you will need a lot more land.

Do you want to live entirely off of boiled potatoes?

Its better than not eating. But ideally you should grow a few different crops, and have animals that can eat the stuff the humans cannot process. Animals are also a way of storing food. IE, if you have a lot of haygrass in the summer, it can become a source of protein in winter.

Cows are right out. So are pigs, if you're not planning to feed them.

True, but one of the reasons that those animals were popular even in the old times, was that a lot of land couldn't be tilled. Without modern drainage a lot of land will become meadows. And no matter what you grow, there are parts of the plants that humans cannot eat, but which can be fermented and fed to animals. And back then they needed at least one big animal to pull the plow.

 

[Cirrhosis_of_Liver]

Tenant farmers, the people who lived on mostly potatoes, if they kept cattle, kept them on the commons, not on their quarter acre garden.

Any peasant wealthy enough to have land for keeping his own cattle on his own land ate wheaten bread.

Edit: sorry, I quite lost the thread and started sperging about historical food prejudices, which, while perhaps amusing, are neither here nor there.

I rely on meat goats for a substantial portion of my income. I am not at all opposed to animal agriculture. My point is simply that a one-acre plot isn't enough for self-contained large animal production. You could haylot them, or you could possibly graze them on public land if such an opportunity exists, but in either case, you are reliant on external opportunities.

 

[Otis Mallebrok]

Tenant farmers, the people who lived on mostly potatoes, if they kept cattle, kept them on the commons, not on their quarter acre garden.

Any peasant wealthy enough to have land for keeping his own cattle on his own land ate wheaten bread.

Even the poorest peasant would have had at least two steers to pull his plough. That's probably the minimum number of animals anyone had. But I assume no one here wants to go full amish and not have a kubota or similar.

 

[Cirrhosis_of_Liver]

Even the poorest peasant would have had at least two steers to pull his plough. That's probably the minimum number of animals anyone had. But I assume no one here wants to go full amish and not have a kubota or similar.

But those oxen wouldn't have made their living grazing on the poor man's half acre of garden and house. That's all I'm saying. There's good reason the enclosures of the 19th Century caused much suffering.

It's also quite plausible that oxen, in a very poor village, would have been either communal property or rented out by the lord. Economies of scale always matter. The American self-sufficient ideal is a single family needing nothing more than they can trade some eggs or whiskey for.

 

[Sperg_rancher]

It is funny when people consider this issue visavis Alaska.

when you have 18 hours of sun in the summer, I gotta imagine something will grow there.

 

[Freshly Baked Socks]

If you have any experience with the sunlight at that latitude, you would understand that what you gain in duration, you lose in intensity. People that close to the pole never see the sun rise directly overhead for long.

...Combined with issues of being so remotely located, and the low number of frost-free days totals to a negative pressure for farming. Those familiar with experimental farms in the state would remember how large silos for storing grain were built with the intention of storing barley produced for export ... WHICH HAS NEVER MATIERIALIZED NO MATTER HOW MUCH SUBSIDY MONEY IS THROWN AT IT. Alaska is a net importer of feed grain for all the cows, chickens, and hogs residing here.

 

[Cirrhosis_of_Liver]

What possesses people to try? Cheap per acre land?

Mississippi is cheap, and a great place to grow things, if not good in any other way.

 

[Freshly Baked Socks]

I call it 'experimental' because the development of agriculture here is heavily dependent on grants to test the viability.

So, the bottom line is, "just how much money do you have to sink into a hole, to produce potatoes, barley, or anything".

Some more successful tests spawn a little cottage industry, to provide potatoes to one store in one town for a few months a year, or help a village keep local hydroponic lettuce for sale where you could not physically ship lettuce... So, you can see that the small successes are built on doing better than what would otherwise be possible - but no one is going to get rich trying to grow more potatoes than Idaho, or make lettuce to ship to California. Nobody is producing enough to cover everyones demands, let alone a surplus for export.

The state has opened up land for sale, and seeks buyers to try farming - but I have to tell you the costs and potential yields never penned out reasonably for me to want to try production farming. That would be different if I had inroads to government funding, and didn't concern myself with marketforces. In that manner, I could make an experimental farm, and produce statistical results, and never worry about having to sell anything.

 

[Aztec Death Squad]

Beyond the technicals of land-usage, there's the matter of simply having distance away from your neighbors. You may only realistically use 5 of 100 acres, but that 100 acres is yours. No one can legally log, build homes, build roads, mine, rezone for mobile home parks or a Dollar General, etc. within your 100 acres. That's worth a lot.

If the land is untouched, you could also consider a conservation easement for tax purposes.

 

[Agamemnon Busmalis]

Legumes are an ideal break crop. They're very good at putting nutrients back into the soil, especially nitrogen.

Cabbages and kale too, especially for potatoes.

Also if you are gardening - never rotate nightshades with each other or plant them close together (tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, potatoes, tobacco). They have a lot of cross-susceptibility to the same diseases and pests and deplete the same nutrient profile.

Mississippi is cheap, and a great place to grow things, if not good in any other way.

It's definitely the jack-of-all trades in terms of soils and climate. Other parts of the country are better for specific crops but you can grow pretty much anything in Mississippi and it'll do decently well. Really the same with Louisiana too.

The big tradeoffs are flooding and serious natural disasters, both hurricanes and severe tornadoes. In a collapse-type situation malaria will reappear as well, that was a substantial drag on the economic development of the Deep South before the development of quinine and pesticides.

 

[Cirrhosis_of_Liver]

Cabbages and kale too, especially for potatoes.

Also if you are gardening - never rotate nightshades with each other or plant them close together (tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, potatoes, tobacco). They have a lot of cross-susceptibility to the same diseases and pests and deplete the same nutrient profile.


It's definitely the jack-of-all trades in terms of soils and climate. Other parts of the country are better for specific crops but you can grow pretty much anything in Mississippi and it'll do decently well. Really the same with Louisiana too.

The big tradeoffs are flooding and serious natural disasters, both hurricanes and severe tornadoes. In a collapse-type situation malaria will reappear as well, that was a substantial drag on the economic development of the Deep South before the development of quinine and pesticides.

Bury 58,000 cans of tonic in your yard. That should hold you and your family over a few decades.

 

[Agamemnon Busmalis]

Bury 58,000 cans of tonic in your yard. That should hold you and your family over a few decades.

Good plan. Juniper is native to Mississippi and you can grow wheat, all you need is a still and a way to make ice and you're set.