Have you ever wondered, “What is a Self Sustainable Farm?” Read on to discover the many benefits of self-sustainable farming.
What Is a Self-Sustainable Farm
A self-sustainable farm requires many of the same initiatives of using traditional skills to live a simple life that focuses on producing over consuming.
Using the principles of permaculture, a self-sustainable farm makes use of everything on the homestead to create a symbiotic relationship where nothing goes to waste.
Take the Back to Eden Gardening method, for example. This method makes use of wood chips that arborists would otherwise dump at the landfill.
The wood chips provide mulch and fertilizer to grow a productive orchard. When the fruit trees need pruning, they produce their own woodchips for future mulch and fertilizer.
Raising chickens for eggs is another basic example. The chickens eat food scraps from your kitchen and, in return, give you eggs and manure to compost for your food gardening.
Your garden is now well fertilized, and you are able to grow an abundant harvest by which the chickens will benefit from more food scraps.
This innovative thinking can start small and spread throughout your farm to rely less on conventional sources. It also provides more for yourself and others who rely on your farm for sustenance.
Benefits of a Self-Sustaining Farm
More and more people want to live a simpler self-sustainable life. Having a self-sustaining farm comes with significant benefits for your family. These benefits include:
- Energy Savings – Agricultural farming relies on petroleum, a nonrenewable energy source. Smaller self-sustainable farms are minimizing the need for fossil fuels.
- Reduce Pollution – Pesticides drifting in the wind, toxic emissions, dust from tilling, and burning fields cause air pollution. Smaller self-sustainable farms can help drastically reduce air pollution by planting perennial grasses, cover crops, and planting trees in windbreaks. By using regenerative practices to reclaim pastures instead of tilling them, you can significantly reduce the amount of air pollution creating dust.
- Prevent Soil Erosion – Traditional farming creates the loss of 10 million hectares (1 hectare = 100 acres) of cropland yearly from soil erosion. Using the Back to Eden gardening method reduces tillage, reducing soil erosion.
- Reduces Toxic Pesticide Use – Eliminating pesticides will help to bring back the pollinators whose numbers have severely died off over the years.
- Reduces Cost – Sustainable farming uses everything to reduce waste. Using manure and organic waste to create fertilizers instead of buying synthetic fertilizers will significantly reduce costs. Starting your garden with organic vegetables will save you on the high price of organic produce in the grocery store.
- Happy Animals – Sustainable livestock gets animals back to their natural habits. Chickens that can naturally peck for bugs. Cows who graze freely will cut down on feed costs and improve their overall health.
- Better Health – Long-term pesticide exposure can cause serious illnesses, including cancer, infertility and congenital disabilities. Eliminating the use of pesticides through self-sustainable farming is good for everyone’s health.
- Personal Satisfaction – Many people enjoy learning new skills and doing things for themselves. If you learn to cure your own pork or master herbalism and natural first aid, it will build your confidence in caring for your family well.
Skills Needed for a Self-Sustaining Farm
The skills necessary for living a self-sustainable life will, of course, depend on how self-sustainable you want to become. Just start learning and see how far your comfort level takes you.
Here are a few places to start:
- Grow a Garden – Having fresh organic vegetables eliminates the need to drive to the store while giving you peace of mind about what’s in your food. Do you have space limitations as an urban dweller, or are you homesteading in an apartment? Gardening in raised garden beds or container gardening on a patio can be an easy solution.
- Reclaim Pasture – There’s always a history behind the land that you settle on. If your pasture land is overgrazed or has bare ground, you will need to learn how to reclaim your pasture land.
- Animal Husbandry – If you’re planning to raise animals like dairy cows, chickens for meat or eggs, raising goats for milk, sheep for wool or other animals, it’s essential to learn animal husbandry. These skills will not only help you to be self-sustaining but also may help to generate income for your farm by selling eggs and milk.
- Butchering – When raising animals for meat, you must know how to harvest them yourself. Having someone walk you through the process the first time is beneficial.
- Bread Making – Bread making is one of the simple pleasures in life. Learning how to make sourdough starter takes self-sufficiency one step further by eliminating the need to purchase commercial yeast.
- Preserving Foods – Part of living a self-sustainable life is storing foods for the winter. The easiest way to do that is to learn how to ferment vegetables. This simple task will boost your confidence to learn how to can, dehydrate, freeze dry, cure meats, and more!
- Soap Making – Soap is an essential commodity when running a farm, especially after all those dirty chores. You can learn to make hand soap, shampoo bars, laundry soap, and household cleaning products from simple kitchen supplies. Plus, homemade soap is a beautiful gift you can share with friends.
- Foraging – There are many wonderful plants in the woods to forage. These plants provide food for your family and also contain fantastic health benefits. Consider foraging for nasturtium, pine nuts, morels, dandelion, rose hips and wild blackberries.
- Tree Tapping – Tree tapping is a traditional skill commonly used to make maple syrup. Other benefits of tapping trees include using sap as an astringent and antiseptic for treating wounds. Some softer sap can be chewed like gum for sore throats during a cold.
- Carpentry – You will need to build things while living on a self-sustainable farm, including chicken coops, fences, shelves, and barns. Having some basic carpentry skills is going to be an absolute necessity.
- Herbalism – Our modern medicine was built on mimicking herbalism and natural first aid. Learning the original methods to treat illness and injury takes your homestead one more step towards being self-sustainable.
- Other Traditional Skills – You can learn many more traditional skills to become more self-sustainable, including knife sharpening, basket weaving, knitting, metalwork, whittling, masonry, fishing and hunting.
How Many Acres Do You Need for a Self-Sustaining Farm
Many factors determine how many acres you need for a self-sustaining farm. It’s always a good idea to plan out your space requirements before purchasing acreage.
Some things to consider are:
- Number of People – It’s important to consider how many people the farm will feed. Also, consider how many hands you will have to help with the work. Small children or the elderly may not be able to take on the challenging demands of certain chores.
- How Self-Sustaining You Want to Be – Most people agree that one acre of good farmland will self-sustain a family of four as far as having fruits and vegetables year-round. The amount of acreage will need to increase significantly once livestock starts getting added. Acreage size will depend on whether you want a small-scale farm to raise vegetables or a large farm to grow and raise animals.
- How Many Animals You Will Have – Raising animals can make you self-sustainable in meat, eggs, milk and wool, but this requires more acreage. Chickens are happy with a coop and a little outdoor space to forage and peck around. Larger animals need more space. One cow requires at least an acre of grazing space, and a mama cow with a baby should have at least two acres.
- Crop Production – How many crops do you want to produce? For a family of four, plan for 2,640 square feet of growing space for corn and 12,000 square feet of growing area for wheat. If your area has a short growing season and you won’t have time for crop rotation, you may need more acreage to grow enough food for your family.
- Fruit Trees – Consider plotting out 100-200 square feet for a small orchard of fruit trees. An orchard this size would produce enough fruit to feed a family of four, so adjust accordingly to family size.
- Fuel Consumption – Many self-sustaining farms will burn firewood. If you plan to have firewood on your land, plan that you will burn upwards of 5-10 cords of wood a year. Five acres of forested land should supply that amount.
- Climate – Where you live and your climate play an important role in how much acreage you need to be self-sustainable. If your area has extreme weather, it may shorten the growing season of some crops. You can learn how to extend your garden season to help offset these limitations, but you may need more space to accommodate colder climates.
How to Create a Self-Sustaining Farm
The desire to run a self-sustainable farm can lead you on an endless search of hours of YouTubing and scouring the internet for answers. This is a surefire way to leave you feeling discouraged and overwhelmed.
School of Traditional Skills is your shortcut to a self-sustaining lifestyle the simple way, without feeling overwhelmed and anxious. With your risk-free membership, you can learn from trusted instructors that are digging the soil, growing and raising their own food, and preserving their harvests right alongside you.
Join the community today, and acquire the skills that matter to you, your family, your health, and your peace of mind.
