Ecuador: Minimum suggested size for permaculture farm.

Hello all!

I'm drafting proposals and concept building. My business partner is a former local here in BC who now lives in Quito Ecuador. With some other interested parties I'm leading a project to get a farm and live the permaculture dream. I for one plan to go full hippy and only wear shoes in town, but that is beside the point. :/

As my friend checks out the local real estate what would be the minimum size to even consider? That is from an horticultural stand point. I also hope to have a village of cool people and all that fun stuff too.

I said "Big is better than small, Urban is better than rural, cheap is better than costly".

All else being equal, what would all y'all advise?

You will probably need 1-2 acres to provide food for each person who lives on the "farm". Then you could just have lots of rangeland for cows/sheep/goats.
I know that in USA just one acre covered in garlic can net you US$50,000. I dont know what the price of garlic is in Ecuador, but if you could find such a cash crop for that locality. then you might not need such a big farm.

It depends (I live in the tropics) - you are better off looking at each piece of land, and evaluating its assets. Is there a river? Well that means you might have a ready access to protein. Are their springs? You may be able to make your own pond.

Conversion rates to protein (which in the tropics is the hardest thing to produce, starches are VERY easy) for fish and chicken can be 2 to 1, whereas cattle is 10 to 1. Goats will eat (prefer to eat!) what other animals don't. Mine eat pretty much exclusively large leaf from brush, and bark from saplings. The only feed they get is to keep them busy while milking them. My chickens live on bugs and coconuts and do very very well (lots of eggs, big fat chickens). They also get the waste from cleaning fish and all the scraps from the kitchen.

My total feed bill for the month is less than 10 dollars.

I am using about 3 acres I think, and not very effectively - but then again, I have hundreds of acres.

Get land with water, and is fertile - not all land is created equal. Of course if you can find land that has been owned by a subsistence farmer, who has planted fruit trees, etc, you are way ahead!