Long-term planning for self-sufficiency

Hello everyone...

I've been living at the property pictured (see attached) for 6 years now in very humid sub-tropical zone 7b/8a .  When I arrived, the old horse pasture that formed most of the acreage had turned into a shrub forest of Chinese privet and black locust interspersed with thickets of goldenrod, fleabane and pokeweed, while the area around the house was lawn. The pond was and is stocked with bluegill, with lots of red eared sliders and crawdads camping on the perimeter. I was happy to find more than a dozen mulberries established around the property as well as three mature pecans in the southwest corner. There were also black willows surrounding the pond.



From the beginning, my goal has been a (mostly) self-sustaining permaculture system, with multiple interdependent zones all working together to produce all the food my family needs, with as little labor as possible (work a full time job and we have a bunch of under 5  kids to chase around). I've organized my property into 7 zones (mostly conceptual - lots of overlap in reality). #1: Animals: goats for dairy, chickens for eggs, rabbits for meat. #2 Orchard: fruit trees (mulberries, figs, nectarines, peaches, apples, crabapples, pears, plums, and cherries) and shrubs/bushes/vines (blueberries, raspberries, boysenberries, goumi berries, elderberries, grapes, melons and maypops). #3 Root crops: (sunchokes, sweet potatoes, Chinese yams, yacon, Chinese artichokes). #4 Greens and vegetables (asparagus, moringa, tomatoes, zucchini, Turkish rocket, cardoon, okra, bottle gourds, chayote, rhubarb). #5 Nuts (pecans, chestnuts and hazelnuts) and grains (amaranth, buckwheat, field oats). #6 Aquaculture (cattails, duckweed, water hyacinth, bluegill). #7 Tree fodder (bamboo, willow, privet, pine, cedar).

Each of the zones is semi-operational now. For animals, I'm still struggling with rabbits, but the chickens and goats are doing well. In the (badly neglected) orchard, the mulberries, figs, maypops and blueberries are doing great but everything else is pest food or disease-ridden (or too early to judge). The root crops are champs - especially the sunchokes and sweet potatoes. Thriving. The green zone is still mostly on paper - haven't even started the chayote or turkish rocket, or gotten the moringa to survive winter yet - but the asparagus, tomatoes and okra are reliable. The nuts and grains are doing well but I'm wasting them for lack of will/capacity/knowhow to process and use them. The aquaculture is just a wild zone that I hope to reclaim from my soon to be extinct muscovy ducks. The tree fodder is doing a great job feeding the goats with no input from me.

As for interdependence and self-sustenance, I feel like I'm wasting a lot of potential at the moment mainly due to my inexperience, overextension and lack of a clearly defined and managed system. The biggest problem I'm facing right now is a heavy reliance on purchased feed for the chickens and rabbits. This is the area where I'm hoping for feedback. A bit more detail before I shut up.

I think I have the ingredients on paper to take care of the chickens, but accounting for the volume of their needs and the seasons is where I start to get lost. If I can keep my goats in milk and my rabbit colony going, there's an all-season source of protein supplement for them.  But I don't have great answers for what to feed them in winter other than my root crops and squash varieties. Stored nuts and grains maybe?  Then in spring and summer, when I'm awash in fruits and greens (and black soldier fly larvae) but short on starches, do I rely on stockpiles or raise a fast harvest crop like buckwheat?

As for the rabbits, I've got loads of greens to feed them during the growing seasons, but come winter, I've got nothing but tree hay. I've heard of people making hay from sunchokes and others giving them tubers, which both sound doable to me.

I sit 4 hours north of you. Given the short winters, I would look into sunflowers and corn to get through the winter months. Though I haven't found how many acres you have, even an acre or two should put you in pretty good shape.

John F Dean wrote:I sit 4 hours north of you. Given the short winters, I would look into sunflowers and corn to get through the winter months. Though I haven't found how many acres you have, even an acre or two should put you in pretty good shape.

It's a little over 5 acres, but some of that is out of the screenshot (heavily wooded slope.

I've had success growing sunflowers, but the birds always get them before I do.

Sam Shade wrote: As for interdependence and self-sustenance, I feel like I'm wasting a lot of potential at the moment mainly due to my inexperience, overextension and lack of a clearly defined and managed system. The biggest problem I'm facing right now is a heavy reliance on purchased feed for the chickens and rabbits. This is the area where I'm hoping for feedback. A bit more detail before I shut up.

I think I have the ingredients on paper to take care of the chickens, but accounting for the volume of their needs and the seasons is where I start to get lost.

I hope your plan for the chickens works out.

Here are some threads that you or others might find interesting:

https://permies.com/t/179388/suggestions-easily-grown-chicken-feed

https://permies.com/t/202855/Growing-chicken-feed

https://permies.com/t/43491/Growing-chicken-feed

Some of your dilemma is basic biology.  Chickens (and pigs) are non-ruminant omnivores...their nutritional needs are similar to your own, and so they are basically competing in your system with you for similar food resources. Providing food for chickens and pigs from a piece of land is sort of similar to producing it for yourself, even though they can eat things you can't or won't.  Feeding them enough for them to produce surplus yield for human food is what often locks people into the cycle of purchased feed.  Ruminant animals, and others that can largely subsist off forage like rabbits and geese, are a different matter.  A sufficient amount of land rich in forage resources, plus a way to store some of that forage for the winter or dry season, and they can subsist indefinitely (and you can subsist off of them)  This is because they can meet some or much of their nutritional needs from plants and plant parts that are indigestible to non-ruminants.  The issue of carrying capacity applies to both....a given landscape under a given climate, soil, and topography has a limit as to how many ruminants, non ruminants, and people that it can support without large outside inputs.  Land improvements can tweak this upward to some extent, but not without limits.

Alder Burns wrote:Some of your dilemma is basic biology.  Chickens (and pigs) are non-ruminant omnivores...their nutritional needs are similar to your own, and so they are basically competing in your system with you for similar food resources. Providing food for chickens and pigs from a piece of land is sort of similar to producing it for yourself, even though they can eat things you can't or won't.  Feeding them enough for them to produce surplus yield for human food is what often locks people into the cycle of purchased feed.  Ruminant animals, and others that can largely subsist off forage like rabbits and geese, are a different matter.  A sufficient amount of land rich in forage resources, plus a way to store some of that forage for the winter or dry season, and they can subsist indefinitely (and you can subsist off of them)  This is because they can meet some or much of their nutritional needs from plants and plant parts that are indigestible to non-ruminants.  The issue of carrying capacity applies to both....a given landscape under a given climate, soil, and topography has a limit as to how many ruminants, non ruminants, and people that it can support without large outside inputs.  Land improvements can tweak this upward to some extent, but not without limits.

I'm hoping to take better advantage of the "can't or won't" category - the black soldier fly larvae tub has been great all summer in that regard (along with all the spoiled fruit from the orchard), but I know that's not going to make it through the winter.

Squash and pumpkin are appealing because they store well and I don't eat much of them myself, but the varieties I've tried so far (with the the exception of bottle gourds) have been annihilated by vine borers.

Root crops are also appealing because I can grow so much more than my family needs.  A pair of 6 X 6 plots of sunchokes and sweet potatoes produced enough for my family's needs - if I can use those as a staple for my chickens, I'm in business.

I'm wondering how much mileage I can get from chestnuts and pecans - I read here of someone grinding down black walnuts for winter chicken feed.

One of the things that changed our paradigm from so-so to amazing is that we started growing the crops that love our region. We're in zone 8b, so instead of planting some of the "Yankee" vegetables, we started growing crops that were high-yield and liked our climate. Seminole pumpkins, true yams, mulberries, chestnuts, okra, tropical greens, cassava, etc. That gives us a great base yield.

As for chickens, Florida Bullfrog's new book "Free-Range Survival Chickens" shares how some of the old varieties of birds (game fowl, in particular) are much more predator-aware and can feed themselves mostly via foraging.

Pigs have done well for us, too, and we can keep them in a relatively small space and feed them the extra without a lot of work. They'll eat everything from sweet potato vines to spoiling pumpkins, Jerusalem artichokes, canna stems and leaves, etc. Plus food scraps from restaurants! We can raise pork for very little purchased feed.

As far as vine borers, maybe you are growing the wrong family of pumpkins/winter squash. I have completely stopped growing anything in the pepo family. Moschata is very resistant to both vine borers and squash bugs. Maxima is between the two, but way way better than pepo for me. The easiest ever for me has been Seminole pumpkins, a moschata.

If in doubt as to what you are growing, Joseph gave us a great squash family guide in this thread.

Gourds are a different family altogether. Cuccuzzi has done really well in past years. Both borders and squash bugs avoid them.

Yeah if you have enough space to grow squash, sunchokes, and sweet potatoes for the chickens all good, pigs will love them too, and you can use them for supplements and "bait food" for the goats (so as to attract them from one area to another or gather them for milking etc.)  These will all store for some months, though probably not a whole year so you'll need to think of other things during the hungry gap.  Similarly with soldier flies, which are absolutely awesome  (I've turned a chicken feed yield directly off my own humanure, dog manure, and poisonous mushrooms from the forest, among other things, using these!)....but they are only around in the warmer months.  I've often fantasized about keeping them going in a heated greenhouse....though the smell would be an issue in any kind of enclosed space!  Perhaps you could raise enough extra to either store the dormant grubs or dry them for use as protein supplement in the winter?  When I lived in California the oaks kicked down such huge yields of acorns that I processed and fed them to everyone....myself, chickens, and sheep.  Chestnuts could probably do likewise, and they don't even need to be leached.  Both are starchy and moist in a raw state though, and won't store very long in the shell, especially not beyond cold winter.  I spent many evenings in the fall clipping acorn after acorn in two with a pair of hand pruners, and then drying these in the sun, separating the shells as they shrunk away from them and eventually storing the rock-hard chunks in jugs for future feeding.  Pecans, walnuts, and other nuts are oily by nature, and will store longer in the shell, especially if you can keep them cool and dry, but after some months they will start to go rancid (but chickens might not mind rancid for a good way further than you and I might!)    And yes, while any kind of access to the mainstream economy is in the mix (such as having a vehicle and going to town on occasion for other purposes) the whole avenue of dumpster diving opens up as a source of food, feed, farm materials and whatever else.  I've raised many batches of poultry with the staple diet being the huge trash bags full of popcorn thrown out by movie theaters....

David Good wrote:One of the things that changed our paradigm from so-so to amazing is that we started growing the crops that love our region. We're in zone 8b, so instead of planting some of the "Yankee" vegetables, we started growing crops that were high-yield and liked our climate. Seminole pumpkins, true yams, mulberries, chestnuts, okra, tropical greens, cassava, etc. That gives us a great base yield.

As for chickens, Florida Bullfrog's new book "Free-Range Survival Chickens" shares how some of the old varieties of birds (game fowl, in particular) are much more predator-aware and can feed themselves mostly via foraging.

Pigs have done well for us, too, and we can keep them in a relatively small space and feed them the extra without a lot of work. They'll eat everything from sweet potato vines to spoiling pumpkins, Jerusalem artichokes, canna stems and leaves, etc. Plus food scraps from restaurants! We can raise pork for very little purchased feed.

How's the smell on the pigs in a smaller space? I have some close urban neighbors that I have to be careful of upsetting with too strong an odor. My black soldier fly larva bin is right on the border of too much.

Joylynn Hardesty wrote:As far as vine borers, maybe you are growing the wrong family of pumpkins/winter squash. I have completely stopped growing anything in the pepo family. Moschata is very resistant to both vine borers and squash bugs. Maxima is between the two, but way way better than pepo for me. The easiest ever for me has been Seminole pumpkins, a moschata.

If in doubt as to what you are growing, Joseph gave us a great squash family guide in this thread.

Gourds are a different family altogether. Cuccuzzi has done really well in past years. Both borders and squash bugs avoid them.

Thanks for the link! My wife grew bottle gourds and rich sweetness melons that both defied the borers that got my stuff. I think the melons' secret was beating most of the bugs and diseases to the scene - they really fruited fast. Unfortunately they are mostly rind but they are beautiful and have a nice mild cantaloupe flavor.

I read about chayote in Eric Toensmeier's book and I'm stoked to try them to see how they do. Not sure how well they store. Had never heard of cuccuzzi but they look great. Gonna have to extend the trellis tunnel to give all these gourds a try.

Just my thinking, but your 'long-term' goal is self-sufficiency. Where I am a 50 Lb. bag of corn is $12 at the local farm store. This is the cheap hybrid GMO standard yellow dent corn. I'd guess if you are here on Permies you don't want to get hooked into using this kind of thing long-term, but for a year or two while you get things organized it will get your animals through the first few winters.

I'd say don't let long-term goals get in the way of short-term survival. An acre of a traditional variety of corn can provide anywhere from 20 to 100 bushels of corn, or roughly 1000 to 5000 pounds. 1000 Lbs. of corn will cost you less than $90 if purchased.

For me it is all about where you are at now, and where you want to be in a few years. It's easy to get sucked into buying your food, or animal feed, since it is so cheap. Short-term that's fine, as long as I keep my eyes on the long-term goal and move steadily towards it.

If you have lots of mulch, the pigs aren't bad. If you don't, or you get a rainy week and can't keep up, the neighborhood will smell them.

As for chayote, it does not store well at all. We've grown it a few times, but no one in the family liked it so we quit. It's fun to grow, though.

If you have the time to process them, I bet you could collect a lot of fall acorns from your woods. I'm planning to try it as poultry feed this winter. We'll see if the reward is worth the effort.