Food self-sufficiency for 9 people on 10 acres, what would you do?

We have around 10 acres of land that can be easily cleared, the rest is steep forest.

I want to provide for all our needs and all our animals needs without a feed store, tractor, ongoing inputs, or power tools.

Rainfall is around 40 inches a year, mostly in winter and spring. Zone 8 or 9.

The permaculture handbook recommends a diet of around 1 million calories per adult per year to provide enough food for an active lifestyle, so for a family of 9, we want to produce around 9 million calories of nourishing food according to that estimate.

If this were your situation, what would you choose to grow and raise?

Not going to suggest crops so much as strategy…

As far as I understand no one has been able to have no inputs without fallowing, or food foresting.

The figure I have heard (maybe Will Bonsall said it?) is that cultivating more than one fourth (give or take) of the land at a time necessitates inputs—the rest being perennial something that goes into a composting (or animals). As a goat farmer the latter option seems wise! It’s also possible and possibly beneficial to rotate the cultivated area and leave the rest fallow.

So the goat manure and bedding go to making compost for your beds, which take up only 1/4 or less of the entire land (about a quarter acre per person— 9/4=2.5 acres). Turnips, say, could be good crops, and other roots—greens and vegetables could be gathered from the forests and fallows.

I also would include the forests and non-arable land into the food calorie equation because they can be excellent sources of all sorts of food—mushrooms, greens, some kinds of shade tolerant berries, etc. Especially if there are nut trees. And since they cannot be cultivated they need little input.

I would always emphasise foraging because it is so reliable and doesn’t require us to take up space in our own land.

Is it typically foggy/cloudy (my ignorant conception of Tasmania) or do you get plenty of sunny warm days?

Thom Bri wrote:Is it typically foggy/cloudy (my ignorant conception of Tasmania) or do you get plenty of sunny warm days?

Different parts of the island get different amounts of fog. We get pretty much no fog at our place, and a mix of sunny days and overcast, but enough sun to rely on solar power and be able to grow tomatoes, zucchini, and other shorter-season summer crops outdoors.

Right now it's peak planting season, and the weather forecast for this week says minimum 5ºC (41ºF) to maximum 19ºC (66ºF). It will heat up more in December, January, and February, but generally it still gets pretty cool at night, and rarely gets above 30ºC (86ºF).

Kate Downham wrote:

Thom Bri wrote:Is it typically foggy/cloudy (my ignorant conception of Tasmania) or do you get plenty of sunny warm days?

Different parts of the island get different amounts of fog. We get pretty much no fog at our place, and a mix of sunny days and overcast, but enough sun to rely on solar power and be able to grow tomatoes, zucchini, and other shorter-season summer crops outdoors.

Okay then! You have lots of choices. Simplest is a rotation of potatoes and maize. That pretty much maximizes calories on small acreage. Both are easy to grow and pretty resilient.

Add in beans, other grains, other root crops like sweet potatoes and turnips, squashes. All high calorie and  easy to grow.

Any experienced farmers or gardeners in your group?

M Ljin wrote:Not going to suggest crops so much as strategy…

As far as I understand no one has been able to have no inputs without fallowing, or food foresting.

The figure I have heard (maybe Will Bonsall said it?) is that cultivating more than one fourth (give or take) of the land at a time necessitates inputs—the rest being perennial something that goes into a composting (or animals). As a goat farmer the latter option seems wise! It’s also possible and possibly beneficial to rotate the cultivated area and leave the rest fallow.

So the goat manure and bedding go to making compost for your beds, which take up only 1/4 or less of the entire land (about a quarter acre per person— 9/4=2.5 acres). Turnips, say, could be good crops, and other roots—greens and vegetables could be gathered from the forests and fallows.

I also would include the forests and non-arable land into the food calorie equation because they can be excellent sources of all sorts of food—mushrooms, greens, some kinds of shade tolerant berries, etc. Especially if there are nut trees. And since they cannot be cultivated they need little input.

I would always emphasise foraging because it is so reliable and doesn’t require us to take up space in our own land.

I wonder if John Seymour's approach for 5 acres would work well, but scaled up a bit.

On 5 acres, he ploughs up half an acre every year and sows it to a crop rotation, and then it stays in crops for 4 years before being returned to pasture for 4 years, so he has at any time 2 acres pasture and 2 acres various crops such as grain, fodder roots, potatoes, beans, etc. It sounds a bit more intensive than Bonsall's one, but it has animal manure and Bonsall does not, so that could make up for it. Pigs could potentially do the ploughing, if we had enough food for them.

What skills do you bring to the table for this project?

I grew corn and beans on 3000 square feet (7% of one acre) last year and got about 290,000 calories just from the corn not counting beans/potatoes etc. No machines, no chems or fertilizers.

2025: https://permies.com/t/279261/Sisters-Garden-year
2024: https://permies.com/t/249459/Sisters-Garden-Year
2023: https://permies.com/t/233039/Fall-prep-spring-sisters-garden

I would also plant oaks or chestnuts for nuts, because I feel like they’re one of the healthier staple foods for starch, all considered. Red oak (Quercus rubra) is the kind growing here and they double as a source of fat.

Or maybe you have some excellent native nuts?

While looking up Tasmanian trees I found a fascinating species, not really a nut tree though. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eucalyptus_regnans?wprov=sfti1#

I agree with M Ljin the path most likely to succeed is going to focus on perennial crops.  I don't know anything about the adverse pressures Tasmania, but assuming the climate zone reference is anything like the USDA climate zones we use here in the USA you're in a good macroclimate to meet the challenge.  I'd focus on the long term challenge, which won't be calorie production.  In that climate with consistent effort I'd sail right by the calorie threshold in a few years just developing the land on autopilot.  The real challenge will be dietary nutrient profile and a degenerative environmental impact if practices neglect a waste stream, introduce a parasite cycle, redistribute nutrients with a geographic bias, etc.  That's where my attention would be during design activities.  I'm interpreting no inputs to mean short term dependencies on outside resources.  A land area of just ten acres is several orders of magnitude to small to avoid resource scarcities.  

Ten people is also an abundance of labor for ten acres so I wouldn't shy away from practices that require intensive management, but I'd still avoid practices that make the local (site) ecology dependent on human labor.  After a good year of observation I'd plan transit ways, cite structures and water works, then work up a plan for the long lived stuff.  Without knowing the site any proposal I make is just blind guessing, but it would likely involve a lot of timber and nut trees, some kind of livestock integration, and an alley cropping system (or equivalent) to make use of annual plants and your abundant labor resource to compensate for whatever design deficiencies appear until they're resolved.  I'd probably also give a lot of consideration to aquatic and riparian areas.  You've the rainfall to support them and the labor to do the land forming.  They're just so productive!  A one acre pond full of panfish and surface plants (lemna, azola, watercress, etc) with a half acre island full of running bamboo, waterfowl, locust and almond, and various utility infrastructure could be a powerful local resource center.

Fun question!

An ancillary part of other answers given is to make sure that everyone is committed to eating what is available during whatever time of year that is. I assume this would already be the case given the post title.

Eating in season, including planning farm animal population ebbs and flows, greatly reduces food preservation needs and frees that time up for other things.

Adding in the local wildlife, such as deer and fish, really helps unless they are fattening up by eating your crops!

If humans require 1 million calories per person per year, they would have gone extinct right out of the gate.  Living off fruits and veggies you grow is the most efficient, with chickens for eggs, then perhaps, a few goats for milk and cheese.

Based on my own limited experience with a family of 7 and 5 acres in a 7/8 zone and not a lot of free time, here's what I would do.

#1 Goats. The easiest livestock to feed, bar none. They eat almost all the weeds, including a lot of easy winter fodder: evergreens like privet, pine and honeysuckle.  Their fencing is hard to get right at first,  but once you have that is smooth sailing and you've got a great source of meat and milk for the roughest acres.

#2 Ducks.  Great foragers, good at avoiding predators,  lower maintenance than chickens. Meat and eggs. Just need a little water.

#3 Jerusalem artichokes. The ultimate no input, high yield staple,  available 5 months out of the year fresh. Very useful as animal fodder too.

#4 Figs & Mulberries. Weedy growth,  long harvesting windows, easy to preserve.

#5 Moringa. Needs some babying in the winter but worth it. A multivitamin in salad form.

#6 Kale. Great to have when all the other greens are gone. Handles neglect beautifully.

#7 Cherry tomatoes. Everbearing, prolific, easy harvest and the most prolific self seeder I've ever come across.

#8 Sorghum. The easiest grain. If you can get a cane press, a terrific dual use plant as well.

#9 Chinese chestnuts.  Very vigorous. Early producers. Processing is a little bit of a pain but can't beat the yield.

#10 Water lotus.  Dependent on water again but a beautiful and versatile food crop that can take a beating.