posted 8 years ago
If you really want to create a holistic system with hogs, chickens/turkeys/ducks, ruminants and space for a large market garden, I'd argue that 80 acres would be what you should be shooting for.
But it all depends on where you live and what your plans are. If you are planning to milk cows or goats for dairy products, then you need land. A rotational grazing pattern of, for example, a half-acre a day, would require you to have enough land to only graze them two or three times a year across that land. Thus, 60 acres of pasture, split into half-acre paddocks, would be 120 grazing days. If you ran your stock across the same land 3 times a year, you would have enough land for a year.
If you want to have income from timber, finished lumber and mushrooms, you'll need some forest (where you could also graze goats and hogs).
You'll need enough land to take advantage of natural water resources—creating a pond or enhancing a natural spring so that it supplies your needs. A pond would be a huge asset in raising ducks and perhaps even fish.
80 acres may actually be too small. Perhaps you'd want a quarter? Farmland varies in cost, but lets go with an estimate of $4000 an acre. If you bought an 80, that would be $320K. If some of that is woodland, wetland and otherwise less desirable land, maybe you could buy an 80 for a quarter-million. $250,000 at 4% interest works out to about $1200 a month on a 30 year mortgage. That's reasonable --- you think you could make $1200 a month to pay for it?
Joel Salatin has a lot of good stuff to say about renting land, and then getting multiple "crops" off of it. Plant your cash crop, with a grazable cover crop intermixed in the rows. Once you've harvested it, graze cattle, Run chickens behind them in an egg mobile. And then get a second cover crop planted so that you can graze the land a second time. That would be 4 passes over the same land in one year, and at the end of that year, the soil would be significantly improved, even though you've taken thousands of calories off of each acre.
How ambitious are you and how hard do you want to work?
"The rule of no realm is mine. But all worthy things that are in peril as the world now stands, these are my care. And for my part, I shall not wholly fail in my task if anything that passes through this night can still grow fairer or bear fruit and flower again in days to come. For I too am a steward. Did you not know?" Gandolf