Get a terrier or better still 2 I have a terrier/springer spaniel cross. Great company and may be useful to breed from. They'll keep everything out including deer & people.
That's a beautiful dog. I like Great Daines the most personally but I can see the appeal of spaniels, my friend use to have one they are very energeitc and attentive, which is nice. I like Great Daines because they a a bit dopey.
Lol! Back when I drank, I'd take you up on that offer. Btw, not to indice any hunger , I came home a litle bit ago with fresh seasoned breadcrumbs for the crabcakes.:eek: My mouth is watering now.:eek:
Another growth industry is the Pawn ( not porn ) shop. There is a TV program in the UK of a pawn shop somewhere in the USA. They get in everything from old cannons to pictures, jewellery, rifles in fact anything that is worth a few bucks. Great characters and good for a laugh. They have a load of knowledge what things are worth or usually know somebody somewhere that knows
Hmmm OK, but the question was how many acres does it take to sustain a typical family. Not how many acres one guy is capable of working.
yeah, he raised a family a wife 3 boys and two girls on 140 acres. Nothing has changed except he's replaced a few horses. Those Amish plows last forever. I assume by typical family you mean a family with no computers, no cell phones, no TV as a matter of fact no electricty. He did have a diesel generator in the barn, but that was just so the boys could sneak out there and do bad things. Otherwise I have family in Iowa who have been farming for years, they started with 140 acres and now have 3,000. Now that 3,000 acres supports one family, but it has been real dicey a couple of times, especially when they diversified into hogs. Almost lost the whole farm.
How much food you are able to extract from a garden depends on the amount of labor , technology and thought you put into it. For some good ideas check out Mel Bartholomew's, "Square Foot Garden" book. Or Elliot Coleman's "Four Season Harvest". Coleman grows a market garden 11 months of the year in Maine. The first thing I did was build an 8 foot high fence to keep the deer and elk out. I witnessed a standing deer jump it. A bull elk rather than jump will walk right through barbed wire bending the metal fence post. My fence uses juniper posts and wire net but the elk will get in though the weak point, the gate. I have made a few modifications and it is now not worth the effort for the big critters to try to get in. But they were not my big problem. The first growing season I grew great German Butterball potatoes, sugar beets, cabbage and lettuce. The second season nothing. The rodents came. They are not impossible to deal with but extremely time consuming. I could poison but I do not want to kill the hawks and coyotes. A friend of mine who gardens two acres by hand uses dogs and the exhaust from a motor vehicle to deal with his rodent problem. But that solution is not for me. I have designed a new system that will produce more food in a much smaller space and over time will pay for itself. It does have a high up front cost but will save on labor. If you really want to go high tech you look into greenhouses and even indoor growing under artificial lights.
check out the urban gardening project in Milwaukee. They use hoop houses. The good thing about hoop houses is they can be taken down and relocated very easily when plans change. It's all 100% organic and they use compost around the outside edge of the house to heat it in the winter. Mostly vegetables and herbs, but they do have a few goats and turkey. They have a little store that opens on Sat and they sell out every week. And that's just one neighborhood. Imagine duplicating that all over the country and that's a whole lot of diesel that won't be bought.