A Farmer Tells the Truth About Growing Your Own Food
Self-sufficiency. Food Prepping. Resilience. Sounds good, or does it?
Supply chain interruptions. Empty grocery store shelves. Rising food prices.
Like many of us, you may have been thinking more about food this year. Possibly, you've been wondering if you could grow some food yourself.
As a garden consultant, I talk to people who want to up their gardening game. In fact, they often want me to create a plan where they can grow most of their food in their yard or even on an acre or two.
These folks want me to tell them, "If you could only grow one vegetable to count on in hard times, what would it be?"
That's a tricky question.
Fifty years. That's how long I've been growing vegetables, including ten years as a full-time organic farmer. I love growing food and teaching others to garden, and I think everyone should learn to produce at least some vegetables. But it would be tough to produce most of your food.
How much food would you need to grow?
Assuming you are already a proficient gardener, your biggest challenge would not be growing enough lettuce, tomatoes, and carrots—tasty as vegetables are.
It would be hard to produce enough calories, fat, and protein. Here's an illustration of what I mean.
Randomly, I chose a man weighing 165 pounds to illustrate my point. I'm assuming he will be very active since he'll be working hard to grow his food. So our hardworking man will need 3588 calories each day if he's not going to lose weight.
How many calories, protein, vitamins, and fat can you grow?
I spent a lot of time looking up the nutrients in a wide variety of food using this database. For example, if we sort all the common vegetables to find the most calorie-dense ones, here are the results, per cup, cooked. I also list the grams of protein, fat, and any particularly significant vitamin or mineral.
Sweet potato,180 calories, 4 gr. protein, Vitamins C and B6
Potato,154 calories, 4.2 gr. protein, Vitamin C
Butternut squash, 82 calories, 1.8 gr. protein, Vitamin C
Not too promising! But look at the lettuce, tomatoes, and carrots.
Romaine lettuce, eight calories, .6 gr. protein, Vitamin A
Tomatoes, 30 calories, 1.4 gr. protein, Vitamin A
Carrots, 55 calories, 1.2 gr. protein, Vitamin A
Plants with more energy are grains, legumes, and seeds.
Corn, wheat, oats, maize, and barley are all grains. All beans, including soybeans, are legumes, like peas, lentils, and peanuts. We all know edible seeds include sunflowers, pumpkins, flax, etc.
Many grains, seeds, soybeans, and peanuts are precious because they contain substantial fat in the form of oil.
Legumes contain more protein per pound than any other plant. For instance, one cup of soybeans not only provides 296 calories but 31 grams of protein and 15 grams of needed fat. This would be comparable to chicken with 297 calories, 32 grams of protein, and 18 grams of fat.
Why not just plan to eat the chicken? Or the egg?
You certainly could, but it takes about 3.3 pounds of grain to produce one pound of meat and 2.3 pounds to produce a pound of meat. Animals use most of their calories to produce the needed energy. Cows and pigs convert grain to meat even less efficiently than chickens.
Most agrarian people consider meat an occasional treat and value it for the taste it provides to a large pot of vegetables or beans.
An interesting diet example from history
An article titled Food in Ireland 1600–1835 tells us what the poor people in the country routinely ate. The author states that a working man ate four pounds of potatoes for breakfast and lunch, flavored either with a pint of milk or some herring, depending on the season. No dinner, I'm afraid.
Milk was not always available and herring was a popular and cheap substitute, with oatmeal replacing or supplementing potatoes when they were scarce. They also ate what they could forage in the wild — berries, nuts, nettles, wild mushrooms and now and then a rabbit or bird. However these were all occasional rather than regularly eaten foodstuffs.
Outside of cities, little or no food was purchased in shops. Rural people either produced their own food or obtained it by foraging or hunting.
So, yes, we could live on a mostly potato diet.
However, the country people in Ireland supplemented their diet as often as possible. Read the rest of the article to learn the innovative and traditional Black Pudding ingredients.
So, how much protein is our gardener hoping to produce?
The data suggests this man needs 60 grams of protein per day x 365 = 21,900 total grams. Let's say he gets 50% of those grams from pinto beans, 25% from sweet potatoes, and the balance from meat, seeds, and other plants.
Pinto beans contain 96 grams of protein per pound x 115 dry pounds and should provide 10,950 grams of protein and 88,665 calories.
Sweet potatoes contain only 7.2 grams of protein per pound, so he'll need a whopping 782 pounds to equal 5,475 needed grams of protein. The good news is that amount of sweet potatoes would give him 304,980 calories or about 25% of the 1,309,620 calories he needs for an entire year!
How will the gardener avoid starvation? What's missing?
FAT! Fortunately, he will gain calories and protein if he can grow pumpkins, squash, or sunflowers for seeds. If he lives in a warm climate and has suitable soil, peanuts would be a winner since one pound provides 118 grams of protein and 2572 valuable calories.
It's an odd reversal for those living in food-abundant countries. Most of us try to cut back on calories and avoid too much fat, and it's challenging to consider growing, trading or foraging for over one million hard-earned calories each year.
I'm thankful I don't have to raise all that food and can focus on eggplants, okra, and kale—even if they're low in calories and protein.
So which subsistence foods would I grow in a real pinch?
Depending on the climate, I'd aim for sweet potatoes (the leaves are yummy, too), white potatoes, winter squash for the flesh and the seeds, beans to dry, especially soybeans, and I'd try for sunflower seeds and peanuts.
For variety and critical vitamin C, I'd plant broccoli, Brussels sprouts, cauliflower, cabbage, turnips for roots and greens.
If you're interested in supplementing your food supply, start learning how to garden now. I didn't get into an essential step: figuring out how many feet of each crop our hungry man would need to grow! That's a whole other article.
Does this mean you should not grow a garden?
Of course not! Growing your own low-calorie vegetables is a great way to eat more nutrient-dense fresh food. And the money you save can be spent to buy high-calorie commodities like beans, grains, and oil. Fortunately, they are relatively shelf-stable and easy to store.
I always keep at least a two-month supply of those staples on hand, along with a week's worth of water and an independent cooking method.
And don't forget you'll need to learn how to harvest, cook, and store all these foods, too.
Questions! Mistakes in my math are entirely possible, so let me know if you catch some. Suggestions?
And if, like me, you have plenty to eat today, let's be grateful and think kind thoughts for hardworking farmers around the world.
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