Dot Tyne assesses how, with hard work and planning, a smaller holding might just achieve self-sufficiency in terms of food for the family and looks at how much land you need to be self-sufficient and how to plan it out.
See also:
The Self-sufficient Garden
Firstly let’s ask the question: what actually constitutes a sustainable smallholding? There is no actual legal distinction between a farm and a smallholding – both are agricultural holdings – but generally a smallholding is considered to be somewhat larger than an allotment plot, but usually less than 50 acres. Anything bigger than this might be thought of as a farm. However, I would argue that smallholding as an activity is more about mindset than purely an area-based concept. By definition, a smallholding is an intensively managed small farm, but would four acres be considered a smallholding if it carried an intensive pig unit? On 4 acres you might feasibly house over a thousand sows! Definitely a small area, but not a smallholding as we would understand it. However, neither would someone with a large back garden, a couple of hens and a pet pig be classified as a smallholder. At the opposite end of the scale would be Laverstoke Park, a 2,500-acre holding run by ex-Formula One world champion, Jody Scheckter. He fully embraces the smallholding ethos, despite the acreage involved.
Here at Ty’n y Mynydd our total area adds up to around 140 acres. However, over two thirds of that is rough mountain grazing, suitable only for keeping a limited number of sheep. Of the remainder, 22 acres are at home and 13 are rented from a neighbouring smallholder. Despite the apparent size of the holding, I would argue that this is very definitely smallholding – from our home acres we are almost entirely self-sufficient in food products, and our farming neighbours undoubtedly consider us a little quaint!
HOW MUCH LAND DO YOU NEED TO BE SELF-SUFFICIENT IN MOST THINGS AND PAY THE BILLS?
This is probably one of the commonest questions we’re asked! Taken all round, I believe that we could quite comfortably provide for ourselves and our family on 15 acres of reasonable ground. Some people manage very well with a lot less, but much of this is due to location.
15 acres in Suffolk cannot be directly compared with the same area in Snowdonia.
Land on the eastern side of the country is generally more productive than the western half of the nation, but the latter is often milder (particularly in coastal regions), and has higher rainfall. Latitude will also affect weather and light conditions, with much more winter daylight in the South. However, summer daylight hours increase the further north you go. In reality there isn’t anything you can do to change these factors, unless you don’t yet have any land, in which case you can bear them in mind when looking for some suitable property.
Before planning exactly how to achieve the goal of self-sufficiency on your holding, it is important to look at any other commitments you may have, and how they will affect what you are able to do.
A lot depends on financial responsibilities such as mortgages or loans. In many cases it’s not what you do with your land that counts, but how much you’ve had to borrow to do it! It’s a sad fact that if your property is mortgaged, then the income from your smallholding is unlikely to cover the repayments and provide a living (even a self-sufficient one!). I am not saying it is impossible, but it would be very hard. Part-time work away from the holding may well be an option to help pay the bills, but it will take you away from where you need to be.
Self-sufficiency, if it is to be successful, is a full-time occupation.
A better option would be to explore the possibilities of working from home. This will give the flexibility to organise work around your smallholding commitments, and means that you can take a break from time to time to pop outside and deal with things that inevitably crop up unexpectedly. Hopefully, your smallholding activities will generate some revenue too.
SO, HOW WOULD WE PLAN OUR 15 ACRES?
CATTLE
The cow is the hub of the self-sufficient holding – the main reason for keeping her being to provide milk for home consumption.
To ensure a year-round supply you will need two cows. During the summer months, two cows will require around 1½ acres of grazing land. If this is strip grazed (and I would recommend this as the most efficient way to manage cattle on a small acreage) then, in a good growing season, there may even be some ‘spare’ grass on this field that can be cut for hay. I suggest that the cows be housed over the winter months – from early November right through to the beginning of May. Cattle can be outwintered, but on smaller holdings it’s generally better to get them off the land. On average, a cow will consume about half a small bale of hay per day during the housed period, and you must budget to feed your cows for at least 180 days of the year. A hundred bales per cow per year should do it, allowing a bit extra in case of a late spring.
It is quite reasonable to expect a yield of at least one hundred small bales of hay per acre if your land is in reasonably good heart and has had muck applied to it. A modest amount of artificial fertiliser will increase yields, if need be. Working on these figures, 2 acres will be sufficient to provide hay for both of the cows.
Two cows will produce two valuable calves every year, assuming that you have used a beef bull on them. In the peak of lactation you’ll have far more milk than you need for the house and more than enough to bucket-rear the two calves, so buy-in some extra calves to rear on the surplus. Ideally, source them from a local dairy farm, but you may have to pay a lot for them. Another option is to find a local livestock dealer and ask them to find a few calves on your behalf. Try to get calves that match your home-bred ones as closely as possible so that you have a tidy looking group when you come to sell them. The price of calves will rise as the spring progresses, so aim to have your own cows calving fairly early, so you can buy-in before the price goes up. When we started keeping cattle we were buying calves for around £75 each, but now a decent beef cross heifer calf is going to set you back around £130–£160. To some extent you get what you pay for, but if you have to pay more than that there will not be much profit in it at the end of the day! Rear the calves indoors through the summer, and aim to sell them in the autumn when they are about six months old. In this way you should be able to rear between six and eight calves from your two cows. With careful planning you could almost double this number by rearing two successive batches. Ask your friendly livestock dealer to find a buyer for you – he will have much better contacts than you, and is bound to know someone looking for a bunch of heifers just like yours! Prices vary considerably, but you could reasonably expect to get in the region of £350 each for them.
If you decide to run one or two of the calves on for beef, keep a couple of the poorest, i.e. the ones that would have spoiled the look of the batch you were selling. These can go out to grass at about a year old, and graze ahead of the sheep flock. Be aware, though, of the additional demands that these extra mouths will make on your hay stocks in the following winter.
A gallon of milk a day for home consumption can be valued at around £1.60 per day, or approximately 35p per litre. That’s much cheaper than you could buy it, and, in your accounts, worth £584 a year as a ‘non-cash’ receipt. You will of course be gaining a lot more than this, as you’ll be able to make your own butter, yoghurt, ice cream and some cheese. The butter alone may save you £30 per month in grocery bills.
THE VEGETABLE GARDEN
The vegetable garden will take up about 1 acre of land. This is ample space to grow all the vegetables and soft fruit required, and there should also be enough room for a small orchard (with beehives, of course) and a polytunnel. This is the area of the holding that can be managed very intensively to provide the highest value crops. Follow my plan for year-round cropping and you won’t go far wrong! Expenditure on seed need not be much more than £80 per annum, but the value of crops harvested will exceed this by far. Account for the vegetables harvested for home use as non-cash receipts. Keep the paper value fairly low, although it needs to be high enough to offset the amount spent on seed. Something like £8–£10 per month would be appropriate.
Grow plenty of soft fruit – it is a high-value crop, and surpluses can be bartered or sold at premium rates (or made into wine!). It is worth investigating what outlets might be available to you well in advance – car-boot sales, farmers’ markets, and country markets (formerly WI) are all potentially useful outlets for both vegetable produce and plants. By keeping your overheads to a minimum you might be able to undercut larger producers while still making a good return. The alternative is to ‘add value’ and charge a premium rate, but the costs and risks may be higher.
WOODLAND
Another acre of the holding should be planted with fast-growing trees. Not only will this provide an interesting diversity of habitat, but hopefully a reliable source of renewable fuel. It could attract grant funding too! Willows can be coppiced every three to five years, so you might cut down a quarter of your trees each year. Modern willow varieties specifically bred for coppicing can yield over 18 tonnes per hectare. Allowing for variations in site and management of the woodland, it would probably be reasonable to expect to harvest around 1½–2 tonnes per annum from your trees. This could amount to more than one-third of your yearly fuel requirements for heating and hot water. Poplar is another species that is also suitable for short rotation coppicing, but it makes very poor quality timber.
SHEEP
A sheep flock should form an integral part of the plan for the holding. Sheep are fairly easy to care for on a day-to-day basis, but do require brief periods of fairly intensive seasonal labour, for example at shearing and lambing time. A breeding flock of twenty-five ewes would be a good size for a 15-acre holding. One could reasonably expect to produce around forty lambs from a flock of this size, a good number of which can be sold off the farm as a cash crop. Some may be retained as flock replacements, and four to five will be needed for the domestic deep freeze. Working on the assumption that the sheep lamb from mid February to mid March, a reasonable proportion of the lambs could be fattened off grass from about twenty weeks of age. Various options exist for marketing lambs – the easiest being to take them to market or to sell them direct to the local abattoir.
Both are easy options for the smallholder and do not need much expenditure of time or money. You could reasonably expect to get around £60 for a finished lamb, and, with thirty-five to sell, a revenue of £2,100 could be generated. However, these are only vague figures, as prices fluctuate so much. Selling direct to the consumer is a road that smallholders often consider, but beware – it is not necessarily a road to rich pickings. There are a lot of additional costs that you have to bear if you market this way, and the premium price you receive may only just cover all the extra outlay. A lot depends on the proximity of your nearest abattoir and finding the services of a friendly butcher. Lambs for home consumption can be valued at £30–£45.
Twenty-five ewes will eat about a hundred small bales of hay each winter, so another acre must be allowed for growing hay for the sheep. Grazing for the sheep in early summer, while the hayfields are still closed off, would be over about 5 acres, rotating regularly between fields. Later, after the hay is cut, more grazing land will be available, with aftermath for fattening lambs.
CEREAL CROPS
If the land is suitable, a couple of acres of cereals should be grown in order to reduce the need for bought-in concentrates. It’s not worth trying to grow wheat for domestic use on a small acreage, but barley is a pretty reliable crop for livestock feed, and, as it can be fed whole to ruminants, there is no need for machinery to roll the grain; oats would be better in the west. Growing 2 acres of cereals could provide you with as much as 4 tonnes of feed quality grain. The biggest difficulty with this is going to be finding a contractor prepared to harvest just 2 acres. It is possible, although probably harder in the cereal-growing areas of the country, where everyone will have huge machinery.
In predominantly livestock areas a number of farmers do grow a few acres of cereals, so local contractors may have more appropriately sized equipment. There are two alternatives to the combine harvester though: one is to cut the corn yourself using an old-fashioned binder (if you can find one), or a scythe (if you can’t). The resulting sheaves should be stooked in the field for a while before being carted into storage. It can be fed on the sheaf, with the uneaten portion of the straw being thrown under the animals for bedding. The other option would be to cut the crop with an ordinary hay mower before it was fully ripe, and then bale and wrap it to make whole-crop silage. In this case it could be used to completely replace both the hay and concentrate needed by the sheep flock prior to lambing, and some could be given to the cows in early lactation. This considerably reduces the consumption of your limited hay stocks, making the raising of a few beef animals a more realistic proposition. Any cereal crop can be undersown with grass. In this way, as soon as the crop is harvested, the grass grows up and the land can be quickly returned to grazing use. Alternatively, a catch-crop such as stubble turnips could be grown after the corn, with the land being returned to pasture thereafter. A different area would be used for growing the cereal crop each year.
PIGS
I haven’t mentioned pigs yet. The trouble with pigs is that while it’s relatively easy to make a profit on a few, it’s much harder to break even with larger numbers, due to the reliance on bought-in feed. The difficulty lies in resisting the temptation to increase pig numbers after having done rather well out of the first few!
However, you will want to keep some pigs to provide pork for home consumption, and also to dig the spare plot in the kitchen garden. So, for the purposes of this plan, pig keeping will be limited to fattening bought-in weaners, costing around £35 each. Keep them on a spare veg plot over the summer months and in a snug sty during the winter, and feed them primarily waste vegetables and weedings from the garden, together with spare milk from the dairy, supplemented with a bit of bought-in feed as necessary (or what home-grown barley you might have left).
Assuming that your family is as hungry as ours, four pigs will be needed for home consumption, with two being for pork and the other pair for bacon, ham, and sausages. These pigs will take from twenty to twenty-five weeks to reach a slaughterable weight, so you can feasibly rear two batches each year. That gives four pigs to sell in order to recoup the cost of raising the whole lot, and make a bit more besides. The most profitable thing to do with a pig you want to sell is not to waste time cutting it up into joints and chops and so forth, but to turn the whole thing into sausages. Work it out for yourself if you don’t believe me – good quality traditional sausages retail at around £7 per kilo, and you get an awful lot of sausages from a whole pig!
POULTRY
Another thing I haven’t yet mentioned is poultry. On this 15-acre holding, just a handful of hens will be kept to provide eggs for home consumption, so very little space will be required. They would either be kept in a run somewhere in the kitchen garden, or they could free range around the yard and buildings – I have allowed 1 acre out of the 15 for house, yard and buildings. A dozen hens should ensure that there are a few spare eggs to sell (for at least £1 for half a dozen), which should cover the cost of any bought-in poultry food. If they free range, they will be able to find quite a bit of their own food anyway. Keeping lots of hens in order to generate more revenue through egg sales may seem like a good idea, but you’ll find them very costly to keep during long periods off lay.
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