A Quarter-Acre Farm
A high-intensity, small urban farm. More expensive to build and requires more maintenance, equipment, and know-how to run, but, once functioning, they are amazingly productive.
Power Possibilities
- Passive solar grow houses
Animals
- Bovine
Not possible with so little space.
- Ovine/Swine
Not possible with so little space.
- Poultry
6 chicken layers and 6 broilers.
6 duck hens and a drake with a small paddling pool.
Between these two flocks, you’ll produce more than enough eggs and meat for your own consumption with enough left over for selling.
Aquaculture
With a full aquaponics system, you can grow vegetables along with fish. These highly efficient systems allow you to recapture valuable nutrients to feed your poultry and fertilize your gardens (see illustrations below). A well-designed system can be maintained in less than two hours a day.
A typical starter system consists of two 100-gallon fish tanks, plus two 1,200-grow hole raft systems. This will allow for 500 fish twice a year (times two), yielding 2,000 pounds of fish per year. It allows for the simultaneous growth of 2,400 heads of lettuce (about half a pound each), which are renewed monthly, for a total of 14,000 pounds of lettuce.
Building A Mandala Garden
Kneel on the spot you will be working in (or standing if you construct raised beds) and lay out a mulch garden all around you, leaving only the spot you need to turn around on while working and a path to walk back out un-mulched.
Size the width of the beds to so that you can just reach the middle of the bed from both the inside and outside (often 4 feet or more).
This can provide 130 square feet of growing space that, if you plan your beds correctly, will require a tiny fraction of the work, water, weeding, compost, and space than conventional field-growing methods. In fact, conventional row-growing methods could take over 1,000 square feet to grow as much produce, using much more expensive off-farm resources.
Using intensive inter-planting with companion plants to both protect and nourish the small garden, this space can feed one person for a growing season.
When you get experienced at building them, you can prepare, plant, and harvest them in less than an hour’s work.
Aquaponics systems can be lucrative additions to all farm systems, but on the farm-scale we’re talking about here, it would be difficult to achieve full self-sufficiency in food or income. On a larger scale, self-sufficiency from the system is more realistic and the operation could even be expanded to a commercial level.
Farm Layout
With a single acre or less, your need to be economical with space is even more important, but because of the compact nature of your enterprise, zones are less strictly defined, as you want to take advantage of every nook and cranny regardless of its would-be zone. For this reason, I’m not dividing up these smaller farm ideas into zones, merely outlining the concerns you’ll need to consider on each.
This kind of operation can be set up in the equivalent of a backyard, so, again, the zones we’ve previously discussed in terms of farm layout are moot here. In this example, you really just have Zone 1 to deal with.
Just how far you go with such a small setup is up to you. For example, if this aquaponics grow system seems too complex and more than you want to maintain, you could replace it with an eighth-acre of food forest, which requires minimal effort and maintenance, plus greatly expanded poultry.
You can still get about four mandala gardens out of this size space, and a single mandala garden provides enough vegetables and greens for a single person per season, so four is adequate even for a family.
Remember, mandala or keyhole mulch gardens are extremely space-efficient and can be easily made by simply selecting a spot close to your home, ideally right outside your back door (if the aspect is suitable) to ensure ease of access.
It’s possible to grow something at nearly every time of year, no matter the season. If you live in a colder area and don’t want to live on cold-weather crops like cabbage all winter, you could plant two mandala mulch gardens in summer and take the winter off.
You’ll want to account for about 3,000 square feet of covered crops in green or shade houses.
Small fruit and berry bushes can be placed in any remaining space. Raspberries, blackberries, dwarf apples, and more can all be easily grown in temperate climates and dwarf or heavily pruned mango, avocados, banana circles work well in warm climates.
A black soldier fly (BSF) digester would be useful to you on such a small farm.