A Half-Acre Farm

Medium-effort level; mostly self-sufficient. A little more work but robust and productive. Some outside feed may need to be bought.

Power Possibilities

• Passive solar grow houses

Animals

• Bovine

Not possible with so little space.

• Ovine/Swine

Three pigs are feasible on this reduced farm space. Feed kitchen leftovers, crop wastes, etc.

You can buy or trade for weaners (a pig that has just been weaned and weighs less than 40 kgs) which will grow from 40 to 240 pounds each in about 6 months. You might think about “sequence buying” weaners throughout the year to allow for the most efficient feeding programs.

• Poultry

Even on just a half-acre, you can manage a small chicken operation of about 20 layers annually. Just 20 hens will produce about 400 dozen eggs per year.

If you’re raising for meat, you can expect about 500 pounds of meat per year from 25 broilers that are allowed to free-range. You’ll see a spike in their growth when forage food is in season and abundant—yielding about four times the amount you’ll get the rest of the year.

Aquaculture

Two aquaculture ponds of one-sixteenth an acre each can produce a polyculture of about 375 to 500 pounds of fish per year (3,000 to 4,000 fish per pond acre), with no outside feed added. Its banks will also produce fodder crops for fish and pig feed.

Farm Layout

On a half-acre, zones are less defined than they are on an acre farm, for example, but there should be more organization than in the quarter-acre example, and principals of design remain the same.

Your house should use a passive design, immediately surrounded by herb spirals and mandala gardens (only 3 of about 130 square feet this time). At this scale, you can expect mandalas to yield about 1,200 pounds of food per growing season and herb spirals about 60 pounds.

You’ll want to account for at least 3,000 square feet of covered crops in green or shade houses.

Your food forest in this layout will account for a one-eighth acre. At that scale, you can expect 1,500+ pounds of food yield when it reaches maturity. The waste from it will feed your pigs well.

Place pig housing beside the ponds for easy fertilization when needed.

On another eighth-acre you should make use of banana circles if you’re in the tropics. If in a temperate climate, you can opt for root crops in this space. Let pigs root through after harvest.

Again, here, a black soldier fly digester could be a great asset.

BSF Composting

I’ll discuss BSF composting in detail in a later class, but here’s a quick intro…

The black soldier fly is a native, non-pest insect whose larvae chew through organic remnants, helping turn organic material into compost, so are useful for managing small and large amounts of biosolids and animal manure. The larvae eat waste and produce compost, and once they move on into the pupae stage, they are excellent sources of nutrition for chickens, pigs, fish, etc.

A BSF digester is basically a compost bin that actively introduces the species and allows for them to crawl out when they reach the pupae stage. A 20-gallon tub would be the right size for typical kitchen scraps, but you’ll produce more organic waste than a typical household, so you might want to start with a 50- or even 100-gallon tub from the get-go. Simply insert a ramp from the bottom of the bin (where the compost materials are thrown) that leads up to a small collection basin for the pupae. They will walk themselves up there, where you can collect them for feed.

If you’re in a warm climate, you won’t have to do much to introduce them into the system, the odors from your days-old compost will attract a female who will lay her eggs there of her own accord. However, you do have to give her a place to place the eggs, and cardboard is perfect for this; place a stack of corrugated cardboard on the inside wall of the compost bin, and your BSF digester should be up and running in just a few weeks. (You can transfer the eggs from the cardboard to the wall of the bin and when they hatch the larvae will fall right into the compost.)