How to Fit Five Acres into One

hey nerds farmer Jesse here today we're going to discuss how to grow a lot of food on a little land because you may very well have more land than you think you do or you may be looking for far more land than you actually need so let's do [Music] [Applause] it all right so occasionally when I tell people especially like larger scale Growers that our entire growing space is about 3/4 of an acre there is a bit of an eye roll as if it's a little bit more than a backyard garden but when I explain that we cram roughly 3 to 5 acres worth of production in that space their eyes unroll it's very weird looking but the reality is that space does not dictate your level of production as much as good design smart planning and proper usage does like if your goal is to grow more food chances are that you don't need more space you need to utilize the space that you have a little bit better so I want to talk about some of the ways that we do that here on on our farm and how it could look on basically any scale but first I want to tell you about the folks who made this video possible and in many ways our style of farming possible BCS America BCS two wheel tractors are designed and built in Italy where smallscale farming has been a way of life for Generations uh discover the beauty of BCS on your farm with PTO driven implements for soil working shredding cover crops spreading compost mowing under fences not over them learn that one the hard way clearing snow and more all powered by a single geard driven machine that's tailored to the size and scale of your operation tractors and attachments are on sale now find sale pricing and your nearest dealer at BCS am.com okay so one of the big ways we make our farm more compact starts with the use of permanent beds now this has been talked about adnasium over the years by any and every grower but I just want to quickly underline the value of keeping your growing space in the same spot year after year first for clarity when I say that we use permanent beds I'm not saying those beds with wooden Borders or whatever those are fine too of course but they would cost us a pretty penny for our like 130 beds our beds are also 4T x 50 ft long which is 1.22 M by 15.24 m or however the heck you metric folks measure such things and the beds pretty much stay put year after year and crop after crop the reason this is even worth pointing out is that a very common garden design and in fact the garden method I learned to farm with is to till a whole garden up every spring and sometimes in the late summer and rebuild beds or rows every single time but with permanent beds sometimes called semi-permanent beds you can skip the whole tillage thing allowing you to get into your ground earlier which will help you maximize space however by keeping the beds in one place you can also work extensively on decompaction the soils and creating a lovely seed bed year after year and every time you need it uh moreover having the growing space in exactly the same place every season allows for better planning more efficient fertilization because you're not spreading compost for instance where your Pathways might ultimately be and less time spent working the soil uh it does require you to choose a pathway management strategy and I suggest watching this video for ideas on that but Pathways can also add a lot to the Garden in terms of nutrients from wood chips for instance or pollinators from living Pathways and so on uh and that brings me to the second thing that allows us to fit so much production into a small area less soil work in a tillage system you often going from one crop to another with well something like a tiller uh this not only requires significant labor and sometimes fuel depending on the acreage but it often requires a rest period for the soil if there was any raw organic matter worked into the soil when you work something raw into the soil it takes time for the soil to break that down and it ties up nitrogen then maybe you were losing crops to weeds brought up from deep in the soil and exposed to the ideal growing conditions provided by a tiller uh if your time is being spent cultivating then it is not not being spent planting and harvesting perhaps needless to say harvesting and planting should be the majority of the work of a farmer and will greatly help you maximize your space because not fighting weeds maximizes your time another thing that tillage requires is for the soil to not be too moist so often times at least here in the East where we have very wet soils up until March or even April or sometimes even May making it borderline impossible to work the soil because if you work the soil too wet you have other issues like compaction we can plant crops very early because I am not tilling I am often planting crops in the field by the end of February while tillage farmers are still waiting for enough dry days to even start the garden prep process uh another technical thing that we do is that we don't just grow one crop per bed per year in fact something like 75% of our beds see at least two crops per season uh around 50% see three and around 30% have four or more crops in a single growing year uh and that's not including cover crops which is done on about 70% % of our growing space at least once in the growing season but it isn't just the number of crops that makes me suggest that we're cramming roughly 5 acres into one it's also the spacing between the rows you see in a row cropping scenario you are often basing your space between the rows of crops on the width of your tractor wheelbase or on your planter or whatever it is so that sort of farming tends to require a lot more space so an example might be carrots depending on Whose guidance you take a lot of row crop Farmers plant their carrots in rows that are 18 to 24 in apart but by contrast our rows of carrots are only 4 to 6 in apart so for every 15 ft which would be three of our wide growing beds we can fit 24 rows of carrots and that same space of row Cropper might only fit 7 to 10 rows of carrots that's less than half the number of rows in the same amount of space and that same thing applies to a lot of if not most of the other crops that we grow one other bonus benefit to Growing intensively is that by decreasing the amount of land that has to be in crop ground we can increase the amount of natural habitat we have around for Birds bugs snakes all the things that help us with production so not only can we fit more food into a smaller space but more ecology to boot of course not all crops can be crammed together quite the same as lettuce or carrots or whatever uh take tomatoes and peppers for instance for those there is often wasted space on the sides of the beds that is where some of our basic interplanting techniques as I described in many a video on this channel come into play uh we may use that space to grow a crop of beets or green onions or lettuce just to ensure that we're getting the most out of that growing space that we have we're not wasting any so how that works is that we will plant the longer season crop either directly into a crop that's about to come out called relay cropping or we will sew a crop next to the longer season crop after we plant it so while that longer season crop matures we can have another cash crop on its way take for instance these super baby carrots you see here I leave a 14in wide strip in the middle of the 4ft wide bed so that I can transplant our Tomatoes into these carrots right before the carrots start to come out in April that's a relay crop that just maximizes the amount of space I'm using in our tunnels and in our tomato beds infrastructure and equipment in fact are also some things to consider when it comes to maximizing space or cramming a buch into a small area like the Rimmel green houses that we use or the Farmers friend cat tunnels that we use extend our season quite a bit as discussed in this video here and by extending our season and growing intensively in these tunnels we ultimately make better use of our space in terms of equipment when using like larger tractors not only is more infrastructure required to store and work on them but valuable crop ground is often gobbled up just by space to turn the thing around at the end of a row so we only have to leave four or 5 ft at the end of our beds to turn around which limits not only the wasted space but the space that we have to keep mowed and cleaned the BCS tractor is great for this because I can turn it around in just a few feet depending on what attachment I'm using I'm going to do a video soon touching on some of the smaller scale stuff that can be used to fill out all the unused or hardto use space on a farm like these grow bags or this new Garden socks kit I got that I'm excited to experiment with like we use our space pretty well and there is still a lot of space on our farm being wasted growing better not bigger is an important thing to keep in mind always and may also allow for you to use some of that space that outdoor space for something other than growing food like our soccer field something that to me at least is just as important anyway I want to be clear that I do not think small farms can or necessarily should replace all large Farms my goal here is to say that small farms when managed well can be bigger than they seem small farms can produce an enormous amount of food and small farms may be the only option financially that many of us can or possibly should access there are notably countries like the Netherlands and Germany that provide fairly impressive models for what small farms can do where they are both relatively small in space limited countries but also in the top five leading exporters of food in the world amazingly think about the size of the Netherlands you you could fit nearly 17 Netherlands in the state of Texas and if you could scale the production by that same percentage oh boy and so I'll leave it at that for now pick up a copy of the living soil handbook to support this work at noil gor.com or a hat or other merch I also highly recommend Ben Hartman's new book The Lean microfarm it spends a lot of time on this particular subject and I'll leave a link in the show notes for that become a patreon member at patreon.com Growers and get discounts on seeds and stuff like that uh there may also be some farm tour tickets still available for Ru draft Farmstead here at the farm if you want to come see it there's like three events I think or just hit that super thanks button that works too otherwise like this video If you like this video If you're not subscribed to this channel make sure to hit the Subscribe button if you are subscribed you're awesome thanks for watching we'll see you later [Music] [Applause] [Music] bye it's already record oh nice [Laughter] [Music] [Music] [Music] sick

Channel: No-Till Growers

Views: 72,330

Keywords: growing plants, regenerative, organic, no till, no dig, small garden, gardening, market gardening, farming, crops, row crop

Id: zU_hP8x5D34

Length: 10min 57sec (657 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 25 2024