This trend for growing your own; how big is it? How long will it last? If it's big, and if it lasts, what does it mean for how we organise our land?
The numbers for England
England is made up of 13.028 million hectares, that's about 2171.33 square meters per person, or 46x46m.
It breaks down like this.
Type of land use | % of our space | Total area (hectares) | Area per person (sq metres) | That's about | ||
| Urban | 19.15% | 2.49m | 415.81 | 20x20m | ||
| crops and bare fallow | 30.05% | 3.9m | 652.49 | 26x26m | ||
| grazing and grasses | 37.80% | 4.83m | 805.12 | 28x28m | ||
| forest and woodland | 8.50% | 1.1m | 184.56 | 14x14m | ||
| other | 5.13% | .67m | 111.39 | 11x11m | ||
So for a community of 100 people, it might be reasonable to use about this much land:
10 acres for housing
36 acres for all your crops, animals, meadowlands and so on
4.5 acres for your woodlands
3 acres of 'other'
and some space for natural water.
That would be representing the macro land use pattern at the micro level.
This data all comes from Defra . The url seems to change quite a lot so if this is dead just google "defra land use" and you should find their spreadsheets in no time.
Andy Collier calculated that a person needs 0.1 acres to be self sufficient for food, or 0.5 acres if you're going to grow the food for your animals. 0.1 acres is 400m2, or 20x20m, and 0.5 acres is 2023m2, or 45x45m. The above land distribution gives you 0.36 acres per person.
Incidentally, 36 acres of farmland is about 14.6 hectares so should be eligible for some farm subsidy...
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