Wheat

Prepare yourself for some rambling...

From everything I've read, hard red winter wheat seems to the best for baking bread. We'd plant it in September or October and harvest it around May. In the meantime, we could grow a cover crop to replenish the nutrients in the soil and prevent erosion. Another idea is to fence in the area so during the summer when we don't have wheat growing, we could grow something full of good protein like turnips and let the chickens and pigs forage on them while simultaneously fertilizing the land with their droppings. This is an interesting article about incredible harvests of wheat after peas were grown in the soil. Here's a great page that goes into more detail about this important grain. It's worth a read.

Anywho, If we're working long days building, growing, and raising animals, we're definitely going to want the easy sustenance bread provides. The recipe I use for one loaf of bread includes 2.5 cups of whole wheat flour. It easily feeds Jamie and I and if we have children someday, it would feed them too. (I'll be safe and say one loaf could feed a family of four to five.) Figuring I made one loaf every day of the year, I would need 912.5 cups of flour. I'm going to round that yearly amount up to 1000 cups to account for homemade pasta, crackers, biscuits, pancakes, etc.

According to the page I linked to, one bushel contains 60 lbs of wheat which grinds into 60 lbs of flour. 1000 cups of flour translates into about 17 bushels of wheat. Now for the tricky part... How to translate that into acres. I think if we treat the soil well we can attain numbers like 100 bushels per acre like the article I linked to says. BUT to stay safe, we should go with the US average of 43 bushels per acre. (I have a feeling we'll exceed this amount though, which will just provide a good item for bartering.) This means 2.5 families can grow their yearly wheat allowance on one acre of land. More specifically, each family will need 17,424 square feet, or each individual will need 8,712 square feet. Of course we'll communally tend the whole farm. These calculations are only so we can figure out how much land we'll need to adequately feed the people involved.

Now to calculate how many milk goats, pigs, and chickens per couple and per acre... Any other livestock visions? Meat goats, turkeys, ducks, rabbits? How neat would it be to raise bison?!

ps. Are we going to use tractors or traditional draft horses or is there a way around both of those options?