minimum space for 100% food self-sufficiency

Imagine you want to get the entirety of your food from your own indoors setup (either a big grow-room, or a series of small grow-boxes). In this thread we attempt to calculate the minimum possible area (walking space included) that would be required for such a purpose. For a starter, we'll need to know which plants are able to produce the highest amount of calories in the minimum amount of time while occupying the smallest amount of space. In other words, we need to rank plants by their "caloric efficiency", which I define as (e*n)/(t*s), where: e = amount of calories contained in 1 edible unit of that plant (ex.: 1 fruit, 1 root, 1 leaf, ...) n = number of edible units present (on average) on a fully grown plant t = time required for that plant to regenerate all of its edible units after being harvested s = minimum volume of space required for that plan to fully grow. After doing that, we'll do something similar, but this time replacing "e" with some specific nutrient (ex.: vitamin A), and then do the same with all others nutrients so we'll get a list of the best possible plants to grow in the minimum possible space.

Let's start it up with potatoes. Wikipedia gives a yield of 44.3T/ha/year = 4.43kg/m², and a food energy value of 870kcal/kg. This gives a required area between 2500×365/(4.43×870)=236m² and 3500×365/(4.43×870)=332m² Cultivating inside, you could probably increase the yield by harvesting twice or thrice a year, and by reducing pests. This would come however at greater price in investment and work. In terms of vitamins, a pure potato-based diet would come with a deficiency in vitamins B2, B7 and B12, as well as minerals.

>>12393 https://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=139314 yeah IDK 8k seems be a bit high but its definitely well above 3k for actually working (on average) https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-11864290

Like the other guy said, potatoes for high yield of calories and some other nutrients. Eat the skin, too. You would need high-yield greens, probably kale, to provide a ton of vitamins. For protein you would need beans and/or peas. For B-vitamins some kind of grain like wheat or whatever. Tomatoes and berries to round it out.

>>12378 imo indoors is just not the way to go easy food production requires space, because then you can do bullshit like: graze 2-3 cows, for net 1000 lbs/meat/year tada, 90% of calories done, for free. (for cost efficiency, the best method is actually growing out suckling pigs and slaughtering before winter, you should net around 300 lbs/pig) if you insist on indoors, probably your best bet is a factory-farm setup with pigs in stalls. feed them expired trash from a local grocery (make a deal to buy it cheap, not uncommon), and enjoy. >inb4 not the spirit of the thread indoor grow-ops suck and cost a soykafton of money just buy 5-10 acres and plant corn/potatoes, way easier than managing some indoor setup hell, potatoes will replant themselves if you are lazy about digging them up

finally, a thread to post this stuff. a bit questionable since i've not been able to find any other reports like these (in searx). tldr: pyramid = more yield on the same area than the usual setup, & it's not about storeys.

>>12397 What about shellfish? Potatoes are a complete protein if you eat the ludicrous amount people are suggesting for pure kcal (and soybeans/ bean+grain are still options), so the primary concern is vitamin B12. I can't find the value for their freshwater cousins (which could likely live in a hydroponics setup under another micronutrient crop) but a single saltwater oyster is %333 your RDA for B12.

>>12400 I ... wasn't thinking about how hydroponics actually work, a filter-feeder wouldn't make sense there. Myy point that shellfish are a space-efficient source of b vitamins still stands through.

anybody would have something to add to pic related?

>>12397 >cost efficiency >space efficiency Rabbits are the best here. Rabbits can be raised on virtually nothing, just require grass and may do best with a little supplemental feed, and don't require anywhere near the space of a cow or pig. Whats more, a single doe will produce about 200lbs of meat yearly, and you can comfortably raise a doe and her kits in 20 square feet in a colony et up, or alternatively raise them in cages for even less space. Some people do it completely indoors as well. If you are willing to eat the whole animal including the brains and marrow, especially if raw, you get every virtually every nutrient the human body needs.

>>12403 rabbits are a good alternative i'd honestly completely forgotten about them because my fiance is a big softy and doesn't want to farm them you listed the pros for rabbits nicely, so ill point out a few (minor) cons: 1) you have to do a lot more killing and gutting 2) you have to breed them 3) the hides are less useful (small) 4) limited fat yield (uncertain if this is true, but the lard from pigs is great for cooking) and a pro that you missed: rabbits / other small food-animals do NOT require refrigeration or freezing to run, since you can eat the entire animal before spoilage and slaughter-as-you-go (vs pigs/cows, require meat storage of some sort) alternative small animal: chickens pros: small, easy to handle, trivial to buy chicks for initial grow-out, easy to manage, you get eggs for free cons: chickenshit, rooster crowing, feathers instead of hides >>12400 idk, haven't read much about shellfish i know outdoor prawn farms are a thing, and are fairly viable IF you are in a warm environment IIRC in 3rd world countries they grow-out prawns in rice paddies along with 1-2 fish species, but that may be hard to translate to your country indoor prawn farms work anywhere, but require space/setup/money the big downside of prawns is that you have to buy the larvae (impossible to breed w/o sig. equipment+expertise), and they have to be shipped O/N in bulk so your min. purchase will be enough to yield like 1k+prawns, way more than you'd want for personal use

>>12404 As for the fat issue, I think a lot of the historical reports of "rabbit starvation" were in conditions where the rabbits themselves were starving and had even less fat than was typical. Rabbits are naturally low fat still, but again, this issue is somewhat mitigated with willingness to consume bone marrow, brains, etc. The combination of chickens and rabbits or just living on chickens would solidly squash any concerns of "protein poisoning" though. Personally I have my own egg chickens and was looking to start a meat rabbit setup soon to make life a little cheaper. No roosters though, would not be nice to have those in the suburbs.

What if there was an animal that didn't require any space other than a small pen, left to find its own food, didn't need a run area or grass or anything, and just showed up to breed and rest in the pen, and you could eat one once in a while for its meat and fat? Like doves. And they provide free manure for your plants. What if there was something that lived in a small tank, grew fast, and provided tasty meals? Like fish. What if there was a creature that required very little space, just lived in your compost heap and ate your garden waste, made your compost a lot better, and provided food for your fish or chickens? Like worms.

Respectfully, what generally happens when you try to optimize nutrition based off of the current, relatively unadvanced understanding of nutrients as simple computable units (wow, this bread has eight grams of "protein!" [it's all gluten]) instead of fully complex interacting molecules in their own right is some kind of horrible disease. That said. If I were you I would explore the use of bacteria to produce nutrients (in your calculations if not reality). I know the practicality of it somewhat contradicts what I just said, but in spite of that, the theoretical efficiency is probably off the chain. You can already produce sucrose using photosynthetic bacteria, and it is bacteria in the guts of ruminant animals that detoxify PUFA to SFA.

>>12405 didn't bring up fat for "rabbit starvation" i just meant that having fat to cook with is really nice, and pig fat is a nice fat to work with lets you make yummy things like: biscuits cakes pancakes fried food etc. >>12407 are doves actually this low maintenance? also, aren't they kinda... small? fish farming sounds cozy except for figuring out the setup and getting small fish to grow-out >>12408 >too much peanut butter is poisonous saddest story in the thread

>>12409 >doves are small >talking about indoor fish farming and rabbits yeah these are all small but its a tradeoff and the whole thread is about minimum possible area indoor farming with grow boxes and there's no animal farming system closer to a growbox than a dovecot. Another plus of doves is that you can probably let them out to forage more easily than you can let out fish. Is forage fair game?

>>12408 >the current, relatively unadvanced understanding of nutrients Human nutritional requirements are well understood due to long term studies of comatose patients fed intravenously.

Plants need food. They don't just grow on water and light. The main value of doves and worms is their soykaf, as free plant food. The fact that you can eat the occasional squab or feed the worms to your fish are just nice bonuses. You can eat dove eggs, but you shouldn't. In the first place, they're small. More importantly, doves know when their eggs are missing, and they will stop laying eggs when that happens. On the subject of pig fat, it's the best fat you can get. If you live near woods you can let pigs out to forage. But they're a lot more trouble than doves, fish, chickens. You can also grow aquatic plants that fish eat right in their tanks. They will also eat some of the algae that usually grows in the tank. You do need to run a water filtration system to keep their water clean, but that's not as big a deal as it sounds like. You see ducks recommended sometimes, but they stink to high heaven and foul their water constantly. Another plant that will give you food in the form of seeds, oil good for various purposes, and fiber suitable for making clothing (you have to spin and weave it of course), rope. or paper, is hemp. It grows tall and fast like the weed it is. Dandelion greens are another nutritious food from a weed that will take over an area if you aren't careful. You can also make cloth from stinging nettle fibers, another useful weed.

>>12410 fish farming: raise catfish, harvest as early as 2lbs, or grow them out to be chonkers rabbits: avg. weight 8-12 lbs doves: avg. weight 1/3 - 1/2 lb (?, harder to find a good source) kind of an immediate difference in yield :( >foraging I'm assuming it is fair game. Don't get me wrong, I agree fish farming is NOT the optimal way to go unless you are doing a paired fish/flooded crop farm, and that is finicky. Doves seem OK, but I think I'd still prefer chickens assuming you own at least 1 acre of land. >>12412 glad you agree re: doves, pigfat >dandelion greens no matter how many times i try them, i cannot get used to the taste (at least for wild cultivars)

The OP asked about indoor, low-space, container sources of food. Of the animals mentioned, only compost worms, tank fish, and doves kind of fit the criteria. I guess you could raise caged-from-birth-to-death small animals, too, like chickens, maybe rabbits? That stuff would require some good ventilation. But all of the stuff that requires ownership of outdoor property, even just a back yard, would seem to be excluded by the OP?

>>12398 Sounds like new-age bullshit. If it isn't, please cite an excerpt from the books that shows it.

Rule of thumb is that under decent conditions, one person needs about 200 square feet of good growing space to grow enough crops to live on year-round. Considering that this would be indoors in containers, you would need about 20 3' by 4' containers (the containers themselves take up some space too). If you put them in 4 long rows with 3 walking spaces between the rows, you would need about 400 square feet for just the garden. That wouldn't include any space for tools, supplies, workbench, etc. So I'd say you'd need about 500 square feet total to sustain one person indefinitely. If you stacked some of the containers on heavy duty shelves, you could get away with less space. You will need electricity for grow lights, fertilizer, water, ventilation, tools, and some way to preserve and store your crops like canning and a root cellar.or just a very cold, dry room. To cover your nutritional needs, you might want to grow at least beans, squash, cabbage, corn, carrots, onions, peas, potatoes, bell peppers, and tomatoes. You could use one of the containers for composting.

>>12417 >400sf for garden you can stack probably even 2 or 3 high for many crops in normal height rooms. If the 200sf number is reasonable then we're really maybe only talking about 100sf with stacks which is incredibly reasonable, so much so that I begin to doubt the 200sf figure but Im curious where you get it from. A nice shelving solution could turn this into a small dense block that would fit easily in most living rooms or garages.

>>12411 the requirements for bare minimum survival are not the same as those for optimal health. Obviously you know this, why act like you don't know what he meant?

Here's how you could do the whole thing in 400 sq ft in an actually sane way with room to move around, reach in two feet from each side of the grow boxes, and have storage and work space. (You'll need to view this with a monospace font.) +---------+------------+---------+------------+---------+---------+ | | | | | | | | 3' | 4'x4'x1' | | 256 sq ft | | 3'x20' | | aisle | (x2 high) | | total | | work/ | | | containers | | grow area | | storage | + +------------+ +------------+ + area | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | + +------------+ +------------+ + | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | + +------------+ +------------+ + | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | + +------------+ +------------+ + | | | | | | | | | | | | | +----------------------+ +----------------------+---------+

>>12418 >we're really maybe only talking about 100sf Lol, maybe you could show a diagram where this would be practical in 100 sq ft. I'd really like to see this. >12419 >the requirements for bare minimum survival are not the same as those for optimal health. The nutrition studies mentioned concern long-term maintenance of general health. Your 'bare minimum survival' distortion is absurd and frankly kind of weird.

>>12420 Never mind the monospace font. Here's a proper screenshot of it.

>>12421 now you are just trolling

>>12417 >37m² I'm gonna need a sauce chief. >>12392 calculated ten times that for only potatoes.

What about aquaponics? Would that increase or decrease the total amount of space needed?

>>12421 shelves like these can be made fairly easily out of wood+heavy duty casters, whole thing is going to be fairly heavy but this is on the scale of a raised bed garden project both in budget and complexity imho. Pull one shelf out and do your thing with it, slide it back in the block. Obviously there's a few variations and this doesn't include a work space (which could be another rolling shelf if you needed.

>>12424 Son, if you're gonna need some sauce, you're gonna need to do some research. You'll find estimates by real, working homesteaders ranging from 200 sq ft for a family of four to 1000 sq ft per person. Both of those are extreme and unrealistic. OP asked about *minimum* *indoor* space. For that, you use appropriate intensive indoor "square foot gardening" methods instead of outdoor row gardening methods that waste a lot of space, Then 200 sq ft is easily enough to provide all the nutrition one person needs indefinitely, and then some. 4x4 containers are perfect for this method. You use a grow mix of 1/3 peat, 1/3 vermiculite, 1/3 compost blend, and 0 (zero) dirt. You only need a six inch depth of it for most things, 12 inches for things like potatoes and carrots. It's absorbent enough to hold the right amount of water, and loose enough that you only need a trowel to work it. It isn't as full of weed seeds, plant diseases, and bug eggs. You don't need to add any fertilizer or plant food, it's all in the compost. It's also lighter than dirt. The year-to-year maintenance is minimal: Compost the garden waste in one of the boxes and re-add it to the garden, and you need little fertilizer. Rotate the crops from box to box normally. After the initial setup expense, the main recurring expense is going to be electricity for the grow lights. Naturally, it helps if you can get sunlight on your indoor plants. >>12425 You could eliminate a couple of the boxes and use the space for fish, but it seems like it would be more trouble and less productive. It would be nice to have fish to eat, though. >>12426 Something like that might be useful for growing herbs and similar small plants. Interesting.

>>12408 Agreed on the oversimplifications; don't conflate this with 'we don't know what we need' - this is your obligatory reminder that we've literally locked people in a room with food supplies for long periods of time. We know sets of dietary requirements that work in the long term. Maybe not ideal dietary requirements, but good enough. Where the problems pop up is when places decide to oversimplify because they assume the layperson cannot possibly understand anything other than black-and-white. >>12378 NASA did good studies about this. Wheat does better than potatoes if all you care about is biomass efficiency. Potatoes are great for biomass/light input. NASA estimates are ~25m^2 / person for O2 production, ~50m^2/person for calories+O2, and ~150m^2 for full dietary needs.

Think about the following: A man needs 3000 daily cals. 1 lettuce has 50 cal. Therefore: you need to eat 60 lettuces a day. 1 lettuce takes 42 days to grow. Therefore: you need to grow 2520 lettuces. 1 lettuce requires 0,09 m^2. Therefore: you need about 227 m^2. Now, how would the calculations result if we replaced lettuce with more serious plants like wheat or potatoes?

something that must be considered is not only the space needed to grow the plant/fungus/animal, but the space needed for supplies, storage, preparation, waste, etc. if you raise rabbits, as an arbitrary example, you'll also need space for their feed, and arguably if you wish to be 100% self sufficient, space to grow their feed. >>12408 It would be interesting to see if space improvements could be made by choosing a growable food source based mostly on calories-to-space ratio, and supplementing it with synthesized nutrients (either via bacterial biosynthesis as you mention or regular chemistry). of course, one would have to ensure the food source is safe when consumed in the needed amounts. after all, it doesn't take much space to make 2000kcal worth of alcohol, but such a diet would kill you regardless of nutritional supplements. my gut tells me that for a single person, it would be more space efficient grow classic foods, but I have no empirical reason for this.

>>12429 An average moderately active male aged 19-50 needs about 2700 calories/day. https://www.webmd.com/diet/calories-chart In good growing conditions, a high-yield potato variety like Yukon Gold will yield about 5-10 pounds of potatoes per plant per harvest. They are a determinate variety, so you can usually get 2 harvests per year outdoors, depending on the length of the growing season. Each pound of Yukon Gold supplies about 340 calories. The spacing can be a little less than 12" between plants for this variety, but lets just go with 12". In an indoor environment, using square-foot-gardening techniques, conditions are ideal. You have perfect "soil", a 12 months per year "growing season" with perfect "weather", the perfect amount of water, as much light as you want for as long as you want every day from grow lights, and less (and more manageable) trouble with pests, Despite these perfect conditions, let's be conservative and say that you could only get an everage 7.5 pounds of potatoes from each plant, and leave it at 2 harvests per year like outdoors. Using normal square foot gardening methods you would have one plant per square foot (in this case), or 16 plants per 4' x 4' container. Using the plan given previously with 16 containers, or 256 sq ft of "soil", laid out in a 20' x 20' room with plenty of work and storage space, and growing only potatoes, you get the following calorie yield: (7.5×16×16×2×340)/365 = 3577 calorie yield per day Naturally, you could grow some other foods instead of just potatoes for more complete nutrition. However, considering the ideal conditions, you would likely be able to get much better results. Let's say you get 9 pounds of potatoes per plant and 3 harvests per year: (9×16×16×3×340)/365 = 6439 calorie yield per day (from 256 sq ft of growing surface growing nothing but potatoes).

>>12431 I think your lbs/ft^2 numbers are very optimistic but I'm not sure how much by. Whenever I've grown potatos (not in a terribly serious way) yields have been a lot lower, and most yield per acre figures I'm finding are a lot lower, like 1-2lb/sqft/harvest (or less) not 7. Not a potato farmer and maybe the light soil and arbitrary length light of an indoor growbox can reach these respectable figures but they sound very high. >>12430 >after all, it doesn't take much space to make 2000kcal worth of alcohol explain the most practical method is going to be growing a calorie dense crop like wheat or potatos and then fermenting it and just drinking beer or potato beer. This at best approximates the same cal/ft^2 numbers of the raw crop but adds extra steps and inefficiencies, and most of those calories are going to be sugar. alcohol is a means of preserving calories not a means of generating them. I'd be interested in a Batch of Inedible Vegetables Into Nice Edibles device that uses lab/chemical means but I think the readymade biological ones are cheaper and less labour intensive.

>>12432 >I think your lbs/ft^2 numbers are very optimistic Maybe you're right, but the figures I'm seeing from experienced homesteaders growing outdoors under good conditions are 3-5 pounds per plant for some varieties, and 5-10 pounds per plant for high-yield Yukon Gold variety. It doesn't hurt to be wary about it, though. Outdoors, a lot depends on soil quality, amount of sunlight per day, length of growing season, weather conditions, pest/disease conditions, gardening practices, etc. A decent indoor setup as per OP along with square-foot gardening method should optimize most of that. But again, it doesn't hurt to be wary. Anything can happen, and maybe I am being too optimistic.

I feel like this is just a thread for math nerds. A practical person would know to have way more than necessary but not more than maintainable. This is to account for crop disease or other things going wrong. But when it comes to indoor spaces I do understand the point since space is limited and you need to know minimum sized space you can afford.

>>12432 It just dawned on me that when you use yield per acre figures, you're including all of the access space, usually about 3' between rows. By that method of calculation, one plant takes up about 4 sq ft instead of the 1 sq ft it physically occupies. So the yield figures look like 1/4 of the figures I'm using. If they're using average-yield variety (3-5 lbs per plant) then that would indeed look like about 1-2 lbs per sq ft or less as you mentioned. A square-foot gardener calculates using only the space physically occupied by the plant. Except for the use of a high-yield variety, there's no discrepancy between the per-acre figures you mentioned and the figures i'm using.

>>12436 >just dawned on me very good point.

>>12432 >explain you're right, I was not accounting for growing the source. An ironic mistake for me to make onsidering the first line of my post was reminding people to do so for rabbit feed.