When I first started planning my one-acre homestead, I imagined something very different.
I was going to have goats, sheep, chickens, gardens, hay, pasture, an orchard, and all the infrastructure needed to make it work. I spent a lot of time figuring out how many animals I could fit, how much food they would need, how to rotate their pastures, and how much land I would need to grow that food.
And I actually got surprisingly far with the plan.
It was possible.
But there was a problem.
Possible isn’t the same thing as sustainable.
The part I couldn’t ignore
The biggest problem with the livestock plan wasn’t actually the animals themselves.
I could make the numbers work.
I could grow their food. I could design the pastures. I could plan for winter feed. I could raise the animals from birth and produce a substantial amount of my own meat and dairy.
What I couldn’t reasonably do myself was process the animals.
I would have needed to pay someone to butcher and package them.
And when I looked honestly at what that would mean over the years, I realized that this wasn’t the kind of self-sufficiency I was really looking for.
I don’t want to build a homestead that requires a significant amount of outside money every year just to turn the food I’ve raised into something I can put in my freezer.
That realization changed things for me.
I could make the livestock system work on paper, but it wasn’t sustainable for me personally.
And that matters.
A homestead isn’t sustainable simply because the land can support it. The person living there has to be able to support it too.
Going back to what feels right
That led me back to something I had already discovered I was much more comfortable with:
a whole plant food diet.
The more I thought about it, the more sense it made.
Instead of using a large portion of my land to grow food for animals that would eventually become my food, I could use that land to grow food for me.
Beans.
Soybeans.
Potatoes.
Carrots.
Beets.
Rutabagas.
Parsnips.
Greens.
Cabbage, broccoli, Brussels sprouts and bok choy.
Tomatoes.
Corn.
Snap peas.
Green beans.
Fruit.
Berries.
Nuts.
Whole grains.
Flax.
Herbs and spices.
And suddenly the homestead became much more than a garden.
It became a system designed around the food I actually want to eat.
One acre becomes a very different proposition
My new goal isn’t simply to grow a lot of vegetables.
I want to see whether I can produce the foods I need to follow a whole plant food diet on one acre, while also leaving room for the things that make the homestead enjoyable.
That includes fruit trees and berries, nuts, grapes, asparagus, herbs, honey, and even some fun crops that aren’t strictly necessary.
I’m also planning for the things that make life more pleasant.
I love popcorn.
I want homemade sourdough bread.
I want tomatoes for sauce and fresh eating.
I want sunflower seeds so I can experiment with making a mayonnaise-like spread using whole sunflower seeds and my homemade soy milk instead of buying mayonnaise made with commercial oils.
I want honey to be my sweetener.
And if I want to grow something simply because I enjoy eating it, I want that to have a place too.
The goal isn’t deprivation.
It’s producing the food that makes my life feel abundant.
I’m not trying to make bacon illegal in my kitchen
There is also an important distinction here.
Going back to a whole plant food system doesn’t mean I’ve decided I can never eat anything else again.
If someday I really crave bacon, I can buy some.
I can have it occasionally.
But it doesn’t need to be part of my homestead’s food-production system.
That’s a big difference.
I don’t need to raise a pig, grow its feed, build the infrastructure for it, and then pay someone to butcher and package it just because I might want bacon once in a while.
I can simply buy bacon when I really want bacon.
My everyday food system can still be completely plant-based.
And honestly, that feels much more comfortable to me.
I’m also thinking beyond food
One of the things that has become really exciting about this new plan is that I’m not just thinking about growing food anymore.
I’m thinking about growing the soil, too.
I want the homestead to become as close to a closed-loop system as I can reasonably make it.
That means saving my own seeds.
It means growing cover crops rather than continually buying fertility inputs.
It means choosing cover crops that can provide nitrogen, carbon and biomass for the soil.
It means returning appropriate crop residues and compostable materials to the system.
It means using composted humanure appropriately and safely after a long composting period, rather than treating human waste as something that simply has to leave the property.
It means thinking carefully about what nutrients leave the property in the food I harvest and how those nutrients can be returned.
I’ve also been looking at John Jeavons’ ideas about growing soil rather than simply extracting food from the soil.
That concept really fits what I’m trying to do.
The acre shouldn’t just produce food.
It needs to help maintain the conditions that allow it to keep producing food.
And the dog is part of the experiment too
I’m even exploring what it would take to grow as much of my dog’s food as possible on the homestead.
That’s a separate nutritional challenge because a dog’s requirements aren’t simply the same as mine.
I don’t want to assume that feeding a dog the same foods I eat automatically makes a complete canine diet. I’ll have to approach that carefully and provide whatever supplements are genuinely necessary.
But even there, the philosophy is the same:
How much of what we need can this little piece of land actually produce?
This feels more like my homestead
The funny thing is that I don’t feel like I’ve given something up.
I actually feel like I’ve found my way back to what I wanted in the first place.
I wanted a small, old-fashioned-feeling homestead.
I wanted to grow my own food.
I wanted to save seeds.
I wanted to preserve food for winter.
I wanted fruit trees and berries.
I wanted a garden that could provide enough abundance that I could share with other people.
I wanted to know where my food came from.
And I wanted the land to become more productive rather than continually requiring me to purchase things to keep it going.
The livestock plan was impressive.
But this plan feels more like me.
It is simpler in some ways, but it is also more ambitious in another sense.
I’m not just asking whether one acre can feed me.
I’m asking whether one acre can become a living, productive, increasingly self-sustaining food system.
And that’s a question I really want to answer.
So I’m starting over—but not really
I don’t think of this as abandoning the original homestead dream.
I think of it as refining it.
I learned something important from planning the livestock version:
A system can be technically possible and still not be the right system for the person who has to live with it.
I don’t want my homestead to become another job that I have to spend money to maintain.
I want it to be something I can manage, enjoy, learn from, and live with for many years.
So I’m going back to the whole plant food system.
Not because I have to.
Not because I think I’ll never want anything else.
But because when I look at the land, the work, the resources, the costs, and the way I actually want to eat, this is the system that makes the most sense for me.
And now I have a new challenge:
Can I really grow it all on one acre?
That’s what I’m going to find out.
