Homegrown Grains: The Key to Food Security

By Gene Logsdon, Chelsea Green Publishing. Posted May 27, 2009.

Figuring Space Requirements

You don’t need much space to raise at least some grains. A normal yield of wheat grown organically would be at least 40 bushels to the acre. So you’d need only 1/40th of an acre to produce a bushel. That would be a plot of ground 10 feet wide by about 109 feet long. A really good wheat grower with a little luck could get a bushel from a plot half that size. Wheat yields have been recorded as high as 80 bushels per acre and even higher.

But using the same kind of average calculations as above, the table below shows the amount of space you’d need to grow a bushel of the following grains.

Growing Grain by the Bushel

Don’t hold me too tightly to these figures. They’re estimates to give you an idea of how big the playing field is. Weather, fertility, variety, and know-how could alter these figures. All I’m trying to show really is that 9 bushels of assorted grains might be raised on a quarter of an acre and provide you with the major portion of your diet.

The amount of grain necessary to support a few head of livestock is not large, either. You need about 12 bushels of corn to fatten a feeder pig to butchering weight. We don’t feed sheep any grain because we sell lambs fed exclusively on grass and mother’s milk. A hen needs about a bushel a year, but if she has ample free range, she needs hardly half that and in a pinch perhaps none at all. A milk cow, along with hay and pasture, needs perhaps 5 or 6 bushels; a beef steer, about the same. And we have raised tasty beef without any grain. In other words, an acre of corn could fill the grain requirements for one pig, one milk cow, one beef steer, and thirty chickens.

What is necessary to raise grains successfully in the large garden or on the small farm is an understanding of planting, harvesting, and processing methods that are no longer common in commercial farming. In many instances, the right way in commercial grain farming today won’t be the right way for small homestead growers. In some instances, the right way for you requires use of the latest technologies; in other cases it requires a reaching back for knowledge now almost lost. It takes both to make grain growing and grain eating the cottage industry it once was, and the key to food security it must become if personal independence is to be maintained and personal freedom preserved.

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Gene Logsdon farms in Upper Sandusky, Ohio. He has published more than two dozen books; his Chelsea Green books include Small-Scale Grain Raising (Second Edition), Living at Nature's Pace, The Contrary Farmer's Invitation to Gardening, Good Spirits, and The Contrary Farmer. He writes a popular blog at OrganicToBe.org, is a regular contributor to Farming magazine and The Draft Horse Journal, and writes an award-winning weekly column in the Carey, Ohio Progressor Times.

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