Feeding the masses with little land
In the early twentieth century when Farmers of Forty Centuries
was written, Asia was immensely overcrowded compared to the United
States. Chinese farmers only had about two acres of agricultural
land to feed each person, compared to twenty acres per person in the
U.S. In addition, many parts of China had been farmed constantly
for four thousand years --- clearly, Chinese farmers weren't
subscribing to American tactics of using the land hard then moving on.
Although many of the traditional farming practices outlined in Farmers of Forty Centuries
have probably been replaced by mechanization and chemical fertilizers
in the last century, I
think we still have a lot to learn from the book. Urban
homesteaders will be enthralled by traditions that allow a person to be
fed on as little as a sixth of an acre of prime farmland. And
those of us watching the U.S. population explode will be equally
interested since we currently have only about three acres of farmland
to feed each American.
So how did Chinese farmers feed themselves on such small farms?
Read on.
| This post is part of our Traditional Asian Farming lunchtime series.
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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