The Truth about Self Sufficiency – How much FOOD do Homesteaders Really Grow?

So… you want to stop shopping at the grocery store? You want to be more self-sufficient?

Yep. us too.

However, in today’s world, achieving this goal is far from easy.

We don’t live in Pioneer times anymore, there’s no Homestead Act which gets us free land, we have insurance and taxes to pay, not to mention most of us drive cars… not cattle.

This has led many people to wonder if true self-sufficiency is possible.

Recently, we received an email from Dale, who asked us how much we still buy at the grocery store after over a decade of homesteading.

He hoped to become grocery store-free in just two years and wanted to know if this was a realistic goal.

Can you be 100% self sufficient as a homesteader? If no, what % should you shoot for?

We have an exact number to answer that question, based not only on our experience but also on insights from hundreds of other homesteads who shared their data with us, and we will share that in this article!

Also, note, this article focuses on human food production, so we won’t be discussing heating for your home or gas for your vehicle, or even grain for livestock, but we will cover those aspects in future parts in this series.

By self-sufficiency, we mean producing your basic needs without any external assistance, starting with food production.

How Self Sufficient are We? 

We grow a TON of food on our homestead. but it wasn’t always that way.

Fifteen years ago when we were first dating, we began dipping our toes into self-sufficiency by catching and cooking fish on the riverside (that was my idea of a romantic date!) At that point, we were only about 0.5% self-sufficient, getting just one meal a month from our fishing.

Things changed when we got married and had our fist kid. Suddenly we cared about what we were eating and feeding our kids, and wanted to do better. We started gardening and hunting for meat to provide for our family. It wasn’t easy at first, there were lots of spooked deer and rotten tomatoes, but we eventually succeeded and were able to eat meals we harvested and grew all ourselves!

That first meal that was 100% ALL US was such an accomplishment. We took a picture of it (and that was not in the days of Instagram) We were so proud of this meal that we had grown with our own two hands and harvested (proud, and a little scared… like…can you just butcher it yourself and not poison your family?)

At this point, that combination of meat and a little bit of garden veggies meant that we could literally do like one meal or two meals a week, out of three meals a day, 30 days a month, that would be about seven percent of the meals that we eat throughout a month we were able to produce.

The first two years of homesteading and we were doing about seven percent of our own food… this is pretty average for a homesteader just starting out the first few years.

How do we know?

Well, we asked over a thousand homesteads about their homesteading production, and we’re gonna share all that data

with you!

Production of NEW HOMESTEADS…

First, we conducted a poll of 750 homesteads who have been homesteading for two years or less.

We asked each homestead to tell us what percentage of their total food they were growing, whether it was 25, 50, 75, or 100.

In our first poll of new homesteaders, 2 out of 10 reported growing more than 25% of their food, but the majority, 8 out of 10, said that they grew 25% or less of their food.

While this may not seem like a lot, it’s a huge accomplishment for someone who is doing something completely different from what they have done in their entire life. It’s not 100%, but it’s a great start.

Lesson #1 – Just Start

Our first takeaway is not to get overwhelmed by how little it feels like you’re doing. The key is to just start. If you’re getting an egg a day from your chickens and that’s giving you protein for breakfast, that’s fantastic.

Sometimes we feel like we’re back in high school and 25% is a failing grade, but when you’re growing your own food, 25% is a huge success.

So, don’t hesitate to get started because you’re feeling overwhelmed by not being able to do it all.

Moved to the Country, Got Chickens. Check. 

We were limited in our apartment with how much food we could grow for ourselves. If we wanted to increase that amount, it was time for us to move to the country, and that’s what we did. We moved to a 10-acre farm in the country and pretty quickly wound up with our first livestock, which of course was six egg-laying chickens.

With farm-fresh eggs, we were able to produce enough food for all of our breakfasts. We could have an omelette with some veggies, fried eggs, or poached eggs every single morning. Breakfast makes up a big percentage of our meals – it’s one out of every three meals. When we combine the eggs with the meat and veggies we were already producing, we are now at a level of about 20% of our food being grown or harvested on our homestead.

Producing Meat

Egg-laying chickens are a stepping stone into the world of meat chickens.

We already knew how to take care of chickens, so we figured we might as well get some meat chickens.

We started with ten the first year, learned how to do it, and we were hooked. They were delicious, easy, and filled our freezer so quickly. Plus, that really upped our self-sufficiency quickly.

The next year we went from 10 meat birds to 50, and just kept getting more.

Now, it’s important to mention, this upscaling hasn’t been without failures along the way.

10 Meat birds are pretty easy to keep alive. As soon as you have 100 to care for, problems multiply.

Meat birds will die. At that scale, it is unavoidable.

They die on us in all sorts of crazy ways, like if it’s too hot or too cold, too wet, if there’s not enough water, if the food’s wrong, or a predator grabs them.

That leads us to our next lesson…

Lesson #2 – Give Yourself Room to Fail

I like how John from Farm Marketing Solutions puts it… John says, he’s killed more chickens on accident than most people have on purpose.

You will too. But you’ll learn a lot. With every failure, you’re going to learn how to do better.

We lost of birds over the years. But we learned from each failure

Last year we had a perfect batch of meat chickens. (Okay, we lost one the night before butcher day, right at the buzzer… but pretty close)

Meat = MORE SELF SUFFICIENCY 

We ate chicken at least two meals a week. That would be an additional five percent of our meals of the month. So, that’s a running total of 25% self-sufficient. At this point, we’re a quarter of the way towards 100 percent, and that was four years into our journey.

After we learned about meat chickens, meat kind of blew up for us on our Homestead. We started doing pigs, sheep, goats, and got beef now in the field. That really upped our percentage of self-sufficiency until the point where now we never have to buy meat from the grocery store. We are a hundred percent self-sufficient as far as our meat goes on our farm.

Shortly after moving to Pennsylvania, we had another big step in our self-sufficiency journey. We built an on-farm butcher facility. In addition to producing the meat, over time we worked on butchering our own meat, processing it, curing it, smoking it, now we do every step in the meat process!

Now, every single plate on our table, the meat on every plate is food we’ve grown, we’ve produced, here on our farm.

So, that brought us to running total of 50% of the food our family eats being produced right on our Homestead.

It took us about five years to be 50% self-sufficient. How’s that stack up to a bunch of other homesteads?

5 Year Old Homestead Production 

We polled 5+ year old homesteads to learn how food production increased over time.

Remember, when we polled 2 year old homesteads, most of the new homesteads were growing less than 25% of their food. But as we approached the five-year mark, production really increased. Now, half of our homesteads are producing more than 25% of their food, and two out of every 10 are producing more than 50% of their food. That’s a huge increase in the number of homesteaders who, over time, are producing more and more food.

Got Milk?

Our life kept changing. Austin got more work from home designing websites, marketing, and doing a little bit of podcasting and YouTube. We could bring more dairy into our farm. We tried with goats but failed miserably. Then we tried a dairy cow, and that opened a whole new world as far as what we could provide for ourselves. Now we had our milk, our cream, our butter, yogurt, soft cheeses, ice creams, all sorts of yummy things!.

The hard cheese was a miss for the first few years, but this year we finally started to get more of a handle on making hard cheeses.

Dairy is a huge source of protein.We even had whole meals that we didn’t need to use meat anymore. We could do a cheese-based meal like a fried cheese. That brought us up from 50% to 70%. Now, that’s 70% of all our food that we’re producing here on our homestead. That took 13 and a half years to get to this point, but we’re here.

So… How (food) Self Sufficient are We?

After a decade plus of homesteading, we’re at about 70% of our food that we’re producing here on our homestead. We asked all the homesteaders in our audience what percent of food they’re producing after 10 years. Our data showed another interesting trend. When you go from five years to 10 years of homesteading experience, you’ll find now six out of every 10 homesteads are producing more than 25% of their food, with three or more out of every homestead producing more than half.

Lesson #3 – You Can’t Fast Forward this Process

the third takeaway that we got from reviewing this data was that you really can’t fast forward this process. It’s hard to skip ahead through all that learning and time, one because it costs a lot of money to get into all this, and year by year, you’ll build up your infrastructure, your animal experience, and you just can’t skip ahead in this way of education and learning.

So, instead of letting this discourage you and think you can never do this, it’s going to be too much work, let it encourage you to just start. Because it is a long process, the sooner you start, the quicker you’ll arrive at these much higher percentages of self-sufficiency.

So What Do We Still Buy from the Grocery Store? 

Now you want to know what we buy from the store if we’re at 70%. That’s like 30% still hanging out. Yeah, there’s still some food that we’re getting at the grocery store.

We are a family with six kids, so we always have kid-friendly snacks on hand. Additionally, we purchase coffee, grains, rice, flour, and plenty of fruits and vegetables. We also use oils and spices, but we have been cutting back on our oil usage since we use a lot of lard in our cooking.

Fruit. We buy all our fruit right now.

We planted an orchard at our farm in Connecticut that produced fruit for six months out of the year. The orchard included raspberries, blueberries, strawberries, apples, pears, Goji berries, kiwi, and various other fruits. Although we had to leave it behind when we moved, we recently planted strawberries at our new homestead, which we hope will produce plenty of fruit. Fruits and vegetables have always been a challenge for us, and we are eager to get better at growing them in the upcoming years.

We are a family with six kids, so we always have kid-friendly snacks on hand. We enjoy buying these types of snacks because we can and want to. Additionally, we purchase coffee, grains, rice, flour, and plenty of fruits and vegetables. We also use oils and spices, but we have been cutting back on our oil usage since we use a lot of lard in our cooking.

We planted an orchard at our farm in Connecticut that produced fruit for six months out of the year. The orchard included raspberries, blueberries, strawberries, apples, pears, Goji berries, kiwi, and various other fruits. Although we had to leave it behind when we moved, we recently planted strawberries at our new homestead, which we hope will produce plenty of fruit. Fruits and vegetables have always been a challenge for us, and we are eager to get better at growing them in the upcoming years.

When we surveyed other homesteaders about their food production, we found it fascinating to see what they were growing and still buying. We received in-depth information about their growing successes and difficulties, and we plan to share more about that in an upcoming article. Some of the things they said they were still buying, even when producing more than 50% of their food, included snacks, exotic fruits, coffee, oils, and chocolate.

Out of the 10% of homesteaders who reported growing more than 75% of their food, none of them claimed to produce 100% of their food after a decade of experience. Everyone still had to buy something, and the things they reported buying were very similar to the things we buy. Growing wheat and milling it can be challenging, and space and money are often limiting factors for growing large amounts of food. Even those who reported growing their own fruits and vegetables still bought them because it can be difficult to produce enough to meet the needs of a larger family.

So… Can You Be Grocery Store Free in 2 Years? 

This brings us to Dale’s question from the beginning: is it possible for anyone to be free from the grocery store in two years? Based on our survey results from almost a thousand homesteaders, it’s basically impossible to achieve 100% self-sufficiency in two years starting from zero.

However, over the next decade, if you focus on learning as much as you can, building up your skills and resources, and continually work towards greater self-sufficiency, with dedication and perseverance, it is possible to become less reliant on the grocery store and more self-sufficient.

So Dale, and anyone else reading along… Here is a 10 Year plan towards greater self sufficiency that is much more reasonable to expect to accomplish…

 

 

 

 

 

 

Homesteady and Friends Self Sufficiency Plan

Year 1-2

If you’re thinking about homesteading, the first couple of years are all about starting. You may not produce much food or know everything, but the experience you gain is invaluable. It lays the foundation for everything you’ll do after.

5 Years In

As you approach year five, a good goal is to produce more than 25% of your own food. If you can achieve that, you’ll be in the top half of homesteaders. It’s a good target to aim for and can help motivate you to keep going.

A Decade In

By the time you reach the 10-year mark, you’ll be a wise old homesteader like us Elder Millennials 😉 If you’re providing yourself with 50% or more of your food, that’s fantastic. You’re really doing it!

So… Want to learn how to grow more food? 

If you want to learn how some homesteaders achieve this level of self-sufficiency, we’ve got you covered. We interviewed many of them, and they shared their secrets with us. We’re going to share those tips in our next article, which will be linked here when it’s ready.

Until then, consider becoming a Pioneer! Our Pioneer Library is full of educational content that will help you grow so much more food!

Click Here to learn more about the pioneer program…