3 Acres?

That's the size of the farmed. . . or gardened, plot of land here:

WORK TRADE FOR ACCOMMODATION: VALLICAN, BC AT WHERE THE PAVEMENT USED TO END FARM

One of the links on our eclectic set on the right hand side of this blog, under agriculture, is the site of a Canadian agrarian organization.

Now, for those not into this stuff, in the agricultural world there's a wide spectrum on farming and, beyond that, what it means to be a "farmer".  If you are deep into production agriculture, you can find those who are aggressively "get big or get out".  You'll also find a lot of traditional farmer, by which we mean commercial farmers who are operating solo or family farm operations of scale.  Then there's the part time farmers that do that, and also do in town jobs (very common).  

And then there's the hobby farmers, who really do something else full time but who live just outside of town on Rustic Acres, or what have you, and who do a little farming on the side, which describes all sorts of activity from having a big garden to near substance farming.

And then you have the radical agrarians.

Agrarianism itself can be described in all sorts of ways. Agrarianism, by its very nature, has a strong subsistence element to it, as with pure agrarians, subsistence is the goal. 

American, and Canadian, farming had its roots in agrarianism from the very onset, something that people basically know in a way and which influences, to this day, the way that people look upon farming.  The "forty acres and a mule" type of view of farming, in which a family sets out to support itself on the land, is an agrarian view of farming, and frankly it was always been starkly at odds with the type of farming that had come up in the English speaking world (but not in all of Europe) in the Medieval period, post 1066.  The sort of farming that subjects of the English crown left when they departed to North America was a sort of production tenant farming, where farming labor was expended for the landlord.  In the Colonies, it was expended for yourself.  We'll expand on that at some later point, but we'll note here that what we're stating about the American Colonies was also true, but in distinctly different ways, for the French one in North America as well, that being New France.  I.e., Quebec.

Chesterton famously saw Distributism, that agrarian doctrine he advocated, resulting in Three Acres and A Cow for the English (and frankly English Catholic) farmers.

But that three acres?

That's what the unit above references.

And here's the question.  Could a modern market garden, in the right North American market, really be viable on three acres?

Pretty tough.

We've addressed this before, and not really in the kindest fashion, in this old thread:

Salon: "What nobody told me about small farming: I can’t make a living People say we're "rich in other ways," but that doesn't fix the ugly fact that most farms are unsustainable" ??? OH BULL. You weren't paying attention.

But we raise it again here, more gently.

Three acres.

Recipe for small scale success, or a quick trip out of agriculture?

Part of that probably depends, I'd guess on how broad your individual duties may be.  I'd note that as the "young Agrarians" often depicted in happy tones on those sites depicting them are not only young, but they're single.  Indeed, a young woman that a relative introduced me to, via the net, in order that she might garner agricultural advice (with it being questionable at best what the quality and value of that advice might be), to give her help in her agrarian goals was obviously in a permanently sterile relationship with her rather despondent long time male "friend", whom I otherwise met and who rather obviously was despairing of a relationship which he was taking more seriously and not happy with the idea of having a permanent playmate.  To put it more bluntly, they were having sex rather obviously, but she was medicating with the goal of avoiding the byproduct of that, which is ironically starkly anti agrarian.

That is, agrarianism, if you look at realistically, didn't have the goal of supporting a class of Norwegian Bachelor Farmers. . . or sterile Friends With Benefits. . . but families.

And modern Agrarianism doesn't seem to be doing that well.

There certainly are families that attempt it, and some of them have goals that square with agrarian philosophers of earlier times (most agrarians themselves have never been philosophers), and of today as well, such as Wendell Berry.  Indeed, some of those individuals stand in stark contrast with other modern agrarians in viewing their enterprise just that way.  

But they certainly find it tough.

One such individual Jason Craig, who is a Catholic farmer, writer, and who lives on a small farm in North Carolina.  Another one is Kevin Ford, who is a stated Catholic agrarian and blogger who has had a series of blogs, the most recently one being Good Ground, but which has one single entry.

One who formally attempted this was Devon Rose, who admits that he went into the enterprise with low knowledge and failed.  He humorously turned his experiment into a book entitled Farm Flop:  A City Dweller's Guild to Failing on a Farm in Two Years Or Less.  Less humorous was the treatment explored in Salon, which we featured quite some time ago in this entry here, which we already noted above:

Salon: "What nobody told me about small farming: I can’t make a living People say we're "rich in other ways," but that doesn't fix the ugly fact that most farms are unsustainable" ??? OH BULL. You weren't paying attention.

 

In the "you must be deaf category" is the author of this story that appears on Salon and which has been commented upon by Forbes:

What nobody told me about small farming: I can’t make a living

People say we're "rich in other ways," but that doesn't fix the ugly fact that most farms are unsustainable 

You'll have to hit the link to follow that one.

That entry, I'll admit, wasn't charitable about the topic, even though I'm sympathetic with the overall goals.  But I'm sympathetic in a Wendell Berry sort of way, not in a neo hippy wort of way.  And that takes me back to the original entry here.

Three acres isn't very much ground. . .anywhere.

Or is it?

Maybe I'm prejudiced by my own location and point of view, but three acres wouldn't be enough to make a living on here unless, maybe, somebody was farming an illegal crop.  And I really doubt that three acres will support a family anywhere.  Indeed, the stated American dream was always 40 acres and a mule, but I'll see these tiny plots suggested from time to time and really wonder.