The Economics of Growing Your Own Food

You need a whole farm if you want to be self-sufficient and it's a full-time job trying to grow all of your own vegetables. The amount of compost you need to buy in each year kind of defeats the purpose and doesn't the hungry gap make it impossible anyway? Two years ago I believed all of these statements. I then realized that I was letting other voices and opinions dictate my perception of self-sufficiency and I am not that kind of person and so I thought you know what I'm going to go all in. I'm going to actually see if these statements are true or if there's actually an approachable way in the modern day for people to be self-sufficient without needing a farm and my response was to create a half-size allotment plot which is what I'm stood in now. It's quite a big downscale in size for me and I had never properly measured or quantified what was coming out of the ground and also the costings and my time taken and I'm putting all of those things together to share with you the results and to put forward a case that yes it is possible to be self-sufficient. This video is giving you the full breakdown. You don't need to go all out in the first year. You can start small and gradually build up. Self-sufficiency is a long-term goal. It's a little bit silly trying to judge whether it's a success or not based on one growing season but I thought to push the boundaries and see what happened and I'll let the results speak for themselves. The first results to look at which I have shared but just a bit of a recap is how much food was grown and how that translated to per unit of growing space and so the first season harvest from this garden was 586 kilos. Now my initial goals for this garden was a kilo a day split between two people which is six portions or six servings of vegetables for two adults every day of the year but it turns out that this final figure is just over the total needed for four adults to have five servings of vegetables every single day of the year. Now the tricky thing is how do you put a price on that because we all know that homegrown food it's such high quality we're eating it seasonally and how do we put a price to that in comparison to say going to the shops to prove that you grow is priceless. I do think this is undervaluing the price but in terms of the value from a UK supermarket from Waitrose to buy the same equivalent of food that 586 kilos would cost just under £3,000. It's about £2,955.11 so that is a first core figure that we need to keep in our minds. But what does this mean for those of you that have a smaller garden? Well fortunately for you I've worked out the costs so per average metre of growing space you can grow 100 portions of vegetables over a single growing season. That is a lot so if you have a balcony or patio that's a lot of food you can still grow. The value side is very interesting it is just over £40 per square metre of food. This is why succession planting is so important and also growing a diversity of crops so you're covering all of your herbs and your salads and your tomatoes these are especially expensive to buy. Now I've read more than my fair share of forums discussing self-sufficiency is it possible and one of the things that struck me is that everyone keeps forgetting that there is a value to the compost that you're producing. It is a yield yes it's not something that you can eat but the more that you can make the more money you can save and so I've got an approximate figure for all of the compost that I made in this garden last year including the hotbeds at around £350 in terms of what the equivalent cost would be for bagged compost. If I combine the value of the food grown and of the compost the final figure in terms of what the yield was was £3305.11 and so I think now is the time to look at all of those costs. I'm going to be sharing with you all of the costs that is in context to this garden. This is starting off with absolutely nothing whatsoever everything was from scratch so chances are you have a small garden or an allotment and the idea with the self-sufficiency garden book is that you pick and choose the things that really excite you and you can follow that through the year and over time as you start to track your savings you can then grow as you want. Now the cost of establishing this garden using raised beds with sides, you don't need to use raised beds with sides by the way I just did it because it's easier for photography but that's a big cost saver, but also all of the wood, all of the tools, all of the compost, the polytunnel, seeds, the perennial plants and the IBC water tank, everything put together cost £4100 and so that that is a lot of money but that was trying to create the highest quality setup in one go to hit the ground running for the book. I've worked out that there are many ways where you can save money like reducing the size of beds and getting a cheaper version of a polytunnel and being more frugal with sourcing things for example wood for making hot beds. You could from a blank canvas create a garden that I would say is 90-95% as productive for half of that price but as I said earlier self-sufficiency is for the long term we don't assign a value to a house for the first year that we spend living in it it's for you know hopefully the rest of our lives it's the same idea with the garden and I think you're going to be very interested by just how much the cost falls from the second growing season onwards. So time is the next value to measure and I worked out the average time requirements for this space. One of the core parts of self-sufficiency is working with the changes of season as much as possible. You don't want to start planning your garden in April when there's so much sowing to be doing and I worked out on average excluding the time taken to harvest all of the food which I don't think we should even dare put a price to the time of the joy of harvesting your own food but when you take that away I would say on average per week this garden needs about four hours of work. Now a lot of you are going to think how on earth is that possible? The first thing is succession planting. I did a whole video about this but the idea is that you create a plan at the start of the year and then every month I just looked at the plan and I did what the plan told me to do and that saved me a huge amount of time. If there were two of you working on the garden like this you could come for either a morning or an afternoon once a weekend and pop in every now and then after a day of work and keep on top of it and grow a huge amount of food and if you really wanted to you could put a price to your time in terms of this garden. So for me on average every hour I invested towards the garden be it planning, gathering resources to planting things it equated in around a value of 15 pounds an hour of both food and compost I produced. If it was just food it would be around 14 pounds an hour compost just over 15 pounds an hour and as a salary doing something that you enjoy eating nutritious priceless food I think that is a very good case. Of course the first year you're going to have the costs just think of costs as being like a really big you know chunk of that salary going towards tax but let's think about the second year let's look at actually how much does it cost year on year in terms of maintaining this garden and then it becomes perhaps the best job in the world. In comparison to setting up a garden there is very little cost to maintain it probably the biggest expense would be seeds I would rather prioritize this space for growing as much food as possible to feed me over the year than trying to produce as much seed and then sacrificing crop yield. I do think it's about in order to make it manageable it's about choosing your sacrifices and I don't see anything wrong with the amount that you're saving from the garden in terms of getting seeds every year. Now of course there's going to be seed packets that can last you two or three years but roughly I would say to maintain it you want to spend about £100 a year on seeds. I would also say set aside £100 to £150 for like a rainy day fund there might be a tool that breaks in the future you will have to replace the the plastic of the polytunnels in about 10 years time that is still much cheaper than getting a whole new polytunnel and also with the lower cost in the second year it makes that average hourly salary look far more favourable. If you want a guide to help you achieve these kind of results in your allotment or garden or growing space pick up a copy of the self-sufficiency garden it runs you through the first growing season within this garden we've absolutely crammed it with as much practical and accessible information for you and thank you so much to over 10,000 of you who have already ordered a copy of this book.