I have been following Earthships for quite some time and the only issue im having with thinking about building one of these is food....

can someone that knows this for sure answer me please, can the earthship provide enough food for a family of 4 for all year around?

i just find it hard to see where all this mass of food can be produced at..the indoor greenhouse doesnt look big enough to contain enough veggies and fruit trees to provide food all year.

And also, how about some meat produce? are there people out there with earthships who also raise some chicken or some sheep for meat? if so, then that means u need food for these animals which means more veggies to grow then u would normally would, which means more space to grow it in....where do u get all this space to grow all the food? and is there enough water in the cictern to water ALL these plants and still provide enough fresh water for consumption?

thank you in advance, and good vibes

Hello Orrsh,

I studied with John Jeavons the author of "How to Grow More Vegetables". His method is called "Grow Biointensive"®. It is a truly sustainable personal food production system that only needs a shovel and a garden fork and some wooden flats for starting seedlings (and some land and water, of course). Based on soil test results, you may need to add certain minerals to the soil to get it productive. But that should be a one-time deal or infrequent applications.

Using his method, one would require about 4,000 square feet of land to produce a complete diet for one person for one year. Our earthship

(www.facebook.com/pages/Zac-and-Nicoles-E...isit/195117207226494) has about 96 square feet of greyater planter area. So obviously, there is not enough area to feed even one person. To make matters worse, our home is a vertical glass earthship so there is no direct sunlight during the summer. This greatly limits the number of plants that can flourish in such an environment. Another issue is the high water table. The greywater is only a couple of feet below the soil surface so the plants must like wet feet!

We do not have an attached greenhouse at our place but are seriously considering it. it would wreck our view but survival is more important. We, currently, do not have the money to do it, though, which is kinda frustrating.

If you have a 2,500 sqft greenhouse, you should be able to grow a complete diet for one person for one year. This also lowers the water requirements if you keep venting to a minimum or incorporate some kind of water vapor recovery system (like an HRV or somesuch). I have a spreadsheet that crudely calculates how much water and land needed for standard greenhouse or open field conditions for this area. A "one man" greenhouse should require about 14,000 gallons of water per season. A "one man" open field mini farm would need about 44,000 gallons of water and 4,000 sqft of land.

The biggest problem is water storage. How do you store 14,000 gallons, much less 44,000 gallons of water affordably? And where is this water going to come from, when you cannot drill your own well on your lot here at Greater World? You are going to need some kind of storm water catchment system to catch all of that.

If every drop of rain goes into the tank, you would need 0.3 acres (or 12,500 sqft) of catchment for a greenhouse. Open field you would need 1.2 acres of perfect catchment. In reality raw land has a catchment efficiency of about 5 percent so you would need 5.7 acres greenhouse and 25 acres for open field!! This is extremely difficult conditions to grow food in because the only significant source of precip come during the late July/early August monsoons which, if you're lucky, you can get four inches to 6 inches of precip And if you're lucky, a rain event that is intense enough to cause water to sheet over the land. Assuming you caught water, you have to store it, covered, until spring planting in May. If it is not covered, it will evaporate and you'd be left with a pile of salt and silt in your storage pond.

Here at Greater World, greenhouses are your only hope, pretty much. AND you need to come up with a viable way to capture water vapor escaping the structure.

FYI, I also attached the spreadsheet

I am considering livestock on our three acre lot here at GW. I've been eradicating sagebrush to allow the grass to flourish to lock in the soil from erosion. Grass seems to be one of the few things that can grow (barely) out here. If I don't like eating grass, a sheep might. Lamb sounds pretty good to me.

But, in short, our earthship as it is cannot grow even a small percentage of food for us because of the lack of direct summer sun on the Greywater planters. Slope glass has a definite advantage in this area, but it has its disadvantage too. The blackwater planter has potential, but finding electric submersible pumps that can fit down a 3" diameter PVC pipe is hard to find. I did pump blackwater onto the surface of our outdoor BW planter one year and got fantastic amaranth production! It was quite a sight!

I also invented a simple device for making contour lines on your land for catching rainwater for crops and grass. I call it the "poor man's laser level". You can see it here:



Sorry for the lousy audio. It was windy out...

I have 92 sq. ft. of garden in our Earthship(TM), with 700 sq, ft. of roof catchment and a 420 gal. tank for it inside. Basically it will only grow just the vegetable needs of one person, and there are three of us. So it just cuts down on the food bill a little. We live in the mountains of Colorado, and one inch of rain will fill our empty tank. It only went empty briefly, once.
I built mine with angled glass (27*, or 8/4---24/12). A full tank will generally last the winter freeze time when iced up.
So an Earthship can not feed a family with complete nutrition. Really, you would need four of them; three to grow food year around and one to live in. It would have to be in an area with at least 12" of rain or equivalent per year, and at least one good growing season for outside, protected orchards and grain fields. If it is a good location, you might get by with 5 acres per person, to include forest and pastureland, and a large pond. Aquaculture, chickens and rabbits would be best for meat sources. More pasture would be needed for other animals.

Food: this is the least developed area of the Earthship Biotecture concept. The recent connection between Earthships and Aquaponics is very promising! Aquaponics is a very new form of agriculture for a diet of vegetables and fish. Requires little space, extremely water efficient, and the vegies grow faster than in soil. With some effort and creativity, it could be adapted to the Earthship greenhouse corridors. Also, the Phoenix Earthship at the Greater World community has a much larger greenhouse than the standard design. Worth considering if you want to fulfill the vision of self-sufficiency.