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Comment by LastTrain | Hacker News Reader

The US Government felt that 160 acres was the right size to sustain a family, and so that is the size allocated to a family in the Homestead Act. On a side note, individuals in their own gardens cannot even remotely approach the efficiency of modern farms, so going back that direction would be counter-productive and terrible for the environment.

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Certainly a family garden is a better use of land, time, and resources than a lawn.

Who said anything about a lawn? [Edit. And no, not certainly. It would be better for you to procure your food from someone who grows it efficiently. Being /good/ at growing food without waste is fucking hard, leave it to the experts. Now, if you are not looking at this purely from an efficiency standpoint, then things like aesthetics, mental well being etc. come into play and you should do whatever floats your boat]

The experts you speak of tend to just be simply putting enormous amounts of petroleum and chemicals and capital toward producing kilocalories. In the process they strip the ground of nutrients and deplete topsoil.

And we likely both agree that continuing to improve those processes is worthwhile and critical. There is plenty to be left desired with modern farming - lack of variety, agriculture as IP, flat taste, etc... but this talk of "home-farming" as a solution to the bigger problems is foolish. I'm not saying don't grow a garden. I have a garden with fresh vegetables, and I love it, but I'm under no illusion that it is a solution to any other problem than my desire for fresh veggies.

Well, we're making some assumptions about self-sufficiency being desirable and/or necessary here. If we don't, it's obvious I should be making Javascript, not food.

160 acres was enough to entice some dopes to risk their lives, nothing to do with some consumption based calculation.

Please elaborate. 160 acres was chosen as it was seen as a self-sustaining number (and evenly fit into the T&R PLSS), but interestingly, /that/ wasn't enough land to support a single family in the arid and high-elevation west until mass irrigation came along. Given five years to make proof that their land could be self-sustaining, many families failed even with 160 acres to cultivate. Maybe those are the fools you are talking about?

> Maybe those are the fools you are talking about?

Well yes, its a number picked and agreed upon to serve the goal of conquering the western United States. It was self-sustaining in a sense because the west was conquered, hell we don't even have native locusts anymore. But at the individual family level it was not self-sustaining in some cases, and in others it was quite more than enough which was what I was addressing for OP.

That is an interesting behind-the-doors kind of theory, that settlers were just being sent out as fodder in the name of conquest. I'm cynical, but I'm about an order of magnitude less cynical than that. I don't deny there was probably some moustache twirling somewhere, but most of the participants in enabling early homesteaders - the settlers, surveyors, assessors, state and federal officials - were just trying to help people pursuit happiness in their own flawed way.

> hell we don't even have native locusts anymore

Not unique to the American West

Man you are not nearly cynical enough. This was following an American civil war. And, many decades later wave after wave were thrown into meat grinder after meat grinder of foreign war, these American conquest years were relatively much less brutal.

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