How much land?

Argh! In some ways, life was a lot nicer when we just went to the store to buy our food. It was simpler, at least. The food wasn't as good, mind you, but it was simpler. We're renting a house at the moment, where we have a phenomenal/loopy landlord who's let us do chickens and goats and turkeys and tear up part of the yard for a garden. There are too many trees to make the whole thing really work though and it's TOO NOISY.

We'll probably be here another year though, barring some miracle. In the meantime, we've started trying to figure out how much land we really need. We have several scenarios, the simplest of which is to have sufficient garden space to grow most of our own veggies, plus a three plot rotation, plus some fruit trees, blueberry bushes, and laying hens on the fallow plots. That's still quite a bit of land we're looking at there.

Then there's the idea of attempting to raise/sell on Craigslist animals for meat. This dramatically increases the amount of land needed. The Better Half is actually taking a farming class at the moment in an attempt to determine if this is even feasible or if it's a pipe dream. I keep thinking pipe dream and yet...there are people doing this sort of thing. Maybe they aren't making any money but then again, even breaking even plus property taxes would be a good thing.

Meanwhile, we hold on, gardening in possibly three different places this year, having chickens in our woods, possibly way to many chickens for a brief while this summer, and scheming. How much land do we need...?