HOW I’D START A FARM ON 3 ACRES (Beginner Plan) | Homesteading Small Scale

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How I’d Build a Farm on 3 Acres

What if I had 3 acres instead of 30? How would I build a productive food source on 3 acres?

I often have people email me saying: I love what you are doing, but I have 3 acres, not 30… How can I make it work?

This video is going to answer that question.

1. I am going to start by giving you 3 guiding principles to anchor your planning process.
2. I am going to give you a list of exactly what animals (including which breeds and quantity of each) I would raise on my 3 acre farm.
3. Finally I am going to break down exactly how much food this 3 acre homestead setup would produce per year… including what that translates into as far as calories; so that you will know what kind of human life this setup could sustain, and exactly how much you would need to supplement to feed your own family if that’s the goal of your homestead.

I have a free “Animals Per Acre” PDF for you (see link at the top of the post). It will show you how many animals (whether goats, sheep, pigs, chickens, cows, etc) that one acre can support, assuming you have 35+ inches of rainfall per year.

The assumption here is that you are not just looking to pack as many living creatures on 3 acres as possible: you are aiming to manage your homestead in alignment with your grass resource. Which will ultimately reduce feed inputs, reduce reliance on conventional supply chains, and keep your land and animals really healthy.

Here are the three critical questions that are important to answer as part of the pre-planning process for your 3 acre homestead setup:

3 Questions Before Planning Your 3 Acre Farm:

1. Who will eat the food I grow: For me, the answer was: my family. With just 3 acres to work with, I would focus solely on food security. No market farming, no for-profit stuff: I would eat or feed my family with everything I grew.
2. What will I grow: I would grow what I and my family eats on a regular basis. While this may seem like stating the obvious, it gets really easy for me to open a seed catalog pick out 16 different varieties of colorful squash… and then set back and realize that I can’t honestly name the last time I or my family ate squash. So instead of spinning my wheels growing things that no one wants to eat: I would focus on producing meat, dairy, and eggs.
3. How many types of things will I initially commit to: I personally kept my 3 acre homestead startup at 3 enterprises, at least to start with. An enterprise being, a sheep or a cow or a garden. So if I had a sheep and a cow and a garden, that would be 3 enterprises total. I did this because I realized over the past few years that I burnout and my productivity per animal goes down when I try to juggle and optimize more than three food producing enterprises at once. You might be better at juggling than I am, but I would advise you set some limit on yourself upfront or you might hit some burnout.

What I Would Raise on 3 Acres:

Now that I have established those three guiding principles, here is what I would start with on 3 acres:

★25 Rhode Island Red Laying hens: Most people raise their hens from chicks, but you can buy ready to lay pullets through Facebook or craigslist if you want eggs right away.

★6 Dorper Wethers: A wether is a castrated male sheep to be raised not for breeding, but for meat. You want to buy that feeder lamb at around 50lb and finish it out to 90-100lb before slaughter. When it comes to buying a wether, they are not hard to find. You can find a sheep owners through Facebook or craigslist and typically most will have an abundance of wethers to offer in either February/March or July/August.

Here is a question I anticipate receiving: “why buy wethers instead of breeding your own sheep?” Well, If you only have 3 acres, breeding stock will consume most of your grass. For example, in order to have 6 lambs to grow out as meat, I would need to maintain a breeding group of 3 or 4 ewes plus a ram. If you have 5-7 acres, a breeding group would make more sense, but on 3 acres, raising meat wethers is a better way to work with your grass resources.

★Finally, I would raise 2 Nubian or French Alpine dairy goats. If you can find a bred-nanny to buy, this would be ideal. A bred nanny is a pregnant female goat. This will allow you to avoid the hassle of finding and maintaining a male goat right away. Your nanny will begin producing milk after the kids are born and with these two breeds in particular, they will stay in milk for almost an entire year after kidding.

How much food would my 3 acre operation produce per year?:

At average production levels per animal, this 3 acre homestead setup would produce about 2677.5lb of food per year or 1.3 million calories.
1.3 million calories breaks down to 4000 calories per day. Which will be 100% of the calories necessary to support about 2 people.

Production goals:
Each laying hen must produce 300 eggs per year.
Each feeder Lamb needs to yield 40 lbs of meat after butcher.
Each goat must produce 218 gallons of milk per year (milking twice per day).

On 3 acres there is opportunity to grow: more chickens a garden, etc. But I personally would only expand once my animals were consistently reaching production levels I just listed.