I want to talk a little about a book that gave me the confidence to start my own farm: The Market Gardener: A Successful Grower's Handbook for Small-Scale Organic Farming by Jean-Martin Fortier. Fortier is often referred to as a "Rockstar farmer." He is hugely popular - every organic farmer knows his name (JM is his nickname) - and he has inspired an entire generation of young organic vegetable farmers by building upon and popularizing a very simple idea.
Before JM's book most prospective farmers believed that starting their own farm was not doable: finding 10+ acres of land, purchasing a tractor and tractor attachments, etc are financial burdens that few can overcome. But according to JM the solution is simple: do away with the tractor.
Most vegetable farmers plant crops on a designated bed . A typical bed is around 30-48 inches wide and around 100-200 feet long depending on the landscape. And there are walking paths between each bed. The problem with a tractor is that the spacing between beds is defined by the distance between the tractor wheels: the tractor wheels must go onto the walking paths so they do not disturb the planting beds. Well, that's a lot of wasted space. If there's no tractor you could space planting beds much closer to one another, just wide enough for two feet to walk on.
Another problem with tractors is that they are typically used to "cultivate." Cultivation means to kill weeds by lightly scratching the surface of the soil with tines that are attached to the tractor. The distance between the crops in the bed are therefore defined by the distance between the tines on the tractor attachment so that the tines don't actually kill the crops: they just pass over them because the farmer plants the crops at the appropriate spacing. But this is also wasted space because plants actually grow just fine at much denser spacing. And guess what: when plants are close together they form a canopy that blocks out sunlight to competing weeds. This canopy also keeps in moisture, so you don't have to irrigate as much.
So without a tractor you can space your beds closer together. You can also plant the crops within the bed closer together. This means that without a tractor you only need a small fraction of the acreage to grow the same amount of produce as you would with a tractor. Compare the two pictures below and I think that the advantages of not using a tractor become quite clear.
With a tractor:
Without a tractor:
JM has a very high yielding and successful farm on just 1.5 acres. Others have built upon his ideas and have developed successful strategies on even less land. You don't need a lot of land to grow a lot of food.
Although I'm not farming anymore I still use this principle at the shop. It seems as if there isn't much variety compared to large supermarkets due to the small size. But that small 3-door freezer has more cuts of meat than a thousand square feet in any large grocery store. The picture below really only has a handful of items sprawled out over a lot of wasted space. It's the grocery store equivalent of a tractor-based farm. Indeed the meat is displayed nicely and well organized while my 3-door freezer is a mess, but really all that's on display here is the illusion of variety.
(imagine a pictures of a standard grocery store meat shelf haha)