Part 3 · Subsistence First
The Ten Thousand Square Foot Food System
Lay out roughly 10,000 square feet as a working household food system, with the blocks, the rotation, the paths, the store and the water, and the honest area per person.
Ten thousand square feet is a round target, about 930 square metres, chosen because it paces out easily. It is bigger than Alik Pelman's 740 square metres, and bigger than the 750 he says in his videos. The gap is the point. Pelman's 740 square metres, held for more than a decade and published in 2024, is the evidence that ground this size is enough. Ten thousand square feet gives you his density plus a margin for paths, nursery and failure.
The area arithmetic, stated first
Do the uncomfortable sum first. Pelman feeds one adult on 740 square metres, 7,965 square feet. Ten thousand square feet, 929 square metres, divided by 740, is 1.26, so a 10,000 square foot system feeds about one person, with a quarter of a person as margin.
Ride one caveat with that number. Pelman farms a Mediterranean climate with 700 millimetres of rain, a rainfed winter grain and legume, and a century-lived olive. In a colder or wetter climate the same methods run worse, not better, because that rotation is unusually efficient. A family of four at his density needs about 2,960 square metres of cultivated ground, roughly 32,000 square feet, or three 10,000 square foot units, and about an acre once the house, store, paths and edges are counted. Ten thousand square feet is one person's system, and a starting block for a family.
What goes where
The vegetable garden goes nearest the house and the water, because it is visited most and is the only irrigated ground. Budget 150 square metres, a little over 100 per person with margin. Pelman runs 140 square metres and about 40 varieties for one person.
The propagation space goes beside it, a few square metres of nursery bed and a bench for seed trays, close to a tap. This is where next season starts and where you learn to save your own seed.
The staple block, grain and legume, takes the largest share and the broadest, flattest rainfed ground. Pelman's staples are 595 of his 740 square metres, about 80 percent. On 10,000 square feet, give grain about 250 square metres and legume about 400. The legume gets more ground because it carries more of the protein and it feeds the grain.
The oil block, an olive, an oilseed or nut trees where the climate allows, goes on the margin or the edges, about 60 to 80 square metres. Grain can be sown right up under the tree canopies, which is why Pelman's nine olives take only 45 square metres of net ground.
The store is a room, not outdoor ground, so design it now: dry, cool and defended, with a raised floor, a wall a rat cannot climb, and a high vent. Grain and beans kept dry and cool keep for a decade.
Rotating the beds
The staple block runs a two year rotation. Split it in two. One year, grain on the first half and legume on the second; the next year, swap. Fava fixes nitrogen from the air, the wheat that follows spends it, and the pair feeds the soil that feeds the household with no bag of fertilizer.
The garden runs a longer rotation. Split it into four quarters. Pelman prepares and plants a 35 square metre quarter, one quarter of his garden, eight times a year, so one quarter comes out as the next goes in. Rotate the plant families so any family returns to the same quarter only every eight or nine years, which avoids the pest and disease buildup of tight cropping.
Paths and access
Paths are the tax a layout pays for being usable, and first plans forget them. Budget three feet, about a metre, for a footpath and four feet where a cart must pass. Run the main path from house to garden to store to staple block so the daily route is short, and along the contour on sloping ground, never straight up the hill.
Pelman spends a little over one day a year on irrigation repair and the electric wire against wild boar, so protecting the staple block is a recurring cost, not a one-time build.
Water
Eighty percent of Pelman's farm is rainfed. Only the 140 square metre garden is irrigated, and only in the dry months from March to October, using about 50 cubic metres of water. Design the same way. Put the staple block where the rain falls while the crop grows, the garden where you can water it, and any tank high enough for gravity to carry it down. Shade every store so it does not evaporate away.
Exercise
Draw the 10,000 square feet to scale
On graph paper, one square to ten feet, draw a 100 by 100 foot square. Mark the house side, the water point and the sun. Draw the vegetable garden at about 1,600 square feet near the house and water, the propagation bed beside it, the grain block at about 2,700 square feet and the legume block at about 4,300 square feet on the flattest rainfed ground, the oil block on the margin at about 850 square feet, and the paths as bands you do not plant. Add the planted area and the path area separately.
Exercise
Plan the rotation on paper
Mark the staple block into two halves and write this year's crop and next year's on each, grain and legume swapping. Mark the garden into four quarters and label each with a plant family, then write the family that follows it next season, so no family returns to a quarter for eight or nine years. If your families do not divide into four cleanly, change the crops until they do.
Fieldwork
String out the ten thousand
On your own ground, measure a rectangle about 100 feet by 100 feet. Use a tape or pace it and check the pace against the tape, then drive a stake at each corner and run a string between them. Stand inside the string and look at the ground it holds: this is one person's food for a year. Then walk the same rectangle again and mark where the house side, the water and the garden would sit, and where the staple block would take the flattest rainfed quarter.
Failure mode
The overhead that eats the plan. Cultivated area is not the whole farm. Pelman's cultivated 740 square metres sits inside a 0.2 hectare holding, so his whole footprint is about 2.7 times his cultivated area once house, paths, edges and unproductive ground are counted. Plan 10,000 square feet of crops and forget the paths, the shed and the store, and your real ground has to be a third larger, or the crops eat the same ground and the household goes hungry.
