Enough Is a Fine Amount to Have

"Enough" is a word people say and rarely a number they write down. Said without a number it is a mood, and a system designed on a mood cannot tell whether it has arrived, so it keeps expanding until something stops it.

This lesson attaches a number to each kind of enough, and then writes the stopping rule that makes a system hold its shape.

Enough food

The measurement is Alik Pelman's, peer reviewed in 2024 and maintained since May 2013. A complete adult diet of about 2,000 calories a day comes off 740 square metres of cultivated ground, 0.183 acres, in about 96 hours of labour a year. One acre feeds 5.47 people. Vegetables are only 100 square metres per person; the land hogs are the seed crops, wheat, legumes and oil.

At household scale the number has two parts. While the system establishes, the ratio is 80 per cent staple calories, 15 per cent perennials, 5 per cent vegetables, because perennials take years and the household has to eat now. And the store has a weight: for a family of five for a year, about 2,798 pounds of grain, 1,119 pounds of beans and 157 pounds of oil. For two and a half people for ninety days, the entry version is 338 pounds of grain, 42 pounds of beans, 9 pounds of oil, about $125, and about 7.5 cubic feet, which one 55 gallon drum holds.

Enough food is not a feeling. It is roughly a ton of grain and its companions in the cellar, and a household can write the number on the wall and check it in October.

Enough fuel

The design target is what the work of the place can be run on without a supply chain. The framing this course uses is the 1,500 watt life, a household energy budget that can be sustained without fossil subsidy and is treated as a different kind of wealth rather than a smaller version of the present one.

There is a harder number underneath it. Modelling published in Energy Strategy Reviews in 2019, discussed at length in this vault's work on energy in economics, finds a fast global transition to renewable electricity dropping system energy return from about 12:1 to roughly 3:1 by mid-century, with substantial re-materialisation, and the authors describe those levels as below the thresholds the literature identifies for sustaining industrial complex societies. At a 1.5 year energy payback and the measured growth rate of solar and wind, roughly 29 per cent of new renewable output goes to building more renewables rather than displacing fuel.

So the household fuel budget is not a lifestyle preference. A lower-energy world arrives on the successful path as well as on the failed one.

Enough money

Here the number is a share. Pelman puts a diet of wheat, beans and oil at roughly 2 per cent of income, against the 10 to 20 per cent food normally takes. His own blunt finding is that growing wheat does not save money, because wheat is about fifty cents a kilogram. The case for growing food is therefore not financial. It is that a household which grows its own is not blackmailable when a supply chain fails.

That reframes what enough money means. Income is not the target; income bounded by a real surplus is. Cato's instruction to his overseer is the oldest statement of it: the good farmer's appetite is to sell, not to buy, and the store is built so the farm can wait for a price instead of taking the first one.

The macro version, for scale. The Global Justice Report published by the World Inequality Lab in 2026 models ninety per cent of humanity doubling its income by 2100 while working about 1,000 hours a year instead of 2,100, with income compressed to a 1:5 ratio and wealth to 1:10, billionaire wealth falling from 6 per cent of the total to 0.05 per cent, converging on about EUR 5,000 a month per person. Even the most ambitious mainstream redistribution plan in print requires a sharp fall in labour hours and consumption.

Enough land

West Virginia farms 3,500,000 acres, which the 2025 state overview counts across about 22,500 farms, and the 2022 Census of Agriculture counted 22,787 farms averaging 156 acres each. The state needs 323,655 cultivated acres to feed its whole population on the Pelman model. So if each of the state's existing farms cultivated 14.4 acres of food, the state would feed itself, which is 9.3 per cent of the average farm.

Enough land, then, is about 14.4 cultivated acres for a working farm, 1.5 cultivated acres for a household feeding eight people, 0.45 acres for one household's complete diet, or a 51 foot square for its vegetables. The land question here is not a shortage. It is a price and a tenure question, which is lesson 403.

Enough attention

The same rule applies to the audience, and it is the one people skip. The number that matters is whether the work reaches the people who will use it; past that, more attention costs more than it returns, because it has to be fed and renewed, and what keeps an audience is rarely what keeps a farm. So the target is a floor and not a ceiling. The moment publishing starts dictating the planting, the tail is wagging the farm.

The stopping rule

Four tests. A system is done when all four are true.

1. It feeds the people on it. Not in a good year. In the year that matters.
2. It replaces its own seed, fertility and tools at a rate the household can keep up, without buying the means of its own renewal.
3. Its cash income is bounded by its surplus. If the harvest fails, the income fails with it, because the income is the surplus.
4. Nothing in it has to grow to survive. No line of work, no product and no channel whose survival depends on next year being bigger than this year.

A system that must expand is not at rest, and a design that is not at rest is not permanent, which is the word permaculture has carried from the beginning. Sufficiency scenarios cut energy demand by 40 to 60 per cent against conventional transition scenarios, which is the same rule at national scale. That figure is reported from the citation in this vault rather than read in the paper, because the publisher blocks the download.