Tonight’s homework assignment: How much land do I need for my own shit? (AKA The Eat n’ Poop Experiment)
Both literally and figuratively.
This is an experiment I’ve been working on for years. And when you actually try to do it—when you have to think about where your food comes from, where your water comes from, and what happens to everything that comes out of you—you gain a very different perspective.
And yes, sometimes the experiment even comes down to a question like: Do I eat the worm, or don’t I?
Food and water are big problems.
But getting rid of what comes out of you can be an even bigger problem.
I’ve been meeting quite a few other people who are “doing it”—trying to become more self-sufficient, reduce their dependence on centralized systems, and figure out what is actually required to sustain a human being.
So I thought a good test for me would be to reevaluate the whole concept at two scales:
Macro. And micro.
Tonight is micro night.
How many acres do you need for your own shit?
A commonly cited homesteading rule of thumb is roughly 2–5 acres per person for a fairly self-sufficient setup—but that’s not a universal number. It depends enormously on your diet, soil, climate, water supply, livestock, energy needs, and how much of your waste you can safely recycle.
And that’s where it gets interesting.
Food production:
You might be able to produce a substantial amount of plant food on a fraction of an acre. Add grains, livestock, dairy, or meat, and the land requirement can increase dramatically.
Water:
You need a reliable source of potable water—and potentially enough watershed, recharge area, storage, or infrastructure to keep that supply reliable.
Waste:
This is the part people tend to overlook.
Your sewage system doesn’t just need a place to put sewage. It needs soil, treatment capacity, separation from groundwater and drinking-water sources, and enough suitable land for the system to function safely.
In Pennsylvania, for example, wastewater land-treatment systems can require significant separation distances from private drinking-water wells. That means the geometry of the property can matter almost as much as the number of acres.
And then there’s the really interesting question:
What if the waste isn’t actually waste?
Humanure, composting systems, graywater, nutrient cycling, orchards, biomass…
At the right scale—and with proper treatment—some things we call “waste” become inputs into another system.
So tonight I’m starting at the smallest possible unit:
One human.
How much land does one human actually need to provide food, water, and a safe place to put—or recycle—everything that comes out of them?
How many acres do you need for your own shit?
Then we’ll scale it up.
Because four people don’t necessarily require four times the land. And four people sharing a watershed, a food system, and a waste-treatment system creates an entirely different problem.
Tonight: micro.
Next: macro.
