 Hello again. Today's question again is another nice one it's one hectare is it too much or too little land and this relates back to a particular series of books that have been published in Russia and around the world now a woman called Anastasia who lives in the forest and she says that everyone should have one hectare of land and so just to translate that so for those of you who are familiar with acres rather than hectares so one hectare is about two and a half acres so what I would say is it too much or too little land well I would say what is it you're trying to do what are your needs where do you live so the Anastasia books are based in Russia there's a cooler climate a similar latitude to where we live in Britain if you live at Equator you have much more light for instance it also might have other things going on around so what are our needs what is the context in which we live and those things will determine how much land we might need and of course it also comes back to where do you sit in the landscape because permaculture is not about just being self-sufficient but for instance it's about each of us providing useful services for the people around us to create local economies so we don't need to move things a long way there's more resilience in systems like that and so some of us might need more land because we are growing particular things for instance if you have animals then animals inevitably need quite a lot of land because you need them to be able to move if animals stay in one place you get parasites, psychos, worm burdens and so on building up which you either have to deal with chemically which is what generally happens these days in agriculture or you do it herbally but either way you're trying to intervene in a system that actually could be cured by keeping the animals moving in wild ecosystems animals move they move in order to not be food or to find food that would include our ancestors too so coming up with the idea of one how much land do I need well really we rather than needing one piece of land all the time our ancestors would have had access to a large area of land but only passed through it for a short period of time and kept moving following the food wherever it happened to be at a particular time of year and there's a very nice book called The Hunter Gather Away by Fiona Campbell and she talks about how Devon ancestors so I live in Devon now in southwest England and how they moved through the landscape from the high ground in the winter months through the woods where they would be sheltered from the rough weather and worked their way down the river valleys basically following the food ending up at the sea the coast in the summer months where the seaweed was best and the one place you didn't have lots of insects flying around because it was nice and breezy and of course the sea is good to be about and then worked their way back up the river valleys to the highlands in the winter and so how much land do we need really depends on what are our needs you know so are we growing food are we growing food for other people are we just growing it for ourselves what kind of food do we want to grow are we active people do we need more energy more calories what are our skills what can we do where in the landscape are we are we high in the landscape where it might be windier but more light or are we down at the bottom of a valley where it might be colder in the winter in terms of cold air sitting frosty are we near water are we further are we halfway up a slope in the thermal belt all of these things are very significant questions so we need to know where we are and what the land can do and what we can do and what our needs are in order to work out exactly how much land we need but I think on one level it's probably better to say yes let's have a little bit more than we might think we need just in case because we can always plant trees in that place and create areas for wildlife rather than feel that we run out of space because for me as a gardener forest gardener I love to plant things to see the development of garden systems and to see the yields that come from those plantings and so on so the only danger with taking on more than you can cope with is that it becomes out of control which might not necessarily be a problem because out of control is essentially what nature wants to do but it might create some conflicts with your human neighbors who might start complaining about all of those thisles you've got growing over there and you've got to do something about them so I think the answer to is one hectare enough it might be it might not be it's quite a lot of land to look after for one person but perhaps for a family I think you could in most places certainly feed produce much of the food that you would use in that space and any land being able to interact and with any land is good to connect with nature to grow food it's a really important aspect of reconnecting with our primal selves if you like however much food you grow for yourself it's going to have much bigger benefits than just the idea of the money that it will save you so yes go forth and grow food and connect with land and yeah maybe a hectare is good