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I found this on another board. Does /out/ have any opinions about the use of the plottage mapped on here?
Some of this makes a fair amount of sense to me. Vegetables are nice to have fresh, relatively low maintenance, easy to harvest and easy to sell when you have too many. Dairy cows are useful and I assume they don't take that much work. Chickens are useful and low maintenance and the fruit trees in the chicken area is logical, in the summer anyway.
However, I don't really understand why someone decided to plant a small wheat field in the SW corner of the property, since wheat is relatively labor intensive to harvest and then mill down into flour without specialized machinery, and the machinery is so expensive that with the meager harvest you'll get from that size plot, you couldn't hope to pay it off if you sold the flour. And it's not like the average family can even use that much flour in a year. I think the person who made this image was probably using the USDA Food Pyramid to map out how much of each thing to plant, and didn't really think this through.
Then there's the pigs. I've never lived on a farm before, but it just seems like there aren't enough if you are harvesting them for meat. And if you are breeding them and harvesting them for meat fairly regularly, then you're going to be doing a lot of work that takes away from tending the rest of the homestead, when your time might be better spent at a craft or trade to earn money to simply buy meat from other people who specialize in it.
Finally, I don't understand why these people are keeping a brown bear in their shed. That seems like an accident waiting to happen. I assume it's a pet and it's trained to behave around people, but what happens when one of the pigs sees it and its chase instinct kicks in?
