We're trading food with "conventional" Australian grain farmers with 4,000+ acres (we use both hectares and acres as many boundaries here predate the 1970s metric changeover) because we have the time to do fruit, jam, preserves, etc (fiddly stuff) and swap that for 20+ kg bags of flour, whole lamb, etc.
We also run multispectral imaging drones to collate data from ANOVA crop variations to build databases on yield V. tempreture | humidity | nurients, etc.
Despite all that home grown figs, pears, tomatoes still swap well for other good and here at least we're not thinking of as luxury, just a way of life.
> Despite all that home grown figs, pears, tomatoes still swap well for other good and here at least we're not thinking of as luxury, just a way of life
To be clear, what you're doing sounds wonderful. I, too, strongly favour small-production food. And I suspect you're doing it more efficiently than other small or home farmers.
But foregoing the low-cost substitute to your higher-intensity preference is a luxury. It doesn't scale to working for everyone who might want it.
Luxury is entirely relative - to you perhaps, wherever you are, this all sounds like luxury.
For us it's a continuation of exactly what my father (still alive) did during WWII when his father and most older males were away overseas, trade was greatly diminished, many people were on the verge of starving, and he (primary school age) fended for his three younger siblings and his mother.
Today we no longer cart water from wells many miles away, we still use windmills (corregated iron sails, Australian not Dutch) to draw up bore water, etc.
As Luxury goes it's zero cost other than literal sweat equity, uses materials about the place (all the water that runs through the house goes to the garden), and has little in the way of fossil fuel usage (we do use a car to fetch manure from nearby stables as needed .. but that's optional in the sense that we can go back to hauling sans car).
The only we're not still doing is shooting | trapping rabbits.
We also run multispectral imaging drones to collate data from ANOVA crop variations to build databases on yield V. tempreture | humidity | nurients, etc.
Despite all that home grown figs, pears, tomatoes still swap well for other good and here at least we're not thinking of as luxury, just a way of life.