Tiny Farm Blog Organic micro-farming with two acres and some tools ~ a daily photo journal...

There's no really useful answer without a lot more detail about your plan: location, land area, crop mix, and so forth.

In the broadest terms, for annual garden veggies, you may have an all-consumingly busy month around last frost in spring, and again around first frost in fall. Especially in your first year or two. Add a couple more months at the start of your first year for getting set up. Apart from that, if you've planned realistically, and with two people involved, you should be able to make whatever time you need for other stuff.

That's not as useful as it may seem, even as a ballpark estimate, because your actual situation could change all that entirely.

A really comprehensive, realistic plan is essential if you want to avoid a lot of stress and unexpected work. All of your time and money considerations are ultimately worked out from your production plan.

You mention growing for your own consumption, and having livestock. From there, the two most basic planning questions I can think of, which lead to many others, are:

• Do you want to raise as close to 100% of your own food as you can, or simply supplement? For example, you could grow all your own fresh veggies during the growing season, and buy the rest. Depending on how much you want to grow, you also have to consider your diet. Do you eat meat? Are you ready to adjust to seasonal eating, not having everything available all the time? Are you going to get complete proteins from legumes, eggs, meat?
• How long is your growing season? Where I am, it's barely six months, so if I want to produce a sufficient amount of food to eat year round, I have to consider root cellars, preserves, cold-weather greenhouse growing, and the like. A shorter growing season also means more land in production, as you're growing for immediate consumption and for storage at the same time.

Answering those questions allows you to start figuring out how much food and of what type you need to produce, and how much land and other resources that will take. When you've got that roughed out, you'll be able to get a broad but useful idea of how much work/time your plan involves.

Hope that's a helpful start!

Hmmm… I understand what you're after with your time-based thinking, but I don't think that's an effective way of estimating what work will be involved. There are too many other variables that determine the time you end up spending. Unless you're making hard-and-fast decisions, like, "We'll do it if we can raise 80% of our food in X number of hours," you'll always be able to make time, just adjust your yield expectations.

From my own bit of experience with seasonal veggie market gardening on a couple of acres, one person, working pretty much full-time, with a bit of help at peak points, like transplanting in spring, can handle an intensive acre of veggies, using mostly hand tools. That's a lot of veggies: figure in different crop mixes on an acre to get an idea.

A few basic variables that have a huge effect on time:

• weather: There's a big difference in tasks and overall hours between a pretty good season, with regular rain and lots of sun, to a cloudy wet one, and a hot dry one — these days, you'll get them all in any 3-4 year stretch. Spot irrigation alone in draughty conditions can take up tons of time. And one serious weather problem, like heavy hail or flooding can mean a ton of remedial work.
• equipment: The type of gear you have makes a HUGE difference in time. Powered equipment, like a tractor, can get some jobs done in a fraction of the time of hand labor. There are trade-offs, the more mechanized you go — cost, flexibility, enjoyment — but it's incremental, there are lots of useful small powered tools to supplement hand work.
• skill level: Things get MUCH easier with a little hands-on experience. You get faster and more efficient at performing tasks, your selection of tools improves, your overall planning and farm set-up get more refined every season. You may be doing most things in half the original time by your second or third year. Experience can make that much of difference.

There are lots more things that could go on that list. It may seem overwhelming, but it's really quite straightforward and cool once you dive in, because everything works together, there's clear cause and effect, so you're continually refining and making things more energy- and time-efficient. Which is also part of the joy of tiny farming! :) And if you're farming based on sound principles, your land, your soil and how it produces, will get better and better as well.

So really, IMHO, a production plan, like, a garden map where you pencil in different crops and do the math, seems like the best place to start. When you've got a bit of handle on that, when you can say, for example, "Well, an acre (half acre, two acres, whatever) looks good to start, with this crop line-up," then it's reasonable to estimate time, for one person full-time, two people, with tractor or without, and so forth…!

I've read what there is on the SPINfarming site. There's some interesting teaser stuff on the FAQs page, but in general it seems to be a sales site for their set of handbooks. The SPIN system sounds good, I guess it's one of those if-it-works-for-you things, much the same as many other turnkey "systems" for small businesses… Around $100US for 100 pages or so of info is fairly steep: would I rather have that, or 4-5 other small farming books? Though if for a hundred bucks you do start successfully tiny farming, that's a great deal. I guess it's summed up best in this line from their FAQs page: "SPIN-Farming is as close to a franchise-ready farming system as you can get while still accommodating the creative and place-based nature of farming." Each person will read what they want into that…

There are other good, practical book resources particularly useful for tiny/sub-acre/urban farming start-up. I've read MetroFarm: The Guide to Growing for Big Profit on a Small of Land (Michael Olson/1994/$30 used), but don't have a copy. It's out of print but available used through Amazon, maybe through libraries, and no doubt findable elsewhere through the web. It covers all aspects of tiny farming, including a business section, with business planning and financial considerations. Micro Eco-Farming: Prospering from Backyard to Small Acreage in Partnership with the Earth (Barbara Berst Adams/2005/$11US) is a great book, I have a copy, that visits and chronicles all sorts of actual tiny food businesses. I also have Market Farming Success (Lynn Byczynski/2006/$30), a super-practical start-up book, covering everything from tools and production planning, to (US) tax issues and legal structures, in a concise 140 pages. It's written by the editor of Growing for Market, a monthly small grower newsletter, that has indexed back issues available for several years. I bought the whole set a couple of years ago, I think it was around $150US. There are detailed, no-frills articles, written by small growers for small growers, on all sorts of specific topics, from production planning to farmers' markets.