Man grows ALL of his food on 750m2

when I heard there's a man who grows all of his food I thought he must spend all of his time and effort doing it but when he told me he spends only one day a month doing it I thought we all could learn something about self-sufficiency from him welcome to Eon Nomads where we explore different ways in which Humanity could live again in harmony with nature this is episode three I hope you will enjoy and I thought okay that's a good plan if I I I want to do something I've never have no experience doing

so I'll just go learn from someone who does it who grows all their food and uh so they're probably in Israel I say maybe 200 people like this and then I choose 20 out of them and then I'll write them a letter an email and then maybe five will respond and I'll choose one and go and do it so I you know sounds like good plan right that's what you do when you you you want to be an apprentice of someone and then I started looking for the 200 and then I thought okay maybe 50

and then people told me oh but it's not just you know it's not in the Jewish societ go to the Arab Society they like they really are you know connected to the land live traditionally so I went to the Arab population and I couldn't find one person that grows more more than 30% of their calories and I realized okay I have to learn it by [Music] myself okay so I'm Alec pelman I live in C um I guess the reason why you're here is that uh I grow of my food I don't buy food in

the supermarket and I built this house which is I'm told is are quite ecological and I guess that's the special stuff about that uh draws people to this place actually it's very well calculated because we made a scientific research on this Farm not long ago and there's a paper to be going to be published soon about it in a scientific journal and uh it takes about one day a month it takes me one day what do you mean meaning 24 hours a month so it's uh 750 m to grow all the food out of which

about 200 square m the weat 300 square m 350 the pulses in this case in this place it's fa beans and the trees are in between so the trees don't take up any space so say 50 m because the the grain grows all the way to the tree trunks and then the the garden is about 150 M so 750 Al together out of which the wheat the beans and the trees the olive trees they rely only on rainfall no irrigation so only the wedge Garden is being irrigated very low maintenance most of it so the

veg Garden takes about half a day a month and the rest another half a day that's about you don't need to work every day like small amount of time like no there are weeks that I many weeks that I do nothing wow well I just pick food from the garden eat it but I do yeah there's nothing I I do yeah once a month what do you do all the rest of the days work fulltime Academia no really I have a full-time job yeah research fellow in the techn and I'm a senior lecturer in like

um what do you call it assistant professor in uh in sh College I think I had this dream as a young boy of like I guess like many other people not all but some people that you know like kind of a robin zon cruzo type of thing like you're not dependent on anyone want and you can uh take care of yourself build your own house grow your own stuff but I didn't do it with this dream anything for many years I just dreamed like anybody else I went through the normal Israeli course of Life studies

and military service and then go to travel and uh yeah but I guess traveling also made me more attracted to this type of life like and more unhappy with the the ways of life that are the common ones that most people will go you know you have to choose a job yeah and uh then buy a house pay mortgage marry have kids and uhy life and uh yeah I I wasn't very attracted to it but I guess the thing that really made me actually you know stop everything thing and do it was a growing environmental

awareness like ethical more environmental and social awareness realizing all the harm that uh the normal way of life is producing yeah and I felt that you know with a like by just living being a good person that goes about with their lives and just the amount of damage that it's being caused by simply living it was uh mind-blowing and very difficult for me up to a stage that I felt like I I can't do it anymore I don't want to be part of it I'm like passively being a part of it just by you know

you're cold you want your air condition on and you're I don't know you need something you have to go into the car so just living so I went first for vegetables which is very stupid because this doesn't keep you alive because it gives you about I mean people who eat a lot of vegetables will have about 20% of the calories from vegetables so this is not what you you survive on if you're thinking about survival this would be your last thing to grow yeah you start with you know with cereals this is and oil and

some protein legumes pulses this would keep you running this would keep you alive so I could you know you could use uh instead of plant-based diet to have animal based diet that's what I wanted to ask and then you have to grow 10 times as much because the middleman which is because you have to grow the food for your animals MH and the animal takes about 90% of the food just for its and gives you 10% of the energy it takes from than so it's a very inefficient machine in terms ofal calories and nutrition and

I think every place used to have some animal based food but it would be very small portion of the diet of the calorie intake cuz they're very inefficient very tasty but very inefficient machine to produce food unless you live I don't know in Alaska or in Wales where no vegetables grow and you know sheeps just uh Ro everywhere so you or if you're near near this you gather sheep you're the sea and then you eat fish fish yeah of course so the more North you go actually yeah the more you need to rely mostly on

animal Foods is it true I don't know yeah maybe you're right I mean in tiet for example or South yeah like they just you have just grass growing and then you need something that can eat that grass grass yeah cuz you you can't feed on the grass so you have something that can and then you eat to whatever feds on it yeah but here the tradition was uh we know ever since the Agricultural Revolution which is very new it's just 10,000 years ago it's nothing 10 20 we have humans 200,000 years and they only realized

that you can actually put the seed in the ground only recently first they just thought okay it's you could play God and you could decide where to where some something should grow and where it doesn't so that's a fairly new technology we use [Music] this uh like formula of cereals beans and some oil tree has been developed in every place on the globe independently of one another so if you're in China say you'll have rice as a cereal you'll have uh soy as the protein uh source and you have a soy oil right this is

the one of the most uh widespread oils in the world again this would be the staple food if you went to I don't know Mexico you'll have maze as the as the cereal and beans as the protein and corn oil so the maze would be used for the oil avocado yeah it could be avocado sunflower of course but uh and this would be the main like the Staples food and the source of the calories so the same formula as has been applied here so from the things that you grow which are vegetables um fa beans

wheat and olive oil yes how many recipes can you make with that how many things can interestingly as I said yesterday this is the formula that has been developed in every place on the planet so some cereal and some pulse some legum and some source of oil and some vegetables so that's the staple food so people had to surv ever since the Industrial Revolution people had to survive on this triple formula so they had to invent many recipes at each and every place including in the Middle East so in the Middle East we have plenty

of dishes that are based on these three ingredients so you'll have the even just the wheat you can make you can eat it like rice you can just cook it as it is and eat it or Mill it into flour or use the Samina which is the center of the but what I do when I m the the wheat I se it whatever comes through the seeve is flour whatever doesn't that's Sam mulina and you can make all sorts of um porridges eggs cakes uh KU uh bug it's wheat that was cooked dried until it's

completely dry and then crushed so it makes it much more readily edible all you have to do is to add some boiling water wait for 20 minutes and it's food so this is only from the one ingredients which is wheat and you know you can and the same goes with fava you can eat it as it is boiled like cooked or make faaf or make Kos or you know whatever so we have already plenty of recipes but now we know one another all over the world and we know other countries so what we can do

we can go to other culture like Japan and ask them what do you do with your legumes which is soy soybeans and take all their recipe and convert them to our um pulses which you showed us before as the as I yeah there is like this is miso based on instead of rice and Bary it's instead of rice and so sorry rice and soil yeah it's uh based on chickpeas and barley and the same goes for this soy sauce and hibiscus for tea and this I talked about it already wheat whe wheat whe wheat uh

fa bean flour some uh corn that was left and dried on the Kernel chickpeas chickpeas that were grown here and some dried uh um cherry tomatoes H zucchini Dy zucchini corette Dred zucchini the sun this is these are green peas M this is a nice uh thing because I use it for demonstration where people come to ask questions and let say if you eat this in a day mhm you get you can survive healthily on this triple okay this is the triple this is the amount you need daily so this is like 50 g of

oil and about 200 g of beans mhm one 40 or so uh grams of Wheat and this is like 2,000 calories out of which 50% come from carbs 20% from protein and 30% from o most Farmers would go the other way around and say okay what do people buy how much will I get for it and then what shall I grow but here the calculation was the other way around at first I calculated what's my daily nutrition need and then I multiplied by 365 days a year so I knew how much I needed a year

so I needed 50 kg of weight 90 kg of beans 20 kg of oil M and about 300 to 400 kg of vegetables then I knew okay then I calculated how much land each one will need and then I I planted everything according to this so nobody does this nobody what what kept me confident that this is a viable option is that I knew that people used to do it for thousands of years you don't have to be very it come it's not rocket science and it is very simple it's just you know water Sun

good soil plant seasonally do it it's in season and not out of season if you grow local varieties you know I don't I wouldn't grow rice here because that would be failure after failure after failure but if you grow wheat it's been here for so long before us yeah it's local it knows it's you know it doesn't need you just spread it and you know live it be and then come back when it's ready [Music] so I guess this uh square is about 2 square m with uh little bunch here of wheat which is one

loaf of bread and you need about two of those a week so that's amounts to about 100 loaves a year which is times 2 m each well 200 square m very small area and that's enough for all the wheat all the cereal you need for year so that's the Bava beans I eat it green for about 2 weeks when it's edible green and then it dries out and then I wait for it to dry completely CU you don't want any moisture inside so that it can store well in a jar and then it can keep

for for years and years in this state the the best ever source of protein or plant-based protein uh 30% protein which is a lot and uh also it's an amazing plant because this is a nitrogen fixer so when I saw I plant say a wheat after I harvest the wheat you have much less uh nitrogen in the soil than before because the wheat used all the nitrogen in the soil whereas with beans it's the exact opposite you put the bean and then after the bean has is being harvested the soil is richer with nitrogen than

it was before so the next Plant to be planted here will enjoy all the nitrogen that been fixed into the soil and nitrogen is very important for plants so I think this is uh the magic plant the the plant of life it gives the soil the thing that the soil needs most for agriculture which is nitrogen and gives our body what we need most which is protein because carbs is very easy to get in nature and oil is also rather easy but protein is the difficult thing mainly from plant you I have a 100% uh

uh homegrown meal this is falafel and bread and olives and mayonnaise made of olive oil and aqua FAA the the water that were used to cook the the fa beans that went into the ffer and salad green salad from all fresh ingredients from the garden and also that's made of made mainly coriander garlic hot pepper and some spices and that's about it cuz first at first I went to some permaculture farms and this type of and they they buy 95% of the so in Israel yeah that's what I met there back then when I did

it it was like 15 years ago um I don't know about today I guess it's not very different and and I went for it and and uh it went much much better than I thought I thought I'd have much more failures I did have some but I always had enough I think I only bought wheat twice uh when wild boar ate it and but that was the only time out of I've been doing it for 12 years now most people I think ask them how much do you think it would take you to they would

say fulltime job for sure and you say one day in a month funnily enough scient and people who are you know researching this for all of their lives that they will give you the same answer that firstly it will take a lot of land and a lot of water and a lot of time and a lot of training so you have to learn potato that's a profession once you've done that now you have to learn onions once you've learned onions now you have to go into peace then by the time you finished all of that

you're 70 years old and you have no strength to actually execute all your plans so uh but yeah it takes much which is not true yeah which is very untrue there's a lot of rainfall luckily in this part of the of the country it's the Western Galilee we have about 750 mm a year which is not much less than London uh so there's a lot of rainfall just spread over only the winter it's only in the winter of course therefore most of my food my staple food has been grown in the winter and keps mhm

dry all year round and then I consume it all year round but it grows only in the winter when in the rainy season as you for example if if it was Japan for example you you have two rainy Seasons so you can grow uh here I grow only in the way like so 600 M are being used one season a year like only in the winter if you had summer rains you could grow in the summer as well so you could yeah exactly double the crop or half the land for the same crop so instead

of uh 600 M you have only 300 M plus the one so you will end up with 500 M square meters instead of 750 so it depends on the climate and it is a model that can be uh up scaled but with the the the appropriate adjustment to each and every [Music] clim out of all the lands on Earth 35% is used for agriculture but the way in which we use these lands to produce our food has proven to be hugely detrimental to the health of our ecosystems practices such as monocrop and petrochemical farming are

depleting the soils from organic matter and microorganisms so I can't help but think what if we asked ourselves the same question Alik asked before sewing the seeds on his farm what is our Global nutritional need and then plant accordingly to supply this need in the most efficient in the ecological way possible how will our world look like if we did that many people believe it's utopian to expect a global agricultural change but really change is happening all the time the current mode of industrialized farming is itself less than 100 years old and in the rate

in which it's depleting our soils change is the only option on the table if we look at the next 100 years time scale many people and Farmers realize this and the movement towards regenerative agriculture is becoming bigger by the day overall we must recognize that the only real longterm values we have on this planet our healthy ecosystems fertile soils and clean water [Music] you