NAVIGATION
Homestead Layout
Homestead Size
Designing Layout
Animals To Raise
What Can Grow
Be Self-Sufficient
Hi, I’m Ryan
I’ve been growing my own food for years, and I love that I can step right outside my door to harvest wholesome ingredients for a meal. I started small, and as my knowledge grew, I gradually expanded my homestead layout to diversify production and increase my independence.
Being able to farm my own land and generate what I need is not a way of life I grew up with, but it includes skills learned from hard work and first-hand experience I’ve gained over time. I progressively worked my way up to manage more acreage, gardens, and animals in a sustainable way.
6 Acre Homestead Layout
A 6 acre homestead layout includes sufficient space for all of the things you need for a healthy, self-sustaining life, including all the fruits and vegetables that thrive in your growing zone, as well as a variety of livestock. Laying out the space before you embark on your homesteading journey will allow you to get the most out of the land you have, with every area producing its best yields.
I’ve set up my homestead farm with distinct areas for each type of produce —areas for raised beds, open crops, berry bushes, and fruit trees. With a farm this size, you’ll be able to include large 20 raised beds. Likewise, each type of animal has its own space: the chickens and their coop, the ducks and their pond, a fenced-in pen for goats, and one for pigs.
Keeping things like raised beds all in the same area makes maintenance easy, for example, when rainfall’s been lacking, and you need to do supplementary irrigation, it’s easier to have to hit only one spot. You’ll also want to set aside areas for energy and storage infrastructure like solar panels and a shed or barn. With a 6-acre homestead there’s definitely room for a full barn.
While it may seem counterintuitive, take it from me: you’ll also want to leave room between each area, like a cushion or buffer, and avoid devoting every inch to growing because you’ll need to be able to easily navigate the different parts of your farm. I’ve learned that you can’t properly harvest areas that are too difficult to reach, so I always include proper space in between in my design.
Designing Your Homestead Layout
How Much Will A 6 Acre Homestead Produce?
A 6-acre homestead has the space to generate enough food of various types to sustain not only a solo dweller but an entire family. As opposed to smaller farms, 6 acres will allow you to raise different types of meats that many consider a key part of their diet. With everything from goats and pigs to a grove of fruit trees, you’ll have plenty of options to diversify and create a homestead that serves your needs best.
A 6 Acre Homestead Will Produce The Following
- Main HouseSituating a tiny home on your homestead will enable you to live fully integrated with the land you’ll be maintaining every day. You can also plant some berry bushes around your house to make this a productive space — the location will make it easy to monitor and harvest the berries during peak ripeness.
- Raised Garden BedsWith 20 20’x30’ raised beds, count on harvesting around 1 to 2 pounds of produce per square foot for an annual total of 12,000–24,000 pounds.
- CompostA 6-acre homestead design has plenty of room for composting, a key element of any farm. Though your birds will eat many of your veggie scraps, the rest will help create a rich fertilizer, ensuring a strong crop year after year.
- Fruit Trees and BeehivesA six acre homestead can fit 20 fruit trees, each producing 100–300 pounds of fruit per year, for a total of up to 6,000 pounds of fruit. You’ll enjoy a great fruit yield thanks to the three beehives placed on your homestead. In addition to their pollinating usefulness, bees produce hundreds of pounds of honey for personal use or trade.
- Goat PenYou can keep 12–15 goats on a farm this size. With a group of goats that size, you’ll have a surplus of milk for things like cooking, making cheese, and even soap production.
- BarnThe barn is an important part of any efficient farm. Although it eats up growing or animal space, it serves as a hub for your tools and homesteading machinery and also offers storage.
- Pig PenA homestead farm of 6 acres has enough room to keep pigs. A key part of many diets, pigs also eat scraps that help the farm’s waste management.
- CropsSome plants, including grains and legumes like corn, wheat, and beans, grow best directly in the ground. In addition to raised beds featuring vegetables that are easier to grow, plan open areas for these crops.
- Chicken CoopA 6 acre homestead offers enough space to build a fenced-in coop and pasture area that can support 25 chickens laying eggs and 75 raised for meat.
- Duck PondYou can keep about 15 ducks in a small nesting house on your farm. Ducks thrive near water, so be sure to create a small pond, which will also allow you to collect rain for watering during dry spells.
- Solar ArrayYou can fit more than 12 panels on a 6-acre farm, which should generate most of your energy needs, though having a backup generator is a good idea for periods of inclement weather and times that you might have extra energy consumption.
- Wood ShedOne benefit of having a farm this size is having the space to keep wood. Being able to store wood and dry-cut wood for future use is necessary so you can heat your space with a wood stove in the winter, use it in a fire pit in spring, summer, and fall, or to be able to burn wood for cooking purposes.
Why 6 Acres Is The Perfect Size For Your Homestead
A 6 acre homestead is the perfect size for a farmer with a bit of growing experience under their belt, who can reliably produce a strong harvest of vegetables and crops each year and is ready to add a few types of animals to the mix. When laid out strategically, as my diagram shows, it’s possible to raise five types of animals on a farm this size (bees, chickens, ducks, goats, and pigs), ensuring a well-balanced diet that you’ll be achieving self-sufficiently.
Are 6 Acres Enough For A Homestead Farm?
A 6 acre homestead layout is enough to farm, especially when you remember that some maintain micro-homesteads on city lots that are much smaller. The question to ask yourself is whether you want to supplement your trips to the grocery store, or produce everything you eat. Six acres is enough land to grow a wide variety of crops, to eat fresh foods throughout much of the year, and to preserve through canning, freezing, or dehydrating for the fallow months.
What Are The Dimensions Of 6 Acres?
When laying out your homestead, keep in mind that 6 acres is about 261,360 square feet. My plot is 724’ long by 362’ wide. This amount of land is sizable enough to accommodate a tiny home. My design has a 14’ x 30’ footprint, though you could even go larger while still leaving plenty of space for the cultivation of crops and livestock.
How Do You Lay Out A 6 Acre Homestead?
For my homestead farm of 6 acres, I chose to create different zones for each type of plant and animal, with plenty of space in between each to make maintenance easy. You’ll want to keep a little distance between your animal pens and the crops and raised beds to avoid losing part of your harvest to curious critters. Situating animal pens near a mature tree or two will allow your animals to beat the heat with a shady space for resting. Additionally, my barn is centrally located, so I can easily access my tools from wherever I’m working on the land.
Here’s What I’ve Done
- A 420-sq.-ft. tiny home with 15 berry bushes
- 13,000 sq. ft. of ground-level growing space
- 12,000 sq. ft. of raised-bed growing space
- A pen for 12–15 goats
- A coop for 100 chickens
- Three beehives
- 20 fruit trees
- A duck pond with 15 ducks
- A pen for five pigs
- A compost pile spread out over three bays
- A storage shed
- A solar array with 12 panels
How Big Should A Homestead Garden Be?
The garden will make up a significant portion of your 6-acre homestead layout, taking up about an eighth of your plot. Again, depending on your goals, you’ll likely devote the most square footage to this area — about 25,000 square feet on a 6-acre plot.
How Many Fruit Trees Should You Plant On 6 Acres?
A 6 acre homestead farm can easily accommodate 30 fruit trees. While this is enough that you could plant a few different types to enjoy various fruits over a longer growing season, remember that you will want to plant them in pairs.
Most fruit trees — plums, apples, pears, and cherries — need to be planted in groups of two or three, or they won’t germinate. Planting multiples ensures you’ll grow fruit and allows for sharing, selling, or dehydrating.
How Many Berry Bushes Should You Plant On 6 Acres?
I have about 15 berry bushes growing around the perimeter of my tiny house. Berry bushes are one of the easier things to get started, but they also take patience because some types of berries need a couple of years to produce significant yields. Whatever type of berries you grow, you’ll want to protect them from animals with fencing or netting.
Fencing Your 6 Acres
The larger your farm, the bigger an investment it will be to fence the perimeter, but properly fencing your farm is an important step that you can’t skimp on, especially when you begin adding animals to your homestead. Fencing the pens is the biggest priority, but you will likely want to add at least a simple fence around your entire plot to properly delineate your space.
What Animals Can You Have On A 6 Acre Hobby Farm?
You can raise several different types of animals on a 6-acre homestead farm, including bees, chickens, ducks, goats, and pigs. Six acres provide sufficient space to really diversify the output of your homestead and allow plenty of space for these larger animals to roam and thrive.
Chickens
Chickens are a no-brainer to raise on a 6 acre homestead. It’s fairly easy to learn how to take care of them. They earn their keep in terms of helping you manage pests, and they provide considerable protein in the form of eggs and meat, which I consider a backbone of my diet.
Ducks
Like chickens, ducks help keep the pests on my farm under control, and their meat and eggs also provide a great amount of protein. I use these products to barter with other homestead farmers who raise cows — something I don’t have the space for on 6 acres. But it is a sufficient size for a flock of ducks and a small pond.
Bees
In addition to producing honey, bees are a critical element in the farm ecosystem, helping to fertilize your plants so all your planning pays off. Honey is not only a delicious addition to tons of recipes, but it offers many health benefits and stays good for years.
Goats
A 6-acre homestead layout will easily be able to fit in a pen for goats. I suggest you keep it fenced, as goats can be mischievous and will roam if given the chance. On the flip side, their curiosity and hunger can be put to good use if you need a bit of wild land to be cleared.
Is 6 Acres Really Enough Space To Grow Your Own Food?
Yes, following a well-planned layout for a 6 acre homestead offers plenty of space to grow your own food, even considering unexpected weather events that might negatively affect your harvest. Six acres is large enough to grow a rainbow of produce and leave plenty of room for a buffer, making your daily rounds a breeze.
How Much Food Can You Grow On A 6 Acre Farm?
With careful planning, you’ll be growing thousands of pounds of produce on a 6-acre homestead. You can expect 25,000 pounds of produce just from your raised beds. When you add in the other categories, you’ll see that the yields are substantial. Depending on your household size, you may achieve yields that exceed your needs so much that you could regularly sell the surplus.
Estimated Harvest From A 6-Acre Homestead With This Layout
- 360 pounds of berries
- 25,000 pounds of produce
- 2,000 cartons of chicken eggs
- 180 cartons of duck eggs
- 1,200 pounds of chicken
- 600 pounds of duck
- 1,500 gallons of goat milk
- 900 pounds of honey
- 16,000 pounds of fruit
Is 6 Acres Of Land Enough To Be Self-Sufficient?
You can be self-sufficient on a 6-acre farm. I am able to grow enough food for my needs each year, with some left over to preserve and trade. It’s also spacious enough to leave a margin for error, since any number of unplanned events can impact your harvest, like drought, disease, or storms, ensuring that I can remain self-reliant.
Can 6 Acres Of Land Can Sustain One Person?
Is 6 Acres Of Land Enough To Feed A Family Of Four?
My neighbors support a family of four on a 6 acre homestead. Their farm is laid out similarly to mine, though the elements may be slightly rearranged. Their production efforts have been successful enough to generate surplus that they sell at our local farmer’s market. Everyone’s different, though, so know what your family likes to eat and adjust accordingly. For example, if you aren’t big fans of goat’s milk and cheese, you probably don’t want a large herd of goats.
Can You Be Off Grid On A 6 Acre Homestead?
It’s smart to also consider the other resources at your disposal. If you live on a wooded plot and own some forested area, you can chop and burn wood to heat your home in the cold season, which will decrease the amount of energy you depend on from the sun.
Is 6 Acres Of Land Enough For An Off-Grid Homestead?
Six acres is a good start toward an off-grid homestead. The solar panels will provide much of your electricity, and the pond can serve as backup irrigation in times of low rainfall. Whether you go fully off-grid or not comes down to your personal lifestyle goals. There are a number of options to go off-grid, some of which include situating the toilet and shower outside of the main house, which may not be for everyone.
How Many Solar Panels Needed To Power Your Homestead?
A good rule of thumb is that tiny homes typically require 10–12 solar panels per 1,000 square feet of living space. I’m pretty conservative with my energy consumption, so, at 420 square feet, my tiny home requires less energy than that, leaving a surplus for devoting to farm upkeep. This includes using grow lights to start seeds in the winter and running my irrigation systems.
Can A 6 Acre Homestead Be Profitable?
However, I view living on my homestead as a way to free myself from the hamster wheel of working, to control the pace of my life, and to increase my self-sufficiency. I don’t farm to try to earn the most money from my harvests, but to allow myself to be my own boss and stay true to the minimalist principles that bring peace and meaning to my life.
Is A 6 Acre Homestead Worth The Investment?
To me, a 6-acre homestead is definitely worth the investment, simply from the perspective of generating my own food and energy. Holding the property for a number of years, being a conscious steward of the land, creating an ecosystem that sustains itself, and making the soil richer through composting and careful rotation of crops also help ensure that your land value increases over time.
How Much Does It Cost To Start A 6 Acre Homestead?
A 6-acre homestead farm represents a substantial investment, but it’s possible to get started slowly over a couple of years. Depending on how much time you can afford to spend before the farm is fully productive, you can buy seeds or young plants and animals that will mature. Here are the things you should plan to purchase as you set up your farm.
Cost Considerations When Starting A 6 Acre Homestead
- Berry bushes: Prices vary based on the age of the bush. You’ll save money by starting from seed or buying younger plants.
- Seeds: A substantial investment at the beginning, after that you can save seeds year to year or trade with neighbors.
- Chickens: The cost will vary whether you buy mature birds, raise chicks, or breed them.
- Ducks: Again, the cost varies whether you purchase ducklings or ducks and how many.
- Goats: Expenses can be reduced here by buying just a couple of goats and breeding them.
- Beehives: You’ll need to purchase each hive and the bees to live there.
- Fruit trees: Trees get more expensive the older they are. Plan to buy fruit trees a couple of years old to ensure a good yield.
A 6 acre homestead layout offers the experienced landowner ample space to cultivate an abundant farm-to-table existence, increase independence, and foster the peace of mind that comes with knowing that you are responsible for creating the comfortable life you’ve grown.
Your Turn!
- What berry bushes are your favorite?
- Are you planning to go off-grid entirely on your 6-acre homestead?
I am very inspired