Yeah, if your granddad kept 24+ cows just for his own milk needs then that's surely a loss, but that's atypical and extremely inefficient. My family is similar,

Yeah, if your granddad kept 24+ cows just for his own milk needs then that's surely a loss, but that's atypical and extremely inefficient. My family is similar, and my grandfather was a dairy farmer, but that was the first thing to go. A dairy is one of the things that scales very well and is just cheaper and easier to buy mass produced milk, but we still garden and raise animals for meat and produce an abundance on a few acres. Grazing animals take up a lot of space so I'm referring to just the garden. Cows, goats, chickens, geese, hogs to root out nutgrass. Deer and rabbits are so plentiful they are a problem. Our main external input that we can't really self source is fuel for the tractor. It's not a massive operation by any means and not a major source of income as everyone has normal non-farming jobs. But it's not a loss, produces far more than we need with not an extreme amount of labor. It's a 100+ year old farm and is mostly forest and timberland now but used to be cotton fields. It's really not that crazy of an idea to be a mostly self sufficient farm. I would say that including non-grazed pasture we have under 8 acres for crops. Probably an additional 30 for grazing. Of course we buy groceries of things we don't grow but if that wasn't an option we would still eat plenty just less varied. The important thing is to just have good land I think. Most of Americas farmland isn't great land for farming, it's just flat or ideal for a specific crop, which is great for mass production. The downside is that it's less productive and requires a ton of inputs with a limited and very time sensitive growing season.