How to live off the land for a year

Could you live off the land for a year without buying a single thing to eat? This was the challenge a retired journalist set himself on Radio 4 this week. Max Cotton lives on a five-acre smallholding near Glastonbury in Somerset with his wife Maxine, two pigs, two dozen hens and a Jersey-Friesian cross named Brenda. He also has six adult sons who, as far as this project is concerned, ‘prefer to pontificate than help very much.’

Cotton conceded at the outset that he would allow himself to purchase salt as a necessity. For everything else, he turned to some ‘back-of-an-envelope type calculations’ and worked out that he would need to grow at least a million calories’ worth of food to sustain him year-round. This would equate to enough wheat to fill a tennis court, or an acre of cabbage if he ate nothing else.