Acre

An acre is amount of land that one person can plow once in one day using one pair of bulls pulling a plow. It is standardized as 4000 sq meters.

One meter is also the amount of land that is needed to support one person for one year, if:

(1) There is only one crop per year.

(2) Land is average (grow 400 kg of wheat a crop for example).

(3) Rain is the only source of water that is used, that is, canal water is not used, also no well water is used (no tube wells, pumping water from ground etc).

(4) No chemical fertilizer is used. Excretions of farm animals and humans are put in soil.

(5) No pesticides are used.

(6) No tractor is used.

(7) The diet of supported person is balanced, that is, get 55% calories from CH, 15% from proteins, 30% from fats, also get all needed minerals (majority from honey) and vitamin and fibers.

(8) From this one acre all needed categories of food (fruits, honey, milk, meat, fish, vegetable oil, grains, vegetables, dry fruits etc are grown).

(9) Within this one acre, other than supporting the person, the farm animals needed to work on farm (such as bulls) are also supported.

(10) Clothing for the person (basically in the form of cotton) is also supported within this acre.

(11) Medicines for the person (the herbs) as well as wood to burn and also flowers for fragrance products are also grown from this one acre.

Note that, traditionally, an acre is a very long, rectangular shape of land. Its length is 200 meters and breadth just 20 meters. This long shape made it easy for the farmer to plow it on a straight path and u-turns are very much reduced. The square shape is beegha or square furlong which is 200 meters x 200 meters, so there are 10 acres in a square furlong. Traditionally, land was bought and sold only in multiples of beegha as land was cheap and people few, also 10 acres used traditionally hardly support a farmer's family with no extra to give in taxes.

1/100 of begha is 400 sq meters, a piece of land ideally suited to make a house for a nuclear family, a store house, a small market for a village, a small masjid in a village, a small school, a small hospital etc. In my opinion, ideally no building should be lesser than 400 sq meters in area. I have also named this area, I call it "qita" which means plot in urdu.

Some lands need to be plowed twice, some thrice before any crops can be grown on it. So, if it need to be plowed thrice, the farmer needs 3 days to plow one acre and 30 days to plow one beegha. A farmer should not spend more than a month in plowing because there are only 6 months available in all to have a crop, one consumed in plowing, one must be there for harvesting and 4 months are the minimum one should reasonably give to plants to grow. Note that seeding is an easy activity and can be done while plowing, by a woman who simply walks behind the farmer spreading seeds as land is being plowed. Ideally, a farmer should have 40 acres to work on, 10 acres to have a crop such as grain, dry fruit, vegetables etc, 10 acres orchard, 10 acres hay land where hay is grown by farmer that is its not a natural grass land, 10 acres for miscelleanous including cotton, wood, herbs, flowers, pool for fishes, hay for bulls etc. Other than these 40 acres used by farmer, there should be a 10 acres for natural forest, grass land, lake etc. So, 50 acres land is arable which is 80% of village, that means for each farmer we should have 62.5 acres of land.

There is an issue in above, if one farmer have to work at 40 acres then he would be just a farmer, he would have no time or energy left to do anything else, things like milking cows, butchering cows, cleaning grains, putting excretions of farm animals back to farm after processing etc.