07/11/2025
🎯 Goal
Produce enough wheat to:
Bake 1 loaf of bread per week for a year (52 loaves)
Bake 2 cakes per year
🍞 Step 1: Estimate Flour Needs
Bread Flour
A typical loaf of bread uses:
~3.5 cups of flour
1 cup of flour weighs ~120 grams (4.25 oz)
So, 3.5 cups ≈ 420 g or 0.93 lb per loaf
Yearly bread flour need:
0.93 lb × 52 loaves = 48.36 lb
Cake Flour
A typical cake uses:
~2 cups of flour = 240 g ≈ 0.53 lb
2 cakes × 0.53 lb = 1.06 lb
Total annual flour needed:
Bread: 48.36 lb
Cake: 1.06 lb
➡️ Total: ~50 lbs of flour per year
🌾 Step 2: Wheat-to-Flour Conversion
1 pound of wheat berries yields about 0.75 lb of flour
So, to get 50 lb of flour, you need:
50 / 0.75 = 66.7 lb of wheat grain
🌾 Step 3: Wheat Yield per Area
Average small-scale (hand-grown or home-scale) wheat yields:
30–40 bushels per acre (modern mechanized)
1 bushel of wheat = ~60 lb grain
So, 1 acre = 1,800–2,400 lb wheat
You don’t need that much. Let’s scale it down:
Let’s say you grow 1,000 lb per acre
To get 66.7 lb of wheat, you need:
66.7 lb / 1,000 lb = 0.0667 acres
0.0667 acres × 43,560 sq ft = ~2,905 sq ft
But to be safe (accounting for lower yields, loss to pests/weather), plan for ~3,500 sq ft.
📐 Final Estimate
Item Amount
Flour needed/year ~50 lbs
Wheat grain needed ~67 lbs
Land needed (safe est) ~3,500 sq ft (~0.08 acre)
🌱 Additional Tips
Winter wheat is typically planted in the fall (Sept–Nov) and harvested in late spring or early summer (May–June), which works well in Piedmont's mild winters.
You could also stagger with spring wheat (planted in early spring, harvested mid-summer) to experiment and diversify.
Consider growing hard red winter wheat for bread and soft white wheat for cakes if you want to optimize for flour types.
