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Title: Solviva: How to grow $500,000 on one acre, and Peace on Earth
ISBN: 0966234901
Author:
Publicate Date: 1998-06-01
Publish: 1998-06-01
List Price: $35.00
Average Customer Rating: 3.5
Format: Paperback
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Amazon Lowest New Price: $21.88
Amazon Lowest Used Price: $24.11
Amazon Merchant Price: $23.10
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| Customer Review: |
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1: A great book
Solviva is a book everyone should read if they are interested in growing their own food, and to learn other methods to live a sustainable life.
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2: Never made $500,000 on an acre
Book covers in general terms information about a passive solar home and greenhouse. Heavy on sustainable living and growing but light on construction details and author only theorizes that one could make $500,000 on an acre but never did it. Despite those short comings it still is a great book with ideas and experiences that will simulate the environmental conscious person.
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3: Fabulous book!
I finally bought this book after hearing about it years ago. I regret not buying it back then. I love this book.
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4: Worth checking out from the library, not worth buying.
I am a gardener with a few years of experience and a lot of book learning on the subject. This is my opinion, after reading the book, and coming to it from that point of view.
If you aren't very well read on gardening or mini-farming, I'd recommend skipping this book until you've read a few others, such as Bartholomew's Square Foot Gardening, Jeavons books on biointensive gardening, and a few others. Otherwise you'll buy too deeply into what Edey is trying to sell.
If you are pretty well read on the topic and have gardening/mini-farming experience, then the book is a reasonable weekend read.
Either way, unless you're extremely flush with cash, I wouldn't buy the book, I'd only spend time on it if it's available from the library.
The title is misleading, the "How To Grow $500,000 On One Acre" is catchy, but not realistic. The author says that her "gross income was up to $50,000 a year," (pg 158). "up to" ought to raise an eyebrow. I'm supposing that the reader is supposed to assume that the author grossed $50K, but that's not what it says. It also wasn't indicated how many years this was achieved, though there was an earlier reference to the author working at it for 8 years. There wasn't also a hard indicator regarding how long it took to build up to this, the term "soon" was used, but could mean just about anything.
The author then made some seriously goofball (in my opinion) extrapolations: that if the set up had been run more professionally, the author would have been earning well over $100k; that if a full acre was used, then that would obviously mean earnings would be over $500k. There's nothing to support such claims. In fact, at one point she indicated that "gross income never did reach much beyond the $50,000." Throw in the fact that this is gross income, and suddenly the whole agribusiness angle of "Solviva" doesn't look so great, despite what the author "believes."
There are a lot of other places in the book that don't read that well. For example, many other books address composting more thoroughly and clearly. At one point the author discussing composting toilets, incorrectly refers to humanure and nightsoil as being the same thing, and discusses what she "believes" to be the best way for handling it. Want to read about the best ways of handling human waste, that are based on actual research and experimentation? Read the Humanure Handbook, it explains the whys and wherefores much better and more clearly than Solviva.
There were a lot of things like that, such as her assumption that because she was having an insect pest explosion and suddenly the problem decreased that it must be beneficial predator insects catching up. This was just some assumption that she decided was true, based on her deciding it was so, when in fact there could have been many different reasons.
I will say this about the book: there was a lot of stuff about the authors opinions about the state of the world. If you're interested in Edey's world view, then certainly this is the book for you. If you're looking for a guide for small farming or gardening, I'd say pass. If you're interested in reading about the topic, there are way better books to put your money and time into. But if you've already read all those, and Solviva is available in the local library, maybe it's worth some time.
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5: Viva Solviva
Solviva is a fresh and brillant exploration of the complexities involved in constructing a solar home. Anna Edey is beautifully human as she describes her real life adversity in bringing such a complex project into fruition.
Edey is an honest and telling author. She articulates her emotion involved in creating the energy necessary to endeavor so seemingly innocent and simplistic a notion as a house that you sustain and that sustains you as you sustain the Earth.
She vividly describes having to consider the marketing and distribution not to mention profit margins of raising organic restaurant quality garden vegetables and greens within the confines of her modest solar home.
With candor she conveys how interesting ones life becomes while taking on rabbits, chickens, and goats as a part of ones daily life, and indeed, in fact, as co habitants in as much as they too survived within the small solar house and that their presence yielded a profit.
Edey humbly describes discovering each vegetable and green with such surprise and satisfaction and that her vegetables were in fact prize winning and well sought after.
Because of the biproducts of such an efficently contained microecosystem Edey is able to support herself and her lifestyle comfortably within a selfsustaining home. Not without the residual income of the modern associate but with the profit yielded from her ingenius business and gardening method.
Ultimately the complexity of the solar structure itself combined with Edey's originality and genius in housing and growing botanicals within the solar home, in addition to the interactivity of the animals at the house, combine to make a kind of EARTHSHIP that does inevitably produce a profit.
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