How Big is Sweet Apple Acres?

Well, I was going to rant about the economic devastation caused by Fluttershy’s sodimizingly stupid solution in Bats, but it begged the question: “Wait, how big is Sweet Apple Acres?” So, using observations and rough math I’m going to try and find a solution. Lets start with animals:

Sheep: Using this picture, it looks like 8 to 10 sheep. You can usually keep an ewe on half an acre, so at least five acres.

Cows: According to this picture. There’s 16 cows. I’m using the Missouri number of 4 acres per dairy cow. That would give us 64 acres dedicated to cows.

Pigs: I can’t find a good picture on how many pigs are there, but you can keep 200 pigs on 10 acres. I’m sure there’s less than that, so 4 acres are fine.

Chickens: Chickens require negligible room. Giving them half an acre is more than enough room.

Buildings: Their home and “yard” area could easily be a half acre. There’s a lot of out buildings so just to make everything even let’s go for another acre.

This gives us 75 acres before we get to the apples.

So how many acres of apples? Well, while doing some remedial research I found this site with some very interesting numbers. It has to be at least 10 acres of apples to be able to sustain itself as an orchard. Ideally there’d be between three and four hundred trees per acre. That means that in Applebuck Season AJ was trying to harvest some 3,500 trees. No wonder she was so tired. These 10 acres would likely include the Zap Apple trees as well as they’d never be able to harvest another 10 acres in one day.

Grains: There’s four ponies on the farm. Assuming that they’re utilizing it all internally you've got 1300-1500 pounds of Apples. They’re hard working so about 2% of body weight a day, 365 days a year. So, about 10,950 lbs. Yesh. Hooray for standardized sizes. Means it’s around 195 bushels. You can get 2.1 bushels per acre so 91 acres just to feed the family. I’m going to round that up to 100, because, public schools and math.

Now we've got ancillary items like flowers, grapes, and carrots. I’m going with 15 acres to give a nice even 200 acres. Then I multiply this by 10% for “waste” space. This represents areas like that beaver creek flowing through that they can’t utilize or spots that take too much work to make it viable. So 220 would be my best estimate for lower size.

So what’s the max upper limit?
Well, there’s only one Big Mac. The big question is: “How much work can an Apple do?” I went to American public schools so I hate math and fractions so I’m going to say that the especially strong Big Mac is as strong as two mules since we've seen him pull two oxen. Two mules can be expected to plow one acre in half a day. How long can he work? Let’s go with 9 months. We know there’s winter and earth pony magic will likely allow it to grow right up until then. That’s 275 days. Let’s give him one day off a week due to exhaustion and timing. That costs us 40 days. We know he spends about 5 days dealing with the Zap apples. For the corn BM is going to have to plow the area. Since there’s at least 100 acres, that’s 100 days. That leaves 130 days. Assuming that Apple Bloom and Granny Smith are blanching and packing the corn he’s going to be harvesting half of it. That breaks it down to 80 days. Plowing the “ancillary” takes out 15 days. 65 days. If he’s doing half of the harvesting of the 10 acres of apples that’s 5 days. If we divide the remaining 60 by two for both plowing/tending and harvesting giving us 30 more acres they can utilize.

Granny Smith is likely in charge of “house work.” It’s easier on a body to do dishes than hoe. If they’re following standard farm protocol, Apple Bloom is in charge of the animals. It’s easy but time consuming work.

The big question is “Just how much work does Applejack do around the farm?” She does an awful lot of gallivanting about and we know she doesn't pull a plow (since she specifically mentions it’s BM’s job in Golden Ticket) That means it’s likely her main job to tend already established trees, sell goods and bake even though she’s not shown to cook that often. If we divide her 230 work days by an even three it’s 76 days per job. Divide that by two to allow both tending and harvesting, subtract her half of the established orchard and that’s another 33 acres she could add to productivity.

So if we add in another 10 acres of waste to keep the percentage of waste the same and it puts it at 293 acres. Let’s call it 300.

Now granted we don’t know the full size of the land grant to the Apple family and we do occasionally see one or two other members come visit apparently to help build barns and the like, but there’s no sign of them hiring seasonal help. Given AJ’s pride and difficulty in asking for help, it’s not surprising. So, yeah, 220 to 300 acres or for the metrically inclined 90-120 hectares would be your best bet in size.