I wonder how many of us truly know how much food we consume individually on a yearly basis? How many have truly done the numbers?
Let's take a simple staple like say Rice. How much rice would you consume in a normal day if that's the only thing you have to eat? Half a pound? Ok let's start with that number. Half a pound of rice is equal to about 1 and 1/4 cups of dried rice which will cook up to about 3 cups when done. That in turn equals out to around 612 calories per day. Not gonna put on weight with this diet are we?
A five gallon pail of Rice with a mylar bag holds about 30 pounds of rice or the equivalent of 60 days rations for one person. You would need six of these pails for one person for a year. Twelve for two. Eighteen for three. You get the idea.
Family of four? Twenty Four pails for one year at half rations. This is assuming a base (the Rice) and that you are foraging or growing/raising, hunting etc. other proteins and fat to go with this Rice.
Now what are you going to do? In one years time you are going to be out of luck. This gives you the Winter to consume and then the Spring and Summer to replace the 24 pails with something else. Assuming of course you cannot grow Rice in your area.
But wait. Does that vacuum sealed can of ready to plant seeds you been keeping in storage have enough seed to plant 6000 bean plants? What? It only has 300 bean seeds? Oops well I guess you can write off the first years growing season because your going to need all those beans produced the first year just to have enough seed to make a full planting the next year.
Ok guess we need 48 pails of Rice now.
How much space does 48 five gallon pails take up again? Let me tell you it makes a pretty good wall with a few acting as night stands too. Remember this is just Rice. Nothing else. And a half ration of it at best. Just a base.
You have the super condensed, high calorie MRE packs? Last I looked a 30 day's ration of MRE in the case was about twice the size of a five gallon pail more or less. Of course no foraging is required when you have those right? You only need to have 96 of them stored and ready now along with your tin of emergency seeds to build from.
If you are not dead certain you have the knowledge and means to jump off Spring with exactly the amount of resources needed to provide yourself and your family with a years worth of food after one growing season than you better have at least two years worth of stockpiled food going into Winter.
I have seen entire rooms stacked floor to ceiling with pails and cases of canned goods but when you truly do the math what looks like a never ending supply comes out to six months tops.
These numbers are pretty much just fairytale numbers anyway. No way on earth a grown man or teenage boy is going to get by on 604 calories a day. In a grid down situation you are going to need 1500 plus just to get by on. One measly can of tuna has 45 calories. Do the math. Even a family of three is going to require a warehouse behind their home to store that much food.
The older I get the more a realize a year is not all that much time. If you aren't ready to be on your way to becoming truly self sustaining within six months after you begin hitting your preps you will more than likely run out of time and food before you start producing.
Look at your preps. Run the numbers and have a plan.
Keep Prepping Everyone!!!
thank you for a nice honest posting
ReplyDeleteWildflower
Thank you for commenting!!!
DeleteIt is rather mind-blowing when you try to think about just HOW MUCH food you need to "hold you over". I've lost count of how many 5-gallon buckets we've got, but I know we've got over a ton (LITERALLY) of various grains---wheat berries, oat groats, rice, and corn. Fortunately, we've got the room to keep it all climate-controlled. Even more important is a massive supply of seeds to grow veggies, plus the knowledge and experience to grow them. I'm into my sixth year of serious gardening and am still learning more every day! It's not nearly as easy as some might think. One additional thing to add to this discussion is the means to preserve the harvest, should you live long enough to reap one! It would be wise to have two pressure canners, a water bath canner, a small mountain of canning jars, and Tattler reusable lids on hand. And again, start using them NOW so you have the knowledge ahead of time!
ReplyDeleteAnon - You obviously know what you are talking about!!! One reason I harp on growing beans so much if they seem to offer the closest to a complete protein and are the easiest to store without canning. In order to truly survive though you are correct preserving the food and having the resources to do so is just as important as growing it.
DeleteGood comment thank you for sharing.
That is why it is interesting to see how our ancestors survived in the mid 1700s in isolated areas. I can pretty much guarantee that they didn't have buckets of rice. They had corn and grain that would have been cooked into mush and pudding to go with all of the meat. Lots of salt is needed as well as a storage building to keep all of the food and meat where animals and weather won't destroy it. They survived like their European ancestors did for thousands of years only with out oppressive governments like were in the old world and like what we have now. I think that is a major key is to be able to not paying so much to the government.
ReplyDeleteSf - I get a real hoot out of biographies that mention hand written accounts of food orders from the 16 and 1700's. I also like some of their accounts of building special sheds or the like to house it all in. Windfalls were another thing we don't even think about today. There are numerous instances of farmers coming across shad or other fish runs on small rivers and becoming fishermen for a few weeks and selling all they had. They could just pull into any small town and sell all the extra they had.
DeleteAmazing how much easier it is without an oppressive government and yet that government back then was so bad we fought a war with it. Imagine that?
Our family has about a month's worth of food,but I really haven't done a hard inventory. The Doctor ( 10 week old) has a slightly higher supply, breast milk, and formula. Another interested post to make me stop and think.
ReplyDeleteK - Hmmm how fast does breast milk dry up in a calorie scarce environment?
DeleteMy recommendation is for a minimum of 2 years of something. No one can live on beans alone for 2 years but if you had 2 years worth and then made sure you foraged and grew your own you should have enough time and variance to make a go of it.
Just my opinion though.
Looks like I need to keep stocking up and learning to grow...
ReplyDeleteIzzy - You got like a years supply of bacon at least :)
DeletePP - one thing that very few talk about when talking about stocking food or growing their own and preserving it for the winter - is foraging. get out and forage as much food as you can that is local to your area. that kind of foraged food is not something you have to maintain, fertilize or weed - it's just there and it's there for free and does not need your attention until you are harvesting it. if you constantly forage food and preserve it, you can be eating dandelion greens in january! another thing that doesn't ever get talked about on prepping blogs is sprouts!!!! grow some radish or broccoli and let them go to seed. the amount of seeds from one plant is enough to save some for next year's planting, and then have enough to sprout all through the winter!!! sprouts are loaded with vitaminC! and again - they take very little effort on your part and can be grown in a jar on your windowsill every day of the year! and this might be a cape breton thing - but there are few blogs that mention how easy it is to grow potatoes - you don't have to weed them, they'll pretty much grow anywhere and if you live in area that is free of potatoe bugs - then it's just smooth sailing until harvest. and did you know that potatoes contain more potassium than bananas????
ReplyDeleteanother great post (and i have caught up on all the others prior to this one). your friend,
kymber
Trenchie!!! LOL
DeleteOh ya foraging is important. I have done more than a few posts on specific plants locally that can be used as forage. I bet greens will become popular once again.
You are correct about the sprouts though. Few Blogs cover them but I have seen em mentioned in quite a few books and even TV series. Remember it was a staple for the Jerico survivors.
Thanks for those recommendations too I need to look into sprouts more.
I mention Potatoes a lot but they are really not easy to grow here. The heavy clay tends to rot em out. I solve that by making raised beds that are pleasing to the eye and fit right in with the surrounding environment and don't make the yard look like the back of a gas station :) wink wink ....
Wow this is a timely post today. I have lost my mind with it all today.
ReplyDeleteSol - This is also the worst possible time to go into needing your preps too witht he entire Winter still coming. Time to think about these things.
DeleteWe must also remember that people used to eat a lot less than we do today because the food was full of nutrients. For example, apples only have less than half the vitamins and nourishment that they did a hundred years ago. Also, if you have pressure canners, make sure you have extra parts like rubber sealing rings and pressure plugs. Also lots of extra lids. We dehydrate our potatoes and onions. Peanut butter (organic) is a great energy food that is packed with calories. Just a tablespoon will keep one going for hours. Raw honey keeps forever and is a natural antibiotic. Don't buy honey from the store....go to the beekeeper or online to get the unadulterated raw kind. If you want to stay healthy, you must eat health giving food.
ReplyDeleteTewshooz - I think dehydrating is very important. So is canning of course but many people will begin to run out of the things you mentioned within the first year I think and unless another system is in place they may be out of luck. With dehydrating though you can do it in many ways even without electricity and it requires very little consumable parts.
DeleteYou have a good point about the nutrients in food and how people ate much less. I always picture some suburbanite getting out there boxed up 1 years food supply they bought and wondering where it all went after 3 months.
Another good post for thinking!
ReplyDeleteI know that you're not advocating it, but living off one staple would be dangerous. You'd need a good mix of beans, wheat, oats, barley, potatoes and anything else that you can get to grow in the climate you live in. Beer was a major staple in England back in the day, providing safe water to drink and store plus extra calories to get you through the day. Growing and malting barley would enable this as well. Cider (hard cider to you guys) and other fermented drinks would be important as well in that respect. As well as being a good thing to trade. I made cider last year but haven't got round to it yet this year.
The trouble with foraging is I'd imagine everyone else would be at it as well so the pickings would be less. In England you're never far from anyone else.
Also you'd have to plan for the bad years as well as the good. I'm a relatively good vegetable gardener but I fail massively some years with certain crops. Someone the other day said to me "what are you going to do with all those apples when your trees are older?" I thought on good years I'd give them away or sell them and on the really bad years we should have just enough. Also I grow pears as well as when apples don't do so well the pears sometimes fill the gap.
I must try to grow things on a bigger scale next year. The weeds are my main problem. I can't keep on top of the garden I've got. If there was a way to grow beans and wheat without the weeds I'd jump at the chance. I guess that's why non organic is so appealing, but it's never a route I'd take. How do you keep on top of the weeds with your beans?
Kev - From what I saw when I lived in Europe folks here in America would have a much easier time foraging especially the further West you live. The countryside however is much much harder to traverse on foot than Europe countryside is so most people wouldn't go far from the roads. There are however vast areas owned by the government that there is no way they could police enough to keep people out.
DeleteYou are correct I am not advocating living off one item just using it as a base that you know will be there. Rice and beans supposedly make a perfect protein when mixed but you can get close with beans and corn and other items as well I think.
Weeds are the bane of my existence. We have such terrible weeds here in Missouri. I know everyone thinks they have the worst weeds in the world but Missouri seems to have every type of weed found anywhere else in the world and then a few extra local ones besides. From Kudzu to Morning Glory. It doesn;t help that the government is ona big kick to introduce less than desirable so called native plants back into the mix either. Stuff that my ancestors worked for centuries to get rid of is now being sown ont he road edges and taking over fields once again.
I have tried ground coverings and sheet metal walkways etc. and nothign really works. Morning Glory, Bindweed and Johnson grass are the absolute worst things and nothing kills their extensive root systems except digging them up completely and you always miss some part. I just try and weed until my plants have enough of a head start to make it then usually I give up.
I do have a new plan though of fencing my garden spot off and turning a pig in there over the Winter. I have read that can actually work wonders for gettign rid of weeds.
I had the chickens on my garden for about 5 months over the winter the second year and it did get rid of loads of weeds, but I didn't keep on top of it and new ones got started. Buttercup is the worst here as it creeps along the ground and has good roots. I have a little mobile pen that I keep a few chickens in and I fold these onto weedy patches in the veg garden and that seems to work.
DeleteKudzu is supposedly edible and your government encouraged planting of it many years ago! Over here people keep on a bout rewilding, reintroducing wolfs and things (not here but further north) I always think that we got rid of them for a reason!
Kev - I have heard chickens are little excavating machines. I haven't gotten any yet because I haven't gotten around to building them a coop yet and Chickens don't last long around here honestly. The coons will break in and kill all of them in one night.
DeleteLuckily the Kudzu isn't an issue here. It grows in a few spots but dies off rather quickly during the Winter months. I do know of a protected low field about 3 miles from me that is covered in the stuff though or was. We had a long stretch of mild Winters that allowed it to grow more but after this last one it may have died back once again.
Oh ya Russ has big plans for eating Kudzu.
DeleteYes, logistics are tough. And think of all those post-apocalyptic armies that run around in fiction.
ReplyDeleteRuss - One reason I disagree with the entire looting horde idea. Not saying it won't be an issue in some places but I seriously doubt it will last long or make it very far into the rural areas.
DeleteI have seen authors set books in rural towns, and make the assumption that the rural towns which they are familiar with, will run out of supplies themselves and head to the big cities for help. People will be looking for packaged foods, as that is all people know how to deal with anymore.
Delete