Prepping for emergencies?

[Ken]

There are so many directions one can go with this sort of thing. For example, I did not know the Mormons were so into this but reading the manual I cited on my original post it appears they have some sort of religious mandate to store a 1-year supply of food for their families. At times in the past it was up to 7 years. They do all the math and even a 1 year supply is a tremendous amount of food. That’s not my thing at all, not trying to duplicate that at all. But I do see the merit in being a little more self-sufficient as our food supply becomes increasingly centralized and potentially brittle.

There are economies of scale to be had by buying in bulk. My dad has stories about my Mennonite grandfather in Oregon during the 30s and 40s who had a family of 14 to feed. In 46 when the military was demobilizing after WW2 he bought a big surplus walk-in freezer from a local base that was being decommissioned and then would do things like buy albacore and tuna off the docks at the Oregon coast and freeze hundreds of pounds of it. As well as doing a lot of their own butchering and freezing of beef and pork.

Personally I’m more interested in self-sufficiency with gardening and food preservation. Like our grandmothers used to do as normal parts of life in the days before year-round grocery supplies of every imaginable fresh fruit and vegetables. Canning, drying, and pickling foods. That sort of thing. I suppose you could call it a hobby, or perhaps a lifestyle. One of the many old universal skills that has been largely lost.

But, of course there are those who take it way to the extreme. The hard-core preppers with their underground shelters stocked with years worth of foods and supplies. Also the off-the-grid types who invest enormous amounts of time and money in alternative energy sources like wind and solar, their own wells, and that sort of thing.

There seems to be a lot of self-sufficient rural types on this forum. I was curious what you all do.

[Wade]

It may not be as important for you at your location but in BC where we live(2000ft above sea level) a greenhouse is very helpful. Greenhouses are fairly inexpensive and can be help yield a lot of vegetables. I have given up growing cucumbers in the garden but they grow great in the greenhouse - same as tomatoes and peppers. And for fun we even plant some cantaloupe and watermelon in it usually too.

[Josh]

I go to church with, and live near by, quite a few operators of bulk food stores. I’m leaving storing and distributing food in bulk up to the experts.

With that said, I like to have a few weeks of food on hand. The CDC and Ohio DH now want all citizens to keep 14 days of supplies on hand. The family I live with likes to keep a lot more around.

[Wade]

I can't eat potatoes because of digestion issues but my wife loves them. So I plant a bunch for her and we had enough left over from the year before last that we didn't need to buy any for eating or planting. Currently we have a bin 3' x 3' and over 2' tall mounded over with potatoes... these things keep making more and honestly last year I just dug them up with one of my sons helping dig while my other two sons loaded them in wheelbarrows and just dumped them in our root cellar bin - we hardly ever have any bad ones. They store really easy if you have the right spot for them.

Garlic is pretty easy too and grows great at our property. I just dry them for a few weeks hanging under the deck roof out of direct sun, put them on flats and left them in the pantry off the living room for my wife and very few of the 400 heads have gone bad too. I have saved the biggest heads for planting again this year which equaled about another 400 plants. I've had offers from people saying they would buy them from me for at least $10/lbs.

[mike]

I go to church with, and live near by, quite a few operators of bulk food stores. I’m leaving storing and distributing food in bulk up to the experts.

With that said, I like to have a few weeks of food on hand. The CDC and Ohio DH now want all citizens to keep 14 days of supplies on hand. The family I live with likes to keep a lot more around.

I would estimate that we have at least a month or two of food in our freezers and canning cellars, although I'm not quite sure. We don't store food for emergencies necessarily, but if something should happen our biggest problem would not be food, but possibly other things such as fresh water or heat, depending on the time of year and if we lost power for an extended period of time. In which case the food in the freezer would be worthless unless you did something with it immediately.

I remember the Y2K scenario where a certain number of people were motivated to store food in bulk. We had a few customers who were buying whole bags of dried foods such as beans and grains, and storing them in air-tight buckets. But honestly it was a very small minority of people.

Modern transportation systems have made preservation and storage of food in large amounts unnecessary, because fresh food in all categories is available year-round. But a lot of rural folks, including the plain people, still freeze and can meat, vegetables, and fruits because it saves money and is in some cases better quality food than what you can buy in stores. Rural folks are more likely to have at least a small garden or have access to locally grown food from markets, farms, and orchards than do people in urban environments, leaving them generally in a better position when it comes to food storage.

[Szdfan]

Last night, my wife and I made a shopping list for food basics that we might need if we couldn’t leave the house for a couple of weeks. Everything we got is stuff we would use anyways. We can get milk from the goats and eggs from the chickens.

We also stocked up on canned soup in case we got sick — soup is easy to make when you’re not feeling well.

We’re taking precautions because we are 20-30 minutes from town and the closest grocery stores.

We don’t really do emergency preparedness in general, but should probably do a bit more because of our isolated location.

Last summer, we lost power one night for 5 or 6 hours. I ended up driving out in the middle of the night to a place where I could get cell reception to call the power company. While they had restored power to most of the area, they somehow had missed us and weren’t aware that we didn’t have power.

[DarkShallNotPrevail]

We've already stocked up on most essentials to prepare for the baby coming, since we live 45 minutes from town. The freezers are well stocked with meat and veggies for meals, the pantry shelves are embarrassingly full, and we're putting in our regular bulk order from Dutch Valley for flour and rice. Doing a last big shopping trip tomorrow for random things like hand soap and nb diapers, as well as fresh groceries like fruit and milk. After this, any extra shopping will be through Amazon or Walmart's curbside pickup.

Thankfully we have all my inlaws living close too, so if we need something fast and can't get to the store we can always borrow! Very happy to have the community of extended family nearby during this time

[JohnHurt]

Our current coronavirus crisis and things like runs on toilet paper have gotten me to think a little bit more about family emergency preparedness. We have a large pantry and probably at least a month's worth of meals stored up at any one time. But don't do canning and that sort of thing like my mother and grandmother used to do.

Anyone here into that preparedness and food storage? If so, I'd be curious what you do. A work acquaintance of mine who is very into that sort of thing in a rational (non-survivalist) sort of way tells me that the Mormons actually have this stuff down cold. It is somehow part of their theology or culture. He's not Mormon, but says they have some of the best printed resources on emergency planning and pointed me to this manual which I have found to be some interesting reading. It is a 220 page preparedness manual with a Mormon tilt.

https://thesurvivalmom.com/wp-content/u ... Manual.pdf

Any comments? Anyone else thinking about how to make their families and lives more resilient in these uncertain times? I'm thinking about getting into canning and putting more food away this summer. I'll have to get my mom come show the family how it is all done as none of my kids have ever been near a canning operation.

Ken,

The link to the Mormon Prepardness Manual was my start with preparedness. It tells you the correct amount of each type of food to store to have a balanced diet. I appreciate that you have posted this for everyone. Just skip the first 20 pages to get past the Mormon stuff.

But it is Biblical to prepare.

Joseph saved Egypt and his brothers by stockpiling 7 years of food. If you keep more food than you could possibly use, then you will be able to share with others during the time of crisis. Preparedness can be a very Christian thing to do.

For our long term food storage, we use mylar bags and oxygen absorbers. White rice will keep 20 years with this method, wheat berries will keep over 30 years. We grind einkhorn wheat berries flour to make bread with low gluten levels. So wheat berries is something that we will always need.

I have a 6 month supply of food for the 8 people at our house, but with the current crisis, I ordered more mylar bags and absorbers this week. The bags are sold out everywhere, but I found 100 of the 20" x 30" bags at Uline for $154.00. These bags will fit a 5 or 6 gallon bucket. I found the absorbers from USA Preparedness or something like that. You need a 2000 cc absorber for a 5 gallon bucket. More information is on YouTube.

They are selling white rice at Sams for I think $25 for a 50 lb bag. You can buy rice online from Walmart. I tried to buy 12 cans of green beans at Sams, but they limited me to only 6 cans per day. That's OK, I understand completely. I might just buy a little bit extra every time I go, that would be better for everyone.

Canned goods will last 5 years, but have a 2 year shelf life stamped on them. What is good about canned food is that you can always donate them to a food bank a year from now, as they are a known quality, while items you pack yourself are harder to donate.

We also raise sheep and have a garden, and our neighbors have eggs and chickens. And we have deer out here too.

Our power goes out fairly easily, so I have a 8,000 watt generator and a lot of electrical cords. My electrician friend down the street said he would help me put a switch in that would cut off the grid and run the house entirely off the generator. I may do that soon.

One of my friends was on "Doomsday Preppers", so I would watch it occasionally. The Doomsday Prepper show hosts would rate each prepper, and all of the preppers failed in one major area: They did not have enough stored potable water. I thought about how to fix this for our family, so here it is:

We have a metal roof (which is necessary for rainwater collection - asphalt shingles won't work), so I replaced the downspouts with 4" thin walled pipe, and re-routed all of the water that falls on the roof through these pipes and into a stock tank filled with pea gravel that acts as a filter. At the bottom of the tank is a perforated pipe, at the top of the tank is an overflow pipe. Both pipes send the water to a manifold that connects 16 IBC totes that hold 275 gallons each, giving a reservoir of 4,500 gallons. The water is then pumped back into the house as needed with a BurCan pump. I also can switch over and use the well, but it has a lot of sulfur and methane. We love to take a shower and wash our clothes in rainwater, it is a real winner.

But if our power were to go out for a week, our well would not work, but we would still be able to draw water out of the IBC totes. These are the big square water containers that sit inside a metal cage. I covered them with black plastic so no algae would form inside them.

We run the rainwater through a Berkey filter for drinking. If we have any bad smell in the water, we put a little bleach in the tanks, but we have not had to do that for over a year.

But our biggest "prep" is our neighbors. We share and do things for each other. So I prepare for them, just like they do for me. They are mostly farmers, and preparedness is part of their culture. I think the greatest thing we can do is to work with each other to get through any crisis.

Thanks for the topic.

John Hurt

[Josh]

good grief

[ohio jones]

good grief

The simple life sure is a lot of hard work.