Prepper stuff-- Prepped for Crisis

[MrMan]

Supply chains have been breaking down a bit, or slowing down. Even in the US which had an efficient supply chain, there were various locations over the past few years where lots of food items were missing from shelves. Even the giant and expert in logistics, Walmart, has had empty shelves.

Russia and Ukraine account for about 12% of calories traded on the world market. Russia was supplying China with more petroleum in the past, and petroleum is a fertilizer input. So food shortages globally could be an issue. Have you seen the price of eggs? $5? $6? $9? It's crazy.

Last year, I bought two ducks, hens, and we raise them in the back yard. A couple of months after I bought them, they started laying. I've gotten one egg a day, except once, one of them skipped a day. We'd slacked off on giving them greens. (These days I feed them a lot of dandelion leaves from the yard.) I might spend about $25 a month of feed. I also spend a few hours a week cleaning their coup and refilling their water container. Ducks need water. We've got two fridges with freezers, and two box freezers, one of them quite big. We've talked with a sheep herder about buying sheep from him. There are farmers that raise goats around here, too. We have discussed raising cattle on a friend's land. We'd need to clear out one of those freezers. If we had solar panels, we could keep the deep freezers freezing at night, even without batteries.


A friend of mine suggested getting food-grade barrels and feeding one with soybeans and the other with corn. He sprouts both of them and feeds them to his chickens. I buy chicken feed for the ducks. If the food supply shuts down and you have 60 gallons of corn and 60 gallons of soybeans with a stash of canned food, that could last a while. You could plant the seeds, too. Using nitrogen might preserve it longer. But using and then refilling it will keep you with a stash of food most of the time. You could use it to feed ducks, chickens, etc. I'm not sure how to keep calcium in their diet under that scenario. You have to cook or sprout soybeans before they are edible, and my ducks turn their noses up at corn. Maybe if it were cracked they would eat it.

We've got lots of canned food, and my wife dehydrated some stuff from our gardens. This is grocery store canned stuff, but my wife cooks fresh food and we rarely eat canned food, so it is more of a stash for emergencies. Still, I think we should eat it. I started cooking the beans to get the salt out and to make them a bit mushier, and gave most of the non-green beans to the ducks to eat.

If you had those Patriot meals, I hear they are kind of skimpy. Imagine you had those and a stash of corn and soybeans if everything really shut down for a few months. Hopefully, the meals would provide some variety, and the other stuff can fill your stomach. My wife makes Indonesian tempeh out of soybeans. It's pretty good if it's prepared well.

I also set up two rain barrels. I went low tech with 3/4 house with the hole pointed up in the downspout of the gutter, funneling rainwater into the barrel without using a diverter. I usually get about 3/4 of a barrel with this method. I'd probably get more with a diverter. If the water shuts off, we have that if I don't completely use all of the water for the garden. If I get the other two or three barrels set up, if they were full, our family might even have water to bathe for a while if there were a water shutdown.

We have grown squash, eggplants, peppers, sweet potatoes, potatoes, greens, and watermelons and some of our fruit and berries might be coming in eventually. This year, we are doing raised beds in planters to keep from having to stoop so much. We may let some sprawling stuff we don't harvest much grow in the old garden, like water melons or certain kinds of squash.

We have a fireplace that we have never used and some firewood. I have a genset I've never tested that came with the house. That's good for part of a day with the fuel I have. I have some tanks for the grill, and cans of gas for a portable stove.

I've thought about solar panels, but I don't know how long I will be here.

I've lived in apartments before, and I've wondered if water and electricity were shut down, how long it would take for people in apartments to die off.

Is there anything 'prepper' that you have done?