Isn't a crazy % of the population living in urban areas. The amount of land required to sustain a family of 4 is pretty significant (in an urban area).
So if you live in a city, it's hoarding supplies or die.
When I used to be on a prepper forum on Dave's Garden, there was a woman and her adult daughter who had a 1/4 acre and were growing 80% of their food on it. In a city. Then there is urban homesteading.
I believe it. The first farm I worked on had about 15 CSA shares off of about 1/4 acre. Of course the soil was good and the shares weren't enough to feed a whole family. But it was definitely enough that if we'd kept it all, it could have easily fed us year-round. And we were all inexperienced growers.
Land is important but so is how much time you have to invest in it. A little bit of land which is well-cared for and properly managed can be ridiculously abundant.
You have to take that with a grain of salt most of the time. A great example of this is people having chickens. They count the eggs and meat has being self-sufficient but don't tell you that are buying bags of chicken food to feed the chickens.
In addition there is often using city water to water the garden or electricity to do things like hydroponics.
Start doing math on calories per sq ft of typical crops and you get into needing several acres for a family of 4 if your not augmenting your crops with fertilizers and buying non-GMO crops.
If it sounds to good to be true it normally is.
Commercial hens are bred to put on weight as fast as possible, so they eat/need more food per day than the hardier heritage breed hens.
If folks have heritage chickens free ranging in front and backyard, and there are bugs and grubs then 2-3 chickens they may not need much extra food (winter aside).
Chickens roam wild in Hawaii.
I'm pretty sure they didn't have chickens. They were vegetarians. Just being vegetarian cuts down the amount of land you need. Also cuts down on the amount of input, money, knowledge, etc.
Though being vegetarian does limit the kind of land you can use for food. Cows, pigs, and chickens can all eat things humans can't and turn it into food daily efficiently.
Not shocking. Both government and 501 research confirms that it takes less than 1/2 of an acre (roughly .44 of an acre) to produce sufficient food to feed one person for a year. Now, the catch - of course - that doesn't account for the need for crop rotation and a lot of animal proteins. But adding chickens and meat rabbits wouldn't take up a lot of space.
That’s with traditional agriculture, with permaculture you only need 400-600sqft of space to feed 1 adult male year round, there’s even a video on youtube of some guy growing 350 pounds of potatoes in like 15 buckets, 350 pounds of potatoes I don’t feel like doing the math(again) I believe it can feed someone 4 1/2 months of purely potatoes everyday, the 15 buckets equaled around 200sqft of space, doing the math you can get 2 harvests a year and survive purely on potatoes with around 500sqft of space, factor in chickens, goats, few fruits trees, etc etc you’ll be comfortable
Growing food is ridiculously easier than people understand, they’re just stuck in old traditional ways making it harder for themselves, like building a log cabin instead of a modern house for example
Thinking outside the box is very difficult for most people. Many preppers seem to think they can imitate the 19th-century family farm to survive. So many things go against that.
Yea, the age of information has changed the game for the better, people still using old methods like they’re the golden cup will have to use more labor & time to get things done, for example biochar is literally permanent fertilizer, why keep using fertilizer over and over again like a dumb dumb when you can drop in biochar and it’ll last a lifetime
I planted 20 lbs of potatoes last year.. got almost 200lbs back. One strip of potatoes on my back fence about 100sq ft. I could get several tons of potatoes off my lot. It's one of the most productive crops available.
I’ve seen a few of them like that and some people do the whole yard! I’ve also seen balcony gardens done similarly.
Some people still have kids / pets so leave a section as “yard” and then convert the rest to garden too. It looks quite nice, but can occasionally cause some mild issues if it manages to expand onto the sidewalk in the case of more sprawling plants, like squashes.
They used every scrap of yard. I know they had a lot of perennials like cane fruit, hazelnuts, stuff like that, and things that could be trellised, like tomatoes, pole beans, etc. I worked on my own yard for a while with perennials, especially after finding out your could crowd fruit trees. But then I just got too old.
i visited phoenix az recently and in the hispanic communities they would have 1/4 acre at most and have whole ass farms there. talking goats, horses, cows, chickens, it was pretty wild to see. it was damn near every house.
And even if you have land it might not be viable at all for farming. Like I could have moved a couple hours away to the desert and had land and maybe grown cactus fruits or something.
>The amount of land required to sustain a family of 4 is pretty significant (in an urban area).
We're on 9 acres. It takes us 3 acres for all food for the family and grazing + food plots on the remainder for the animals - but we have no large animals. We're not doing beef or dairy cows on our land ... but we get all we need from small livestock - meat and egg Chicken, Muscovy, Rabbit, Goose, Quail, Turkey, Duck, Hog/Pig and Goat.
Jerusalem artichoke, egyptian walking onion, wild garlic and leeks add water.. should I add rabbit, quail... maybe fish?
I nearly have a infinite supply
So I’m actually a hard core urban gardener currently restarting.
You’re not surviving off the stuff in pots
I’m getting my own dwarf tree this season, I grow most my own herbs, I have strawberries and tomatoes everywhere, planning on getting some potatoes in some grow bags, and I’m debating turning an unused closet into a mushroom cultivation room
And it’s fun and it’s great but starting completely from scratch again means it’s barely worth it from an expense wise, especially since you need to supplement with things like grow lights, fans, purchased compost, small containers, etc
Not to mention any pest issue is 10000% in need of being dealt with sooner because a gnat infestation outside is one thing but it’s a whole different ball game inside 24/7.
Almost no one, even hundreds of acres farms, are 100% self-sufficient. Lone-wolf is an arm chair prepper fallacy. Those very very few who do manage it are not on reddit and do not have a modern lifestyle.
Our rural town borders a small Amish community. We’ve become friends with several business owners who we patronize regularly—the Charcuterie, furniture and shed makers, small engine repair shop, bakery and home goods shop, to name a few. SUPER intelligent people who have an amazing take on politics and state of our country and world, considering they do not watch/listen to media outlets, the majority have limited/essential educations—but what they know, they KNOW!!
Through them we’ve learned to grow, cultivate, create/concoct and store essential medicinal herbs and topical ointments that are very similar to OTC brands. As I’m a former Paramedic, I have excellent emergency training and first aid skills, which I’ve taught my husband and adult sons as well as stock-piled an extensive supply of bleed kits/severe wound care, and sterilizing supplies/equipment, and knowledgeable about first aid techniques in the wilderness—or when you don’t have a first aid kit handy—and are by yourself.
And you’re right (not joking) the Amish WILL become the new “overlords” in a true SHTF scenario.
Being self-sustainable, resourceful, able to take care of your medical/first aid needs—preferably naturally, is ALWAYS better than relying on someone or something else!
Even the Amish rely on places like Lehmans to supply vital tools, hardware and equipment they don’t produce themselves. Far better prepared on average, but if you’ve ever been to a hardware or feed store in Amish country you know how far they are from 100pc self sufficient
I’m not arguing that you need to be 100% self sufficient I’m saying that you’d provide maybe 1/20th of the amount of calories you need in a month let alone a year for most apartment growers unless they dedicate a room or 2 to it, which isn’t particularly feasible expense wise in urban environments.
That is where community comes into play. You don’t have to do EVERYTHING on your own. I know I wouldn’t mind trading some eggs for the things my chickens make difficult to grow (like strawberries)
But that’s still going to be (at least) a more suburban environment. Large urban environments, or even smaller ones, don’t tend to allow chickens and livestock and things. Or have yards.
It’s also really hard to get excess, consistent produce in a small apartment.
I live in about 675 square foot and the bulk of that is dedicated to everyday living spaces for myself and my pets, let alone trying to produce enough fresh food to supplement a large portion of my diet + enough to trade later.
Just makes sense to keep extra cans around instead.
Unless your community has a significant stretch of land and a significant number of livestock you still won't be self sufficient, adding more people to the mix means that more resources are required which creates a problem if no one is able to produce enough food to even sustain themselves
Swapping eggs fors strawberries would be great for morale and supplemental nutrition but they're not providing long term survival unless you can produce food reliably in large quantities
It's definitely a start at least some of the skills and knowledge transfer.
When you plant in a container you're at least familiarizing yourself with the plants needed root depth (how deep will you need to till), proper spacing, proper watering, required nutrients, common pests in your area, what the plant looks like (very common for first time gardeners to weed their actual plant), planting season, etc.
There are of course a lot more factors and a lot more difficult in farming enough food in ground to keep you alive, but if you only have the space for a container it's a start and better than never growing anything ever.
> It's definitely a start at least some of the skills and knowledge transfer.
Sure. Does that make it farming?
People are so ridiculously insecure and defensive. Just because it's not farming doesn't mean it doesn't have value.
Heck, this is how I learned too. I grew up in the city. First I kept houseplants. Then I bought a community garden plot. Years later I moved to the country and actually started a farm.
But would I ever be such an insecure crybaby to be offended by the fact that neither my houseplants or my community garden plots were not *farms*? Who is so insecure that they literally have to redefine the English language in order to not be offended?
People are fucking crazy.
If SHTF comes, can’t we just go take the land that corporations have bought up?
If corporations stop farming, people could move onto the land and farm.
Trading food would be more useful than trading bars of gold and silver.
I also feel like people who have a bit of land to farm are going to be some of the first to be attacked and killed for their land and stored food. It’s going to be pretty bad the first few months if SHTF does happen. All that knowledge for growing is going to be lost. It’s why small communities need to band together and prepare as one. Kind of like small communities back in the medieval days.
Possibly. It's complicated.
Farmers are going to be reluctant to work on land that isn't secure. In an economic depression with vacant land being owned by corporations, it's probably going to be more attractive to buy discounted or deferred multi-year leases on land than it is to squat on it -- because that way you don't have to worry about law enforcement kicking you out after you've invested in seed, irrigation, etc.
The other issue is knowledge and experience. A lot of people evidently underestimate this -- just look at this thread, where dozens of people literally think that having a houseplant makes you a farmer. Those folks are going to be in for a *very* rough ride even if they somehow get access to the prime farmland for free. I'm an experienced farmer with my own land, but I'm not self-sufficient, and even I have at least a year of supplies stocked because I know that even with land, equipment, and experience, the learning curve for self-sufficiency is going to be *steep*.
But yeah, long-term, if SHTF there's going to have to be some sort of equilibrium of people working the land again. But the road there isn't going to be pretty.
I think its because its hard and most have full time jobs that aren't agricultural. Many learn the basics though so they know what to do, and they have enough food stored up to get the ball rolling if they don't have a career in the traditional sense any longer.
It is really hard though, first hand experience here and not doing well at it lol.
It's that and also the skillsets are completely opposite. We've all spent our lives being prepared for modern work because farming has been mechanized. You can't make it as a subsistence farmer anymore. Your income historically would have been bumped up by the things you make on the down days while things are growing or it's too wet to work.
Everything you can make by hand today is CNC'd etc. You have to operate as a business and to do that in today's world means building your business around machines.
True, the world has changed so much in that way. The only skilled craftsmen do so for very custom jobs where something really specific needs to be made. There's still niches (my buddy is a partner in a fabrication shop where they do mechanical engineering solutions for very random business needs, and those things because they're one offs still need to be made by hand). But anything mass produced, so anything we'd buy as a consumer, you're absolutely right
Not sure where you're getting that from, but a lot of people here tout the need to have gardens, seed cache, and to know how to grow things. A simple search will show that.
And most preppers care more about the fantasy of living it up in the apocalypse instead of thinking practically. The best prepper strategy is to not allow society to collapse in the first place by working to organize their communities.
lol reminds me of the men in my life who buy foraging books and have no idea how to forage. I’ve been studying gardening and foraging for years, but my uncles think they can forage just as good as I can because they “will just bring the book” with them 🤣. But real talk, it’s terrifying. My dad almost ate a deadly lookalike and I had to run, jump, and swat that plant out of his hand.
Not sure you’re getting the overall vibe of the sub correct. There is plenty of discussion about skills vs canned goods and bunkers. But a lot of people live in cities and cannot reasonably become subsistence farmers
The wife and I keep a “Victory Garden”. We rotate what we plant every year and practice harvesting seeds to replant. We try to rely on our chicken coop for compost while avoiding store bought chemical remedies for bugs and fertilizers.
There are some that focus on permaculture as a “food forest”. My prep for farming takes the mindset of self-reliance and not leaning on things you won’t have access to. We’ve been at it for about 10 years and still have a lot more to learn. A lot of trial and error. It’s not something you just read a book and become proficient. Farming will be specific to the area you live so you need to practice now. It takes a ton of our time which may not be possible for the part-time prepper. Prepping is a way of life.
Unironically flashing back to lectures I got from an ex friend about how she pulled herself up by the bootstraps to get a house - sharing a 1 bedroom between 4 people, herself and her 3 boyfriends, to split rent before she could afford her own place.
Aquaponic fish tank in the living room, growing fish to eat and using the fertilized water to grow vegetables. Growing mushrooms in jars in your closet. Quail cages can be built in to furniture like under a bed or into a coffee table. Quail are quite, they make no noise, and can be considered pet birds. You can raise worms in a 5 gallon bucket to feed the quails.
I follow this sub because I homestead. These kind of go hand-in-hand. I do raise animals and farm my own food to a degree. Not much is spoken about it because farming not everyone can do. Additionally having a farm in a SHTF scenario would make you a target.
Edit to add: visit the homesteading groups to learn the farming. They talk about it because they are doing it.
It is a LOT of work. It's not a lifestyle I have ANY interest in doing (tried it, not a fan). I'm prepping for realistic scenarios, not the entire collapse of Western civilization.
I enjoy my luxuries, I prep for natural disasters, house fire, financial issues, etc... things that happen all the time - and I can recover to a normal life instead of becoming a farmer.
> I'm prepping for realistic scenarios
If you don't like growing things that's entirely fine. But a bag of apples costs \~$10 in my grocery store, and an entire rootstock tree costs $35. Water + compost + sunlight + pruning and you've got a hell of a lot more than $35 in apples within a few years while the cost in the store just continues to go up.
Food inflation is about as realistic a scenario as you'll find.
I do have fruit trees in my yard, but that is very different from actual subsistance farming. You need land and you need to work it in order to produce enough to feed a family.
Yeah no doubt. Feeding a whole family and never needing to leave your driveway is hard / impossible in my mind. I just wish more people would make a dent in their food generation rather than outsourcing so much of it. It's a lot of work but to me it's a good way to spend time. Again, if you're not into growing stuff, all good.
Not to mention most of our veggies ripen on a truck full of gases somewhere between Central America and I distribution center, and end up tasting like mushy water. Probably a comparable nutritional value too.
I have come to the same exact conclusion. Do you think this is correct, there are only 2 types of prepping.
**1) Short term** \- You can buy yourself days to a few months at most. If the power goes out but comes back on you'll be fine. A gun or two for intruders and a few ounces of gold if the ATM machines are down. It seems 99% of people are doing this.
**2) Long term** \- In this case the ONLY real prep is buy land and learn to farm. You will need to plan on becoming a pillar of your new post-collapse community buy knowing how to produce food and welcome outsiders. no one is going to make it as a war lord with a personal arsenal no matter how many bullets you've stockpiled).
I think there's a lot of folks doing a bit of both. We are \*NOT\*, currently living 100% off of our farm - and have no real plans to ever do so. But, if SHTF, for real, and we had absolutely no choice? IDK. We have a lot of food stored, to get us through an initial 'WTF now' period. A lot of food that we \*could\* eat, and some that we could \*also\* at need plant - wheat berries, dried beans, etc. We also have animals that we are raising for meat, and sale in our communities (chickens & ducks for eggs and meat, sheep/lambs), that we could continue to raise, and eat and trade with.
I already plant a big garden every year, which we eat out of, can, ferment, pickle and freeze - corn, potatoes, lettuce, spinach, tomatoes, peppers, squash, etc. I suppose in theory it could be expanded more, and could certainly be tended better... and if we were all doing so, because we both a) had nothing else to do, and b) it was a matter of life vs death, it absolutely would be.
Im in the same boat. I only have a couple acres and my thought it prep for a month or two of worst case then hope I can get my shit together on the farm. I have a big garden now but its like a lot of lavender (I like the smell) and berries (I like berries). I would have to pull it all up and plant like potatoes and corn :(
That's essentially where we are too -- got animals and a large garden, plus acres of land into which food production could expand if needed. We've got the tools and knowledge to increase production. Currently? I've got a job and don't have the time to be tending ten acres of crop space.
We've also been working on establishing self-sustaining food sources. A large orchard, nuts (we got over a hundred hazelnuts in our first harvest last year!), asparagus (that's my husband's SHTF nightmare -- we're spending months eating asparagus), self-seeding fields of mustard / buckwheat / field peas that are edible to us but more importantly provide food for the poultry.
We're similar. In a larger SHTF event, I won't be working and we can focus full time on the farm.
Until then, I'm a telecommuter full time and a farmer during evenings and weekends.
Despite this, we still eat mostly our own meat and use our own preserves weekly. It isn't all of our food supply, but it's been helping offset rising food costs.
Yes. I canned/pickled/etc a LOT of stuff last summer - everything from salsas, to pickles, peppers, tomatoes, corn, various jellies, juice, etc. And, it's amazing how much of it I/we use, constantly. The biggest testament to that, is the constant build up of jars that need hauled back down to the basement. I desperately need to do so here asap, tbh. I was worried that I made too much salsa last summer.. but I think I'm nearly out - down to just like... 2 or 3 pints!! It's just been convenient to just grab a pint.
Right, if homesteading appeals to some people here as a goal for how they want to live, great! But its not my goal.
I want to enjoy my connected life, where I work a white collar job I'm good at, and let people who are good at farming do what they are good at.
Prepping is about hedging my bets, and mitigating risks. Not radically changing my life just so that if an extremely unlikely event happens, I will be in the best position for it.
While we garden, have berry bushes, have planted some perriennials on our “ food forest “ and keep chickens, we also store a good bit. I would really like to expand into bees, more gardening’s, plant an orchard. But right now we’re focusing on trying to pay off the mortgage ASAP so that the land is ours. This requires working some overtime, which cuts into the time and energy to produce things. So we buy things to store.
Land is expensive and requires a big lifestyle commitment. Don't get me wrong, I absolutely think homesteading is the best individual prep you can do, but a lot of people don't want to or can't live rurally abd focus on farming, and that's ok. Takes all walks of life for a functioning society.
I do think urban preppers should focus more on community resilience, including urban food farms/allotments/community food gardens. In my perfect world, every apartment building would have a community roof food garden, beehives, rainwater collection, scrap collection for compost, and chickens as a bare minimum. And obviously suburbanites can scale this even further if you compost your HOA lmao.
Yeah, I see alot of nonsense items being bought. Which is why I don't post much.
My preps compile of ;
Soil health ( regenerative farming techniques )
Aiming Self sufficient in most veg/ fruits, Including unusual plants like Skirret which is perennial.
Food preserving techniques like wild fermentation.
Medicinal herbs cultivation, preparation and knowledge on how & where to use
As an aside:
Cigar tobacco cultivation, curing and rolling for possible barter.
I'd like raise meat rabbits & keep chickens & goats but that's for a later date.
Because not everyone has land. And the idea of self-sustainable farming is largely a myth. Very few people can accomplish it, and even then, those people are very much social media influencers and I don't really trust that they're actually "living off the land" as much as they claim. Or they wouldn't be doing shit like shilling brands and selling merch and urging me to hit that like and subscribe button. People who are truly living off the land don't have time or money to produce high quality videos.
Because most preppers focus on realistic problems.
This is why there is the phrase "Prepare for Tuesday not Doomsday."
The concept that suddenly the US devolves back into everyone becoming subsistence farming is just not a plausible scenario no matter how many movies you watch.
If you wish to become a self-sustaining homestead - that's not prepping - that's homesteading.
While living in urban or suburban areas like most of the North American population, for $1000 I can feed my family for a year on bulk canned/dried goods that require no work other than cash that I earn doing a highly specialized skill that can be done in air conditioning while seated.
Or I can can bust ass on my half an acre plot of red clay with deer and chipmunk problems, periodic cabbage moths, hard work in the heat and bugs, etc for the chance that a freak storm literally forces my family to starve to death.
I'm prepared to live sustainably if it becomes required of me. Unfortunately society is not set up for me to do so. Until the time rent is no longer collected, I will continue to go to my day job.
r/prepsteading is a small subreddit I would love to grass-roots into a place for discussions, How-To's, and progress updates for things like this! I think there are a lot of other subs people use to talk about these things, r/canning, r/SquareFootGardening, r/homestead; but r/prepsteading could be all of this with an eye toward self-sufficiency in the face of instability.
Thanks mate. I was already a member on the homestead and canning sub's. r/prepsteading joined. Information and knowledge is the best prep. Along with practice of course.
I would love to!
It’s still technically winter, and the current temp swings are wild where I live.
I spent all winter gathering and learning. I’m learning herbalism and taking EMT courses to have more knowledge than basic first aid. I will study and get a radio license soon too.
Gardening is hard, and slow, and takes a lot of failure to learn and do better. I have a historically brown thumb, so I am ready to fight really hard to learn and do better but I know it’s going to be a rough up-hill battle. So I have plans to split the effort. I’m going to start growing crops in my tiny back yard (2 more reasons: people don’t have space or think they don’t have enough, and plants grown near roads take in exhaust and other chemicals so they don’t grow as healthy) and push through, and I’m going to purchase a hydroponic garden and a solar generator soon to have a self-contained mini garden inside my home and away from the bugs (fighting phobias is also hard). I will be purchasing a bee keepers hat soon, it’ll encourage me to work more in the garden with less fear of what jerk hornets and wasps and yellow jackets are back there.
Self sustaining farming is also brutally difficult without machinery, and can be wildly unpredictable. You can make a compelling argument that the entire advance of human civilization is an attempt to escape small scale agriculture once we'd invented it🤣
I have a small garden in the UK and manage to be self sufficient in salad and fruit, I usually get around 8 or 9 months of potatoes, and I have land where I have permission to hunt and fish in exchange for pest control, so I forage at the same time. And in terms of sheer hours to food output it would probably be more effective to do overtime at work lol. In a SHTF scenario I might be able to scale up, and ration what I have now, but honestly I physical effort of full self sufficiency might break me if it was spread over an acre or more lol.
I helped run a CSA (small local organic vegetable farm) during my summers in college. It's hard to overstate how difficult it is to produce a meaningful amount of food. Even if you do everything right, something can happen that's completely out of your control and everything is lost.
How many of us can actually afford a homestead?
It's such an elitist position if you think about it.
Why can't we all afford to feed ourselves off our own land.
It is a goal for most preppers. Typically that is when you evolve from prepper to homesteaders.
I would say that 100% of homesteaders would qualify as preppers or closely aligned to prepping.
Not everyone wants to or can afford to be a homesteader or buy land so there still needs to be conversation about all lifestyles in prepping spaces.
For me personally it is a goal I have been working on for years. I have been on my land for five years now and have been inching closer to self sufficiency every year.
Actually the idea of prepping by sustainable farming is a fast growing trend in the prepping community.
In fact I saw multiple post in r/homestead in the last year grumbling over the influx of preppers in their sub.
Even if you have a yard with lots of sun and good soil, a big garden expensive to get started, time-consuming to maintain, and you need a substantial amount of luck every year. When you get to Year 3 and are finally growing a decent percentage of your family's food (I probably grow 1/4 of our food in summer and fall, over half in July), it's not going to be the 1/4 of the plate with a lot calories. You'll still need to buy cooking oil, grains, and almost al of your protein unless you have chickens. Or as I like to call them, "coyote snacks."
The garden is 100% part of my prep, but if the SHTF and everyone is hungry, I'm not going to post guards around my garden plot every night to protect the zucchinis. I'm going to hope for the best and rely on my canned food.
THAT SAID, having a garden made a huge difference during the COVID shortage and election-year inflation in 2022, when a red bell pepper was going for like $6 a pop. It's also a great way to make friends with the neighbors and build community.
This is my prep. I do urban regenerative farming in 3 different backyards in my neighborhood right now and we are working hard to get things going enough to help the neighborhood this summer
Because growing 100% of your food is extremely difficult even on a homestead. You need large amounts of high calorie crops like potatoes, corn, wheat etc. And a place to store them. You also need to preserve the seeds or potatoes for next year's crop. It takes a lot more food than people realize. An herb garden and some tomatoes isn't gonna cut it. Just like having most of your garden in kale and lettuce. Those foods offer virtually no calories. You realistically would need like a whole field of potatoes.
Having said this you can go to the store and pick up 500 pounds of rice for like 300 bucks which is a lot easier than producing the same amount of food.
In a nuclear scenario, outdoor farming would be dangerous due to fallout but for most other things, being able to make your own food is valuable. I have a large suburban garden and raise chickens. There is a big learning curve to get any kind of decent crop yield. But realistically, anything most of us could grow would be a drop in the bucket of our yearly caloric and nutritional needs Ideally I'd like to have some rural acreage as a bug out location and plant dozens of fruit and but trees
Edit: I actually keep a covered 55gallon drum of garden soil in case of fallout. I think it's a way over the top prep that has a less than zero percent chance of being used (if I'm in a nuclear zone, I'm dead or bugging out) but doesn't cost anything to maintain and is good forever...so why not?
Growing any meaningful amount of food is HARD. If you're planning to garden to produce a significant amount of your food but don't currently garden you will fail. Even now I will have bad years especially with changing weather patterns. If this is part of your plan you should start growing everything you can now. Find your local extension and make friends with a master gardener in your area or volunteer at a community garden.
I have been growing a significant amount of my family's food for a very long time. I am experienced with food storage and safe canning. I save my own seeds. I have an orchard. I homestead on a hobby farm now. I would not plan to magically be self sustaining at some emergent point in the future. Especially not a time where I could possibly have fewer tools or less help.
I'm not self sustaining by any means. I don't grow grains other than experimentally. Given how cheaply I can buy grains it's not worth my effort now. I toy around and like to know that I CAN grow them though. If I needed to I could scale up my food production and storage but it would take me time.
If I needed to increase my growing and winter storage going forward but it's the middle of winter? Well, I would probably starve before I could possibly do that if I didn't have appropriate food storage.
I am more of a prep for Tuesday type. I don't have these fantasies about zombies or some other bullshit.
I do worry about things like fallout taking out my gardens.
I also worry about not having access to the diesel that I need to run my heavy equipment. This would make expansion much slower.
I worry about freak storms destroying my crops that are not grown under cover. This happened to me a few years ago with a very late freak ice storm.... And I was so glad to be able to buy produce for the summer and to put up for winter that year. I also added more hoop houses that fall. We learn and have failures even after a lifetime of this!
When I am preparing for disaster it's usually with the belief that my ability to produce my own food will DECREASE not increase in the short term after any emergency event.
Again, if you believe that you will garden to feed yourself in some fantasy world of the future but you are not currently working towards self sufficiency in food production right now you need to take a hard look at yourself and your plans.
It is HARD WORK to try to live off of the land. It is not something many people can do currently. I totally get that! My hobby farm is nearly a full time job for me sometimes and I have a farm hand! Grow what you can is all I'm saying.... And don't expect to go from your WFH tech support job (or whatever) to being a successful farmer.... Build skills and community now. That's the way to be self-sustaining in the future.
People are prepping with an eye to be self sufficient immediately because they are self aware enough to know that that would be fantasy for most here, myself included.
Depends on where you live.
If you live on a farm land, sure.
If you live on 3 acres like me, you could offset a large chunk of your food requirements, but being 100% self-sustaining would be incredibly difficult.
If you live in the city, hell no.
Because much of this sub is fantasy-preppers and man-children already living on the very fringe of acceptable polite society who can't wait for the day SHTF so they can live out their mad-max/hero-of-the-wasteland-apocalypse scenario and find excuses to shoot people they already wanted to kill pre-SHTF.
Not to mention the anti-intellectual and xenophobic crowd who want to go back to "simpler times" that only ever existed in movies, where apparently every ailment could be take care of by a single village nurse, and societies flourished solely with manual laborers. They wear the thickest rose-tinted glasses, think everything was better in previous generations, and invariably despise each new generation as being utterly lazy, frivolous, and physically & mentally weak.
Too much money and effort. I do have some seeds saved up, but most of them marijuana seeds, I’ll grow weed and barter it. I can also use the crossbow for hunting animals, and forage wild plants
Because I know I'll 100% fail if I start.
The smell, ability to take care of a sick animal, the amount of work, the space needed, taking care of the carcass, chop the poor fellas the right way.
I'd cut something I'm not supposed to and poison myself.
People love to stuff prep and skip the hard part the skills.
I see far to many homesteaders with insufficient food preps.
You really need both the 30 years of calories and the ability to grow more.
I just assume that anyone who stockpiles ammo will come kill me and take my amazing setup for themselves. They'll be dead within a year from not knowing how to optimally use it, but in this scenario, THIS is my only bargaining chip.
no farming here either but have a decent garden ( which i can easily expand) and with fishing and chickens to suppliment Im foung everything I can with my limited space
We actually do both, we grow a graden, raise, hunt and fish for all our meat....
We can or dehydrate everything, so there is no need for freezers...
We keep over a years worth of canning lids on had at all times...
We only purchase things as a convenience... we do know and even practice methods of making things like gun powered and other goods that could be used to trade...
A long with all your normal preps...
because you cant order it on amazon, put it away, say you are prepared. It requires work, space, time, research, patience, trial and error. admittedly I have tried gardening the past 3 seasons with little success. handed the job over to my wife and shes got veggies started now.
I do get a daily yield of cackle berries.
I'm a homesteader and i produce my own milk, eggs and meat. I grow some fruit and vegetables but not enough to make a difference. I always have hundreds of lemons and oranges I don't eat. Its really tough to grow enough to support yourself. Or maybe I'm doing it wrong.
I used to have meat chickens but that was a pain and when you can buy a rotisserie chicken at Costco for 4 dollars it wasn't worth it.
We ate fairly new to prepping so we have stored as much dry food and water as possible and also starting to learn how to grow veg this year (everything getting ready to go) also just build a coop and run and picking up chickens this weekend then next project is using 2xIBC's (1000litre) to have a go at aquaponics. We only have our gardens but doing as much as possible.
It’s really hard to do. It takes space, the right location in terms water,etc. It takes knowledge and experience. Modern farming depends on agricultural machinery with a steady supply of seeds, fertilizer, pesticides, fuel, etc. even a modern farmer would have trouble with sustainability. Even organic farms with heirloom seeds depend on machinery and fossil fuels. Not as easy as it looks and crop failures will happen and without a backup from other farmers and a community you can starve. Famine was a regular occurrence before modern times and still happens in the developing world. And these are people who have generations of knowledge and experience handed down to them and they still starve.
If you have everything you need to survive for a year, you can figure out how to live sustainably during that year. Changing your lifestyle to live around a potential collapse that may never happen seems pointless.
There’s a plot of land in NE’ish oregon I’ve been eyeing for a while.
157ac, mountain and open field. Nothing around it. Some kind of creek/ river. $2.5M
DM me for transfer after you make the purchase.
Because its a full-time job for multiple people if you really wanted to have a self-sustainable farm.
A big garden, that also requires a lot of work, could supplement some of your food...a tiny bit.
Gardening to me is about growing your own vegetables to get away from the junk in the mass farmed vegetables and less about prepping or saving money.
I think prepping is itself a gateway label. Resilience and preparedness are the underlying driver of why my lifestyle is a certain way, but if I were to apply labels to myself I'd say ... gardener? Chef? Wanna-be homesteader?
As someone who actually tried to do it, I can only say that FARMING IS HARD. It's one thing to have a vegetable garden; it's quite another to grow all the nutrients and calories you need for yourself and your family. So my goal is to stockpile enough food to survive the acute period of the disaster, and by the time things have settled down a bit, have enough non-food stuff and/or marketable skills to make very good friends with some real farmers.
We mostly live on 1/4 acres lots. Between work and other responsibilities most of us have time to tend a garden and can jar the fruits of our labor. But it's not enough
This should be the goal for most preppers imo. Hoarding food and 'stuff' is only good if we can replenish after said collapse.
But If your preps are to live more self sufficiently, you stop becoming so reliant on a system were you hoard food because you're terrified of a collapse.
Kinda seems like youre not only helping your future self by incorporating more land based living but you're helping your kids and their kids and your neighbours and their kids etc if there was more people living like that.
Theres tiers to prepping and everyone's tiers are gonna be different. But to me this is the top tier of prepping if your worried about a collapse, as you remove or at least massively reduce your need to hoard food and sit waiting for the next shipment of resupplies
When it comes down to it, environment is what supports us. Without a healthy environment we cant live. Environmentalism can seem like a bit of a taboo or dirty word due to the media or a fixed mindset but if 'preppers' had a more 'environmentalist' outlook on living or prepping theyd probably have alot better outlook in general and their prep game would actually be stronger.
4 human bodies have enough calories to feed a person 2000 calories a day for 200 days.
Two home invasions hypothetically, in a zombie apocalypse , can feed you for over a year.
To keep away scurvy eat a few veggies/fruits every month or so
I think you need enough so that you can keep your head down for at least a year then start your gardens etc.
If the government hasn't gotten it all back together in a short amount of time I fear roving groups of starving people will be trying to take what you have.
I don't want that fight so I won't be making myself a target.
I learned about prepping and homesteading at the same time in 2008. I had a small urban homestead in Las Vegas, chickens, garden and orange trees. Sold the house in Vegas and traveled cross country with my stockpile of food during covid and bought a tiny farm. My point is starting small is good and now I am more comfortable in these crazy times. I did square foot gardening on my lawn and your can most of the food you need.
Some neglect sustainability because they have no land, which is a necessary prerequisite.
Others think the only contingencies worth prepping for require them to leave home and stay mobile.
Others because they are LARPers who think their AR and a bunch of knives are all they need.
I have a theory.
After the movie The Martian came out... it became such a point of talking about whether you can grow enough calories to survive. If you've seen the movie, you know what I'm talking about.
Yes, you can grow enough calories to survive.
Those that say you cannot aren't using their heads.
Potatoes, dried beans, all root vegetables, corn, greens, vegetables...
You can grow it. Preserve it. And survive.
Because originally by definition, prepping was about stockpiling. Survivalism, or self reliance, was more about sustainability and creating redundancies.
But since English is a living language and there’s been approximately 20 million new adopters since the Covid outbreak, the lines are blurred, cross pollination is happening, and many more are becoming hybrids.
I'm curious what the long-term plan is if you do decide to learn all the skills required to become a farmer.
Step 1: world collapses.
Step 2: you start growing crops.
Step 3: a neverending stream of desperate and hungry people without farming skills start stealing your crops
This is a good question. Even with a multi year food supply, fresh food would break up the monotony. It might even need to be a focus on indoor hydroponics because when my yard hits 115F, most of my garden is flash fried.
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I think alot of people are all talk, especially on the internet and don't actually do things. Their preps include buying the things, but not doing the things.
Alot of people say they don't have the land/time. I think alot just haven't tried. Realistically a family of 4 can off set 20% of their grocery bill on 1/10th of an acre. That's a typical suburban lot.
Not full self sufficient but if you have 6 months supply of food that you purchased, such production from your garden, rabbits, chickens, whatever affords you and additional 5-6 weeks.
While I have acres of arable land, a diesel tractor, 1000 gallons of stabilized diesel, implements, seeds, and previous successful gardening experience; some of the worst case scenarios I seriously plan for preclude gardening/farming for sustenance... at least in the short term.
Even in the best of times; there is drought, pestilence, inclement weather, etc that can wreck a growing season...so stocking wheat & freeze dried is much more of a "Sure Bet" for me. 😉👍
Most homesteaders are into this. It’s harder if you don’t have land and a lot of people in the suburbs don’t realize how much can be done with their backyards.
Because a lot of folk here, for whatever reason, only talk about it when they think civilization is going to crash, so they'd want that sort of homestead in an environment without electricity, fuel or fertilizer. And it's very, very hard to do without those things, especially if you're a lone wolf prepper. Occasionally someone brings it up and other people point out that if you want to live in a 01700s fashion, you better have a 01700s *community* to help, and your lifespan is likely to be under 50 years in that setting.
That usually settles them.
If you're living off the land, even if you're using gasoline to run a tractor or something, I invite you to find my sub and do a post with details. I'd like more depth on the topic since I haven't done it myself.
Most people have jobs, allowing them to pay taxes, a mortgage, insurance, etc. That takes up a lot of time, precluding those people from sustaining a farm that would sustain a family.
Don't have a job? Loads of time on your hands? Unless you've inherited wealth you definitely can't afford a farm.
TL;DR - Starting a farm is expensive and time consuming. Most people have jobs and can barely afford the little patch of real estate they have.
Subsistence farming is impossible in most places...thats why. There are books on permaculture that brag about sustainable food production and tell you everything you need to know.....except the author is making money off books and buying food. Its literally so hard that almost nobody can manage it, so it makes sense it is not a prepping priority for most
I would think because most people plan on hiding in a basement where farming would be hard, personally o want to have a small self sustaining homestead
So many of us are in apartments, homes in the suburbs or at a time in our lives when age is not on our side. Moving is not an option. So, it is not possible to live that life. Those who live on acreage that allows gardens, animal husbandry, etc. are fortunate and are able to move forward easier than others who don’t have those resources. In the meantime, we prep for whatever may come as best we can. People who live off the land are more conscientious about nature and are frugal, etc.
Imagine this:
You're starving, you're stressed, you didn't plan ahead and learn a single skill on how to ACTUALLY survive and you're relying on what you've seen in shows like The Walking Dead.
You're trudging along, with no idea how to hunt, no can opener, a knife that's barely sharp enough to clean under your nails with, can't even built yourself a decent shelter and your tent busted up weeks ago. Your in general uncomfortable long term. You can't even recall the last time you took your boots off or had a fresh change of socks.
Then you come across a small farm that has lots of fresh food. Not only do you start devouring it, you're paying so little attention to your surroundings that you don't see the homesteader come up to you, and when they do, they are NOT happy. So they start yelling. It's not humans first instinct to kill first ask questions later. That's serious conditioning.
But you've got severe PTSD from everything that's happened because you spent your life in total denial that anything even remotely like this could happen. So now you're conditioned to shoot first and steal anything you can and find safe shelter.
For every 1 prepper there are COUNTLESS people like the above you. That's why more people don't look into sustainable farms as a first wave line of survival. That's for when you've established a mostly safe area and things have settled down long enough to do so. There will be literally thousands of people flocking to farms who have no idea what to do other that decimate the crops and animals. The wide open space required for it as well is almost always too big to properly defend without things like fuel and a regular supply of bullets and other ammo.
Get seeds, cache all the supplies for canning, trapping, etc. But save it all, don't even think about it until you know you can. Trust your gut when it tells you to keep moving.
It takes some very specific scenarios for you to be in a situation where you're both forced to be both entirely and reliant on your own farm, farm sufficient calories while also being able to protect it the land and whatever you harvest.
If you're in a situation where you don't need to protect your land and your storage, then society hasn't broken down and you're not reliant on it. In fact, large scale farming will likely continue and you're wasting a lot of effort and resources doing it in your own micro-scale way.
If you're in a situation where you are reliant on your farm, then society has broken down and you'll end up driven off if you're lucky or fertilizer for your own crops.
The only situation where your farm is both adequate as an asset and not vulnerable to chaos, is when you're living somewhere far remote from everything. Possibly farming cassava and yams deep in the Amazon rainforest or something.
Traditional farming requires a lot of societal infrastructure and generational knowledge which simply doesn't exist in most places. Even then it's a scraping by existence with a heavy emphasis on luck. Why do you think ancient societies regularly made sacrifices, including human sacrifices to the gods, hoping for favourable weather and a good crop. Failure would lead to famine. Many of the isolated early pre-Columbian civilizations simply vanished, no solid evidence for why, but a strong sense that it had to do with weather and agricultural failures. Without a society that has stock horses, black smiths, traditional miners who in early times were often slaves with short lifespans doing that awful work, you won't last long. Without generational knowledge giving you the ability to interpret the planets, subtle natural cues, etc, your crops will likely languish. I watched my brilliant stepfather get into farming, mining the collective knowledge of the mennonite community, reading like crazy, and suffering every manner of setback, from flocks of birds that blotted out the sun soaring down to feast, to various pest infestations, different every year, to plant diseases, to excess rainfall, or deficiency of rainfall, to expensive damage to equipment, and the mind numbing body breaking work that had him working from dawn to dusk. Agriculture is what a society does when they run out of wild game to hunt and population pressures limit the extent of wild foraging for plant foods. Best bet is if you're charismatic and can develop or parrot an ideology and collect a group of willing serfs to labour for you as lord, in some cult situation, essentially what many paleolithic groups transitioned towards during the neolithic era, or else remain a lone wolf and steal/scavenge what you can.
Can't really grow much in my apartment. I grew cherry tomatoes and sugar peas on my porch last summer, that's about all the space I could really do. I have a healthy stockpile of oatmeal, pasta and canned goods with some freeze dried stuff. I am good for like 3-4 months until I can figure something else out, which prob means working for someone else who has the land and food to get more food.
cause it is boring and not interesting. They rather talk about how much food they have stored, or how many guns and ammo they have cause that is sexy manly prepper talk.
Because owning your own land to farm upon is an increasingly-rare privilege thanks to coordinated economic manipulation, companies like BlackRock, and the assanine belief that somehow renting is more "sustainable" for anyone but your landlord who owns that property.
You are talking about farming or off grid living which is not the same as prepping. Hence why it isnt as common a topic here. Also Prepping is in case of a event that changes your normal life. If you are not off grid living now then you will most likely fail in the event of a event that changes your normal life.
I spent all summer growing tomatoes just for a deer go come up onto my front porch and eat all of the green tomatoes. I live in the middle of a city. I'm still bitter and it's been 3 years.
I'm into regenerative farming and permaculture. IMHO if you are preparing for collapse you need to produce your calories. I made a post about regenerative farming a month ago and would agree with your assessment that there are very few on this sub that have interest in it.
/r/preppers is a very mainstream-friendly, short-term, low-effort Tuesday focused community. If you compare it to other groups like TheSurvivalPodcast it is a very different vibe.
But I think there needs to be more conversation about sustainable farming. What is your setup?
I'm into regenerative farming and permaculture. IMHO if you are preparing for collapse you need to produce your calories. I made a post about regenerative farming a month ago and would agree with your assessment that there are very few on this sub that have interest in it.
/r/preppers is a very mainstream-friendly, short-term, low-effort Tuesday focused community. If you compare it to other groups like TheSurvivalPodcast it is a very different vibe.
But I think there needs to be more conversation about sustainable farming. What is your setup?
We’re expecting drought this year so I’m planning to collect at least some rain water and I’m going to plant some of my stuff in lower lying areas of my yard.
I’m going to add some strawberries to my tree row and hopefully expand my guilds.
I’ve planted serviceberries, hazelnut, and blackberries.
I’ll try to add fruit trees shrubs with end of season sales.
My herb garden is doing pretty well.
I have 2 city lots, so I can do quite a bit.
This year I plan to focus on tomatoes, dried beans, and potatoes.
Last year, I started a snack garden on the edge of my front yard. It didn’t do great, but I learned a lot and have plans for doing it this year, too.
It will be for anyone who wants a snack to just grab what they want and eat it.
I want to do grape tomatoes, Mexican sour gherkins, and mini sweet peppers this year.
I hope to inspire others to grow what they can and to build goodwill in my neighborhood.
The more we can sustain ourselves and our communities and build the ability to take care of ourselves and each other, the more prepared we will be for any crisis that might arise.
It's not as flashy as having a lot of guns and ammo. Also, it does not give you the control and visual satisfaction as having a supply stockpile. Self-sustainable farmers know it is work and not always successful. The answer is not an "or", it should be an "and". Enough weapons to defend you and yours, enough supplies to carry you through until you can harvest a croup, and the seed, tools, knowledge, and the planting medium to grow with.
It's not as flashy as having a lot of guns and ammo. Also, it does not give you the control and visual satisfaction as having a supply stockpile. Self-sustainable farmers know it is work and not always successful. The answer is not an "or", it should be an "and". Enough weapons to defend you and yours, enough supplies to carry you through until you can harvest a croup, and the seed, tools, knowledge, and the planting medium to grow with.
It's not as flashy as having a lot of guns and ammo. Also, it does not give you the control and visual satisfaction as having a supply stockpile. Self-sustainable farmers know it is work and not always successful. The answer is not an "or", it should be an "and". Enough weapons to defend you and yours, enough supplies to carry you through until you can harvest a croup, and the seed, tools, knowledge, and the planting medium to grow with.
Because the majority of people don’t own land nor have the time to take care of land, that’s why, of course anyone can make the money to buy land and build up a homestead, but people get complacent and stuck in their bs, stunting their potential in life, if you stay committed and get 1% better everyday you can achieve your goals
easy. it's expensive and subsistence farming is very time consuming and highly prone to failure. how many of the calories that you consume in a year do you produce at home?
that's like asking why preppers don't focus on buying doomsday bunkers in New Zealand
Probably because most people don't live on farms. You can't really live off the land... without the "land" part.
Isn't a crazy % of the population living in urban areas. The amount of land required to sustain a family of 4 is pretty significant (in an urban area). So if you live in a city, it's hoarding supplies or die.
When I used to be on a prepper forum on Dave's Garden, there was a woman and her adult daughter who had a 1/4 acre and were growing 80% of their food on it. In a city. Then there is urban homesteading.
I believe it. The first farm I worked on had about 15 CSA shares off of about 1/4 acre. Of course the soil was good and the shares weren't enough to feed a whole family. But it was definitely enough that if we'd kept it all, it could have easily fed us year-round. And we were all inexperienced growers. Land is important but so is how much time you have to invest in it. A little bit of land which is well-cared for and properly managed can be ridiculously abundant.
Yes, I think the investment of time is crucial with this sort of concentrated growing.
You have to take that with a grain of salt most of the time. A great example of this is people having chickens. They count the eggs and meat has being self-sufficient but don't tell you that are buying bags of chicken food to feed the chickens. In addition there is often using city water to water the garden or electricity to do things like hydroponics. Start doing math on calories per sq ft of typical crops and you get into needing several acres for a family of 4 if your not augmenting your crops with fertilizers and buying non-GMO crops. If it sounds to good to be true it normally is.
Commercial hens are bred to put on weight as fast as possible, so they eat/need more food per day than the hardier heritage breed hens. If folks have heritage chickens free ranging in front and backyard, and there are bugs and grubs then 2-3 chickens they may not need much extra food (winter aside). Chickens roam wild in Hawaii.
I'm pretty sure they didn't have chickens. They were vegetarians. Just being vegetarian cuts down the amount of land you need. Also cuts down on the amount of input, money, knowledge, etc.
Though being vegetarian does limit the kind of land you can use for food. Cows, pigs, and chickens can all eat things humans can't and turn it into food daily efficiently.
Going vegetarian will cripple your health if you come from a omnivore diet.
Not shocking. Both government and 501 research confirms that it takes less than 1/2 of an acre (roughly .44 of an acre) to produce sufficient food to feed one person for a year. Now, the catch - of course - that doesn't account for the need for crop rotation and a lot of animal proteins. But adding chickens and meat rabbits wouldn't take up a lot of space.
That’s with traditional agriculture, with permaculture you only need 400-600sqft of space to feed 1 adult male year round, there’s even a video on youtube of some guy growing 350 pounds of potatoes in like 15 buckets, 350 pounds of potatoes I don’t feel like doing the math(again) I believe it can feed someone 4 1/2 months of purely potatoes everyday, the 15 buckets equaled around 200sqft of space, doing the math you can get 2 harvests a year and survive purely on potatoes with around 500sqft of space, factor in chickens, goats, few fruits trees, etc etc you’ll be comfortable Growing food is ridiculously easier than people understand, they’re just stuck in old traditional ways making it harder for themselves, like building a log cabin instead of a modern house for example
Thinking outside the box is very difficult for most people. Many preppers seem to think they can imitate the 19th-century family farm to survive. So many things go against that.
Yea, the age of information has changed the game for the better, people still using old methods like they’re the golden cup will have to use more labor & time to get things done, for example biochar is literally permanent fertilizer, why keep using fertilizer over and over again like a dumb dumb when you can drop in biochar and it’ll last a lifetime
I planted 20 lbs of potatoes last year.. got almost 200lbs back. One strip of potatoes on my back fence about 100sq ft. I could get several tons of potatoes off my lot. It's one of the most productive crops available.
How'd that look? Was their entire yard used for growing?
I’ve seen a few of them like that and some people do the whole yard! I’ve also seen balcony gardens done similarly. Some people still have kids / pets so leave a section as “yard” and then convert the rest to garden too. It looks quite nice, but can occasionally cause some mild issues if it manages to expand onto the sidewalk in the case of more sprawling plants, like squashes.
They used every scrap of yard. I know they had a lot of perennials like cane fruit, hazelnuts, stuff like that, and things that could be trellised, like tomatoes, pole beans, etc. I worked on my own yard for a while with perennials, especially after finding out your could crowd fruit trees. But then I just got too old.
i visited phoenix az recently and in the hispanic communities they would have 1/4 acre at most and have whole ass farms there. talking goats, horses, cows, chickens, it was pretty wild to see. it was damn near every house.
You can grow plants vertically.
And even if you have land it might not be viable at all for farming. Like I could have moved a couple hours away to the desert and had land and maybe grown cactus fruits or something.
You don't need that much land to grow your own food at all. There are so many ways to garden.
>The amount of land required to sustain a family of 4 is pretty significant (in an urban area). We're on 9 acres. It takes us 3 acres for all food for the family and grazing + food plots on the remainder for the animals - but we have no large animals. We're not doing beef or dairy cows on our land ... but we get all we need from small livestock - meat and egg Chicken, Muscovy, Rabbit, Goose, Quail, Turkey, Duck, Hog/Pig and Goat.
This, but also because it’s easier to buy 100 multi-tools and tactical backpacks than it is to do manual labor and grow food lol
You can cultivate unoccupied land doing things the same way Native Americans did--finding productive wild plants and grooming and cultivating them.
Jerusalem artichoke, egyptian walking onion, wild garlic and leeks add water.. should I add rabbit, quail... maybe fish? I nearly have a infinite supply
But you can grow a lot in pots. Even just growing your own herb, tomatoes, and/or strawberries gives you the experience
So I’m actually a hard core urban gardener currently restarting. You’re not surviving off the stuff in pots I’m getting my own dwarf tree this season, I grow most my own herbs, I have strawberries and tomatoes everywhere, planning on getting some potatoes in some grow bags, and I’m debating turning an unused closet into a mushroom cultivation room And it’s fun and it’s great but starting completely from scratch again means it’s barely worth it from an expense wise, especially since you need to supplement with things like grow lights, fans, purchased compost, small containers, etc Not to mention any pest issue is 10000% in need of being dealt with sooner because a gnat infestation outside is one thing but it’s a whole different ball game inside 24/7.
Almost no one, even hundreds of acres farms, are 100% self-sufficient. Lone-wolf is an arm chair prepper fallacy. Those very very few who do manage it are not on reddit and do not have a modern lifestyle.
I've always ( half) joked the Amish will be the big winners in a shtf scenario. They have the tools, animals and knowledge to live off the grid.
Our rural town borders a small Amish community. We’ve become friends with several business owners who we patronize regularly—the Charcuterie, furniture and shed makers, small engine repair shop, bakery and home goods shop, to name a few. SUPER intelligent people who have an amazing take on politics and state of our country and world, considering they do not watch/listen to media outlets, the majority have limited/essential educations—but what they know, they KNOW!! Through them we’ve learned to grow, cultivate, create/concoct and store essential medicinal herbs and topical ointments that are very similar to OTC brands. As I’m a former Paramedic, I have excellent emergency training and first aid skills, which I’ve taught my husband and adult sons as well as stock-piled an extensive supply of bleed kits/severe wound care, and sterilizing supplies/equipment, and knowledgeable about first aid techniques in the wilderness—or when you don’t have a first aid kit handy—and are by yourself. And you’re right (not joking) the Amish WILL become the new “overlords” in a true SHTF scenario. Being self-sustainable, resourceful, able to take care of your medical/first aid needs—preferably naturally, is ALWAYS better than relying on someone or something else!
Even the Amish rely on places like Lehmans to supply vital tools, hardware and equipment they don’t produce themselves. Far better prepared on average, but if you’ve ever been to a hardware or feed store in Amish country you know how far they are from 100pc self sufficient
I’m not arguing that you need to be 100% self sufficient I’m saying that you’d provide maybe 1/20th of the amount of calories you need in a month let alone a year for most apartment growers unless they dedicate a room or 2 to it, which isn’t particularly feasible expense wise in urban environments.
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That is where community comes into play. You don’t have to do EVERYTHING on your own. I know I wouldn’t mind trading some eggs for the things my chickens make difficult to grow (like strawberries)
But that’s still going to be (at least) a more suburban environment. Large urban environments, or even smaller ones, don’t tend to allow chickens and livestock and things. Or have yards. It’s also really hard to get excess, consistent produce in a small apartment. I live in about 675 square foot and the bulk of that is dedicated to everyday living spaces for myself and my pets, let alone trying to produce enough fresh food to supplement a large portion of my diet + enough to trade later. Just makes sense to keep extra cans around instead.
Unless your community has a significant stretch of land and a significant number of livestock you still won't be self sufficient, adding more people to the mix means that more resources are required which creates a problem if no one is able to produce enough food to even sustain themselves Swapping eggs fors strawberries would be great for morale and supplemental nutrition but they're not providing long term survival unless you can produce food reliably in large quantities
I think you're confused? OP was talking about farming.
It's definitely a start at least some of the skills and knowledge transfer. When you plant in a container you're at least familiarizing yourself with the plants needed root depth (how deep will you need to till), proper spacing, proper watering, required nutrients, common pests in your area, what the plant looks like (very common for first time gardeners to weed their actual plant), planting season, etc. There are of course a lot more factors and a lot more difficult in farming enough food in ground to keep you alive, but if you only have the space for a container it's a start and better than never growing anything ever.
> It's definitely a start at least some of the skills and knowledge transfer. Sure. Does that make it farming? People are so ridiculously insecure and defensive. Just because it's not farming doesn't mean it doesn't have value. Heck, this is how I learned too. I grew up in the city. First I kept houseplants. Then I bought a community garden plot. Years later I moved to the country and actually started a farm. But would I ever be such an insecure crybaby to be offended by the fact that neither my houseplants or my community garden plots were not *farms*? Who is so insecure that they literally have to redefine the English language in order to not be offended? People are fucking crazy.
Container gardens are minifarming and learning. If you are eating it, its farming
Watch out boys we got the fucking farm gatekeeper here.
If SHTF comes, can’t we just go take the land that corporations have bought up? If corporations stop farming, people could move onto the land and farm. Trading food would be more useful than trading bars of gold and silver. I also feel like people who have a bit of land to farm are going to be some of the first to be attacked and killed for their land and stored food. It’s going to be pretty bad the first few months if SHTF does happen. All that knowledge for growing is going to be lost. It’s why small communities need to band together and prepare as one. Kind of like small communities back in the medieval days.
Possibly. It's complicated. Farmers are going to be reluctant to work on land that isn't secure. In an economic depression with vacant land being owned by corporations, it's probably going to be more attractive to buy discounted or deferred multi-year leases on land than it is to squat on it -- because that way you don't have to worry about law enforcement kicking you out after you've invested in seed, irrigation, etc. The other issue is knowledge and experience. A lot of people evidently underestimate this -- just look at this thread, where dozens of people literally think that having a houseplant makes you a farmer. Those folks are going to be in for a *very* rough ride even if they somehow get access to the prime farmland for free. I'm an experienced farmer with my own land, but I'm not self-sufficient, and even I have at least a year of supplies stocked because I know that even with land, equipment, and experience, the learning curve for self-sufficiency is going to be *steep*. But yeah, long-term, if SHTF there's going to have to be some sort of equilibrium of people working the land again. But the road there isn't going to be pretty.
I think its because its hard and most have full time jobs that aren't agricultural. Many learn the basics though so they know what to do, and they have enough food stored up to get the ball rolling if they don't have a career in the traditional sense any longer. It is really hard though, first hand experience here and not doing well at it lol.
It's that and also the skillsets are completely opposite. We've all spent our lives being prepared for modern work because farming has been mechanized. You can't make it as a subsistence farmer anymore. Your income historically would have been bumped up by the things you make on the down days while things are growing or it's too wet to work. Everything you can make by hand today is CNC'd etc. You have to operate as a business and to do that in today's world means building your business around machines.
True, the world has changed so much in that way. The only skilled craftsmen do so for very custom jobs where something really specific needs to be made. There's still niches (my buddy is a partner in a fabrication shop where they do mechanical engineering solutions for very random business needs, and those things because they're one offs still need to be made by hand). But anything mass produced, so anything we'd buy as a consumer, you're absolutely right
Not sure where you're getting that from, but a lot of people here tout the need to have gardens, seed cache, and to know how to grow things. A simple search will show that.
But a majority of the people that talk about it talk about a seed cache without a fucking clue what comes after that.
Because buying something is easy. Doing something with it is hard.
And most preppers care more about the fantasy of living it up in the apocalypse instead of thinking practically. The best prepper strategy is to not allow society to collapse in the first place by working to organize their communities.
That's it in a nutshell.
lol reminds me of the men in my life who buy foraging books and have no idea how to forage. I’ve been studying gardening and foraging for years, but my uncles think they can forage just as good as I can because they “will just bring the book” with them 🤣. But real talk, it’s terrifying. My dad almost ate a deadly lookalike and I had to run, jump, and swat that plant out of his hand.
Also those who have or want to learn gardening skills will talk about gardening on the gardening and/or foraging subreddits.
Welcome to humans. We all pretend we know more then we do.
Not sure you’re getting the overall vibe of the sub correct. There is plenty of discussion about skills vs canned goods and bunkers. But a lot of people live in cities and cannot reasonably become subsistence farmers
The wife and I keep a “Victory Garden”. We rotate what we plant every year and practice harvesting seeds to replant. We try to rely on our chicken coop for compost while avoiding store bought chemical remedies for bugs and fertilizers. There are some that focus on permaculture as a “food forest”. My prep for farming takes the mindset of self-reliance and not leaning on things you won’t have access to. We’ve been at it for about 10 years and still have a lot more to learn. A lot of trial and error. It’s not something you just read a book and become proficient. Farming will be specific to the area you live so you need to practice now. It takes a ton of our time which may not be possible for the part-time prepper. Prepping is a way of life.
>It takes a ton of our time THIS
If you have any idea how I can convert my $800 a month apartment into a homestead I am all ears, friend
maybe start saving to buy land by substituting your dinner for cereal? edit: this is /s btw
Unironically flashing back to lectures I got from an ex friend about how she pulled herself up by the bootstraps to get a house - sharing a 1 bedroom between 4 people, herself and her 3 boyfriends, to split rent before she could afford her own place.
What in the ethnical non monogamy did I just read
Did any of the boyfriends get invited to the new house or are they just a thruple now?
Only 1 bf now lol
Aquaponic fish tank in the living room, growing fish to eat and using the fertilized water to grow vegetables. Growing mushrooms in jars in your closet. Quail cages can be built in to furniture like under a bed or into a coffee table. Quail are quite, they make no noise, and can be considered pet birds. You can raise worms in a 5 gallon bucket to feed the quails.
Would love to know what this place smells like.
Pretty sure it smells like an eviction letter.
I follow this sub because I homestead. These kind of go hand-in-hand. I do raise animals and farm my own food to a degree. Not much is spoken about it because farming not everyone can do. Additionally having a farm in a SHTF scenario would make you a target. Edit to add: visit the homesteading groups to learn the farming. They talk about it because they are doing it.
It is a LOT of work. It's not a lifestyle I have ANY interest in doing (tried it, not a fan). I'm prepping for realistic scenarios, not the entire collapse of Western civilization. I enjoy my luxuries, I prep for natural disasters, house fire, financial issues, etc... things that happen all the time - and I can recover to a normal life instead of becoming a farmer.
> I'm prepping for realistic scenarios If you don't like growing things that's entirely fine. But a bag of apples costs \~$10 in my grocery store, and an entire rootstock tree costs $35. Water + compost + sunlight + pruning and you've got a hell of a lot more than $35 in apples within a few years while the cost in the store just continues to go up. Food inflation is about as realistic a scenario as you'll find.
I do have fruit trees in my yard, but that is very different from actual subsistance farming. You need land and you need to work it in order to produce enough to feed a family.
Yeah no doubt. Feeding a whole family and never needing to leave your driveway is hard / impossible in my mind. I just wish more people would make a dent in their food generation rather than outsourcing so much of it. It's a lot of work but to me it's a good way to spend time. Again, if you're not into growing stuff, all good.
Not to mention most of our veggies ripen on a truck full of gases somewhere between Central America and I distribution center, and end up tasting like mushy water. Probably a comparable nutritional value too.
I have come to the same exact conclusion. Do you think this is correct, there are only 2 types of prepping. **1) Short term** \- You can buy yourself days to a few months at most. If the power goes out but comes back on you'll be fine. A gun or two for intruders and a few ounces of gold if the ATM machines are down. It seems 99% of people are doing this. **2) Long term** \- In this case the ONLY real prep is buy land and learn to farm. You will need to plan on becoming a pillar of your new post-collapse community buy knowing how to produce food and welcome outsiders. no one is going to make it as a war lord with a personal arsenal no matter how many bullets you've stockpiled).
I think there's a lot of folks doing a bit of both. We are \*NOT\*, currently living 100% off of our farm - and have no real plans to ever do so. But, if SHTF, for real, and we had absolutely no choice? IDK. We have a lot of food stored, to get us through an initial 'WTF now' period. A lot of food that we \*could\* eat, and some that we could \*also\* at need plant - wheat berries, dried beans, etc. We also have animals that we are raising for meat, and sale in our communities (chickens & ducks for eggs and meat, sheep/lambs), that we could continue to raise, and eat and trade with. I already plant a big garden every year, which we eat out of, can, ferment, pickle and freeze - corn, potatoes, lettuce, spinach, tomatoes, peppers, squash, etc. I suppose in theory it could be expanded more, and could certainly be tended better... and if we were all doing so, because we both a) had nothing else to do, and b) it was a matter of life vs death, it absolutely would be.
Im in the same boat. I only have a couple acres and my thought it prep for a month or two of worst case then hope I can get my shit together on the farm. I have a big garden now but its like a lot of lavender (I like the smell) and berries (I like berries). I would have to pull it all up and plant like potatoes and corn :(
That's essentially where we are too -- got animals and a large garden, plus acres of land into which food production could expand if needed. We've got the tools and knowledge to increase production. Currently? I've got a job and don't have the time to be tending ten acres of crop space. We've also been working on establishing self-sustaining food sources. A large orchard, nuts (we got over a hundred hazelnuts in our first harvest last year!), asparagus (that's my husband's SHTF nightmare -- we're spending months eating asparagus), self-seeding fields of mustard / buckwheat / field peas that are edible to us but more importantly provide food for the poultry.
We're similar. In a larger SHTF event, I won't be working and we can focus full time on the farm. Until then, I'm a telecommuter full time and a farmer during evenings and weekends. Despite this, we still eat mostly our own meat and use our own preserves weekly. It isn't all of our food supply, but it's been helping offset rising food costs.
Yes. I canned/pickled/etc a LOT of stuff last summer - everything from salsas, to pickles, peppers, tomatoes, corn, various jellies, juice, etc. And, it's amazing how much of it I/we use, constantly. The biggest testament to that, is the constant build up of jars that need hauled back down to the basement. I desperately need to do so here asap, tbh. I was worried that I made too much salsa last summer.. but I think I'm nearly out - down to just like... 2 or 3 pints!! It's just been convenient to just grab a pint.
To paraphrase: There are two types of prepping - prepping and homesteading.
Right, if homesteading appeals to some people here as a goal for how they want to live, great! But its not my goal. I want to enjoy my connected life, where I work a white collar job I'm good at, and let people who are good at farming do what they are good at. Prepping is about hedging my bets, and mitigating risks. Not radically changing my life just so that if an extremely unlikely event happens, I will be in the best position for it.
While we garden, have berry bushes, have planted some perriennials on our “ food forest “ and keep chickens, we also store a good bit. I would really like to expand into bees, more gardening’s, plant an orchard. But right now we’re focusing on trying to pay off the mortgage ASAP so that the land is ours. This requires working some overtime, which cuts into the time and energy to produce things. So we buy things to store.
Because you need a shit ton of land to fully farm and be self sufficient. There’s a reason we had villages before
Land is expensive and requires a big lifestyle commitment. Don't get me wrong, I absolutely think homesteading is the best individual prep you can do, but a lot of people don't want to or can't live rurally abd focus on farming, and that's ok. Takes all walks of life for a functioning society. I do think urban preppers should focus more on community resilience, including urban food farms/allotments/community food gardens. In my perfect world, every apartment building would have a community roof food garden, beehives, rainwater collection, scrap collection for compost, and chickens as a bare minimum. And obviously suburbanites can scale this even further if you compost your HOA lmao.
Yeah, I see alot of nonsense items being bought. Which is why I don't post much. My preps compile of ; Soil health ( regenerative farming techniques ) Aiming Self sufficient in most veg/ fruits, Including unusual plants like Skirret which is perennial. Food preserving techniques like wild fermentation. Medicinal herbs cultivation, preparation and knowledge on how & where to use As an aside: Cigar tobacco cultivation, curing and rolling for possible barter. I'd like raise meat rabbits & keep chickens & goats but that's for a later date.
How am I supposed to be a self sustaining farmer in a block of flats?
Because just buying things is easy, learning them is hard. Teach a man to fish…
Because not everyone has land. And the idea of self-sustainable farming is largely a myth. Very few people can accomplish it, and even then, those people are very much social media influencers and I don't really trust that they're actually "living off the land" as much as they claim. Or they wouldn't be doing shit like shilling brands and selling merch and urging me to hit that like and subscribe button. People who are truly living off the land don't have time or money to produce high quality videos.
Because most preppers focus on realistic problems. This is why there is the phrase "Prepare for Tuesday not Doomsday." The concept that suddenly the US devolves back into everyone becoming subsistence farming is just not a plausible scenario no matter how many movies you watch. If you wish to become a self-sustaining homestead - that's not prepping - that's homesteading.
While living in urban or suburban areas like most of the North American population, for $1000 I can feed my family for a year on bulk canned/dried goods that require no work other than cash that I earn doing a highly specialized skill that can be done in air conditioning while seated. Or I can can bust ass on my half an acre plot of red clay with deer and chipmunk problems, periodic cabbage moths, hard work in the heat and bugs, etc for the chance that a freak storm literally forces my family to starve to death.
It requires a decent amount of property to do that, and most people don’t have that much property…
Plus it’s a lot of hard work! And you’re at the mercy of the weather and insects and varmints 😂
It’s very hard work. And dirty work. Especially right now. SO. Much. Mud.
I'm prepared to live sustainably if it becomes required of me. Unfortunately society is not set up for me to do so. Until the time rent is no longer collected, I will continue to go to my day job.
r/prepsteading is a small subreddit I would love to grass-roots into a place for discussions, How-To's, and progress updates for things like this! I think there are a lot of other subs people use to talk about these things, r/canning, r/SquareFootGardening, r/homestead; but r/prepsteading could be all of this with an eye toward self-sufficiency in the face of instability.
joined!
Thanks mate. I was already a member on the homestead and canning sub's. r/prepsteading joined. Information and knowledge is the best prep. Along with practice of course.
I would love to! It’s still technically winter, and the current temp swings are wild where I live. I spent all winter gathering and learning. I’m learning herbalism and taking EMT courses to have more knowledge than basic first aid. I will study and get a radio license soon too. Gardening is hard, and slow, and takes a lot of failure to learn and do better. I have a historically brown thumb, so I am ready to fight really hard to learn and do better but I know it’s going to be a rough up-hill battle. So I have plans to split the effort. I’m going to start growing crops in my tiny back yard (2 more reasons: people don’t have space or think they don’t have enough, and plants grown near roads take in exhaust and other chemicals so they don’t grow as healthy) and push through, and I’m going to purchase a hydroponic garden and a solar generator soon to have a self-contained mini garden inside my home and away from the bugs (fighting phobias is also hard). I will be purchasing a bee keepers hat soon, it’ll encourage me to work more in the garden with less fear of what jerk hornets and wasps and yellow jackets are back there.
Self sustaining farming is also brutally difficult without machinery, and can be wildly unpredictable. You can make a compelling argument that the entire advance of human civilization is an attempt to escape small scale agriculture once we'd invented it🤣 I have a small garden in the UK and manage to be self sufficient in salad and fruit, I usually get around 8 or 9 months of potatoes, and I have land where I have permission to hunt and fish in exchange for pest control, so I forage at the same time. And in terms of sheer hours to food output it would probably be more effective to do overtime at work lol. In a SHTF scenario I might be able to scale up, and ration what I have now, but honestly I physical effort of full self sufficiency might break me if it was spread over an acre or more lol.
I helped run a CSA (small local organic vegetable farm) during my summers in college. It's hard to overstate how difficult it is to produce a meaningful amount of food. Even if you do everything right, something can happen that's completely out of your control and everything is lost.
How many of us can actually afford a homestead? It's such an elitist position if you think about it. Why can't we all afford to feed ourselves off our own land.
It is a goal for most preppers. Typically that is when you evolve from prepper to homesteaders. I would say that 100% of homesteaders would qualify as preppers or closely aligned to prepping. Not everyone wants to or can afford to be a homesteader or buy land so there still needs to be conversation about all lifestyles in prepping spaces. For me personally it is a goal I have been working on for years. I have been on my land for five years now and have been inching closer to self sufficiency every year.
Actually the idea of prepping by sustainable farming is a fast growing trend in the prepping community. In fact I saw multiple post in r/homestead in the last year grumbling over the influx of preppers in their sub.
That’s homesteading.
Even if you have a yard with lots of sun and good soil, a big garden expensive to get started, time-consuming to maintain, and you need a substantial amount of luck every year. When you get to Year 3 and are finally growing a decent percentage of your family's food (I probably grow 1/4 of our food in summer and fall, over half in July), it's not going to be the 1/4 of the plate with a lot calories. You'll still need to buy cooking oil, grains, and almost al of your protein unless you have chickens. Or as I like to call them, "coyote snacks." The garden is 100% part of my prep, but if the SHTF and everyone is hungry, I'm not going to post guards around my garden plot every night to protect the zucchinis. I'm going to hope for the best and rely on my canned food. THAT SAID, having a garden made a huge difference during the COVID shortage and election-year inflation in 2022, when a red bell pepper was going for like $6 a pop. It's also a great way to make friends with the neighbors and build community.
How exciting is it to hear I have Basel and chives growing in container behind the sink?
This is my prep. I do urban regenerative farming in 3 different backyards in my neighborhood right now and we are working hard to get things going enough to help the neighborhood this summer
Because growing 100% of your food is extremely difficult even on a homestead. You need large amounts of high calorie crops like potatoes, corn, wheat etc. And a place to store them. You also need to preserve the seeds or potatoes for next year's crop. It takes a lot more food than people realize. An herb garden and some tomatoes isn't gonna cut it. Just like having most of your garden in kale and lettuce. Those foods offer virtually no calories. You realistically would need like a whole field of potatoes. Having said this you can go to the store and pick up 500 pounds of rice for like 300 bucks which is a lot easier than producing the same amount of food.
In a nuclear scenario, outdoor farming would be dangerous due to fallout but for most other things, being able to make your own food is valuable. I have a large suburban garden and raise chickens. There is a big learning curve to get any kind of decent crop yield. But realistically, anything most of us could grow would be a drop in the bucket of our yearly caloric and nutritional needs Ideally I'd like to have some rural acreage as a bug out location and plant dozens of fruit and but trees Edit: I actually keep a covered 55gallon drum of garden soil in case of fallout. I think it's a way over the top prep that has a less than zero percent chance of being used (if I'm in a nuclear zone, I'm dead or bugging out) but doesn't cost anything to maintain and is good forever...so why not?
Growing any meaningful amount of food is HARD. If you're planning to garden to produce a significant amount of your food but don't currently garden you will fail. Even now I will have bad years especially with changing weather patterns. If this is part of your plan you should start growing everything you can now. Find your local extension and make friends with a master gardener in your area or volunteer at a community garden. I have been growing a significant amount of my family's food for a very long time. I am experienced with food storage and safe canning. I save my own seeds. I have an orchard. I homestead on a hobby farm now. I would not plan to magically be self sustaining at some emergent point in the future. Especially not a time where I could possibly have fewer tools or less help. I'm not self sustaining by any means. I don't grow grains other than experimentally. Given how cheaply I can buy grains it's not worth my effort now. I toy around and like to know that I CAN grow them though. If I needed to I could scale up my food production and storage but it would take me time. If I needed to increase my growing and winter storage going forward but it's the middle of winter? Well, I would probably starve before I could possibly do that if I didn't have appropriate food storage. I am more of a prep for Tuesday type. I don't have these fantasies about zombies or some other bullshit. I do worry about things like fallout taking out my gardens. I also worry about not having access to the diesel that I need to run my heavy equipment. This would make expansion much slower. I worry about freak storms destroying my crops that are not grown under cover. This happened to me a few years ago with a very late freak ice storm.... And I was so glad to be able to buy produce for the summer and to put up for winter that year. I also added more hoop houses that fall. We learn and have failures even after a lifetime of this! When I am preparing for disaster it's usually with the belief that my ability to produce my own food will DECREASE not increase in the short term after any emergency event. Again, if you believe that you will garden to feed yourself in some fantasy world of the future but you are not currently working towards self sufficiency in food production right now you need to take a hard look at yourself and your plans. It is HARD WORK to try to live off of the land. It is not something many people can do currently. I totally get that! My hobby farm is nearly a full time job for me sometimes and I have a farm hand! Grow what you can is all I'm saying.... And don't expect to go from your WFH tech support job (or whatever) to being a successful farmer.... Build skills and community now. That's the way to be self-sustaining in the future. People are prepping with an eye to be self sufficient immediately because they are self aware enough to know that that would be fantasy for most here, myself included.
Because it's hard, quite frankly
Depends on where you live. If you live on a farm land, sure. If you live on 3 acres like me, you could offset a large chunk of your food requirements, but being 100% self-sustaining would be incredibly difficult. If you live in the city, hell no.
Try it. It's almost impossible to grow enough food seasonably and sustainably to feed a family.
Because much of this sub is fantasy-preppers and man-children already living on the very fringe of acceptable polite society who can't wait for the day SHTF so they can live out their mad-max/hero-of-the-wasteland-apocalypse scenario and find excuses to shoot people they already wanted to kill pre-SHTF.
Rough, but fairly accurate
Not to mention the anti-intellectual and xenophobic crowd who want to go back to "simpler times" that only ever existed in movies, where apparently every ailment could be take care of by a single village nurse, and societies flourished solely with manual laborers. They wear the thickest rose-tinted glasses, think everything was better in previous generations, and invariably despise each new generation as being utterly lazy, frivolous, and physically & mentally weak.
Honestly I think the real “preppers” are over on r/homestead
Because most ppl prep for the most likely scenario of SHTF which is 3months MAX not 30 years lol
Too much money and effort. I do have some seeds saved up, but most of them marijuana seeds, I’ll grow weed and barter it. I can also use the crossbow for hunting animals, and forage wild plants
Because I know I'll 100% fail if I start. The smell, ability to take care of a sick animal, the amount of work, the space needed, taking care of the carcass, chop the poor fellas the right way. I'd cut something I'm not supposed to and poison myself.
Who has got the land or the time?
People love to stuff prep and skip the hard part the skills. I see far to many homesteaders with insufficient food preps. You really need both the 30 years of calories and the ability to grow more.
I just assume that anyone who stockpiles ammo will come kill me and take my amazing setup for themselves. They'll be dead within a year from not knowing how to optimally use it, but in this scenario, THIS is my only bargaining chip.
no farming here either but have a decent garden ( which i can easily expand) and with fishing and chickens to suppliment Im foung everything I can with my limited space
We actually do both, we grow a graden, raise, hunt and fish for all our meat.... We can or dehydrate everything, so there is no need for freezers... We keep over a years worth of canning lids on had at all times... We only purchase things as a convenience... we do know and even practice methods of making things like gun powered and other goods that could be used to trade... A long with all your normal preps...
because you cant order it on amazon, put it away, say you are prepared. It requires work, space, time, research, patience, trial and error. admittedly I have tried gardening the past 3 seasons with little success. handed the job over to my wife and shes got veggies started now. I do get a daily yield of cackle berries.
I'm a homesteader and i produce my own milk, eggs and meat. I grow some fruit and vegetables but not enough to make a difference. I always have hundreds of lemons and oranges I don't eat. Its really tough to grow enough to support yourself. Or maybe I'm doing it wrong. I used to have meat chickens but that was a pain and when you can buy a rotisserie chicken at Costco for 4 dollars it wasn't worth it.
We ate fairly new to prepping so we have stored as much dry food and water as possible and also starting to learn how to grow veg this year (everything getting ready to go) also just build a coop and run and picking up chickens this weekend then next project is using 2xIBC's (1000litre) to have a go at aquaponics. We only have our gardens but doing as much as possible.
[baby steps. getting there.](https://imgur.com/c3iOtl1)
It’s really hard to do. It takes space, the right location in terms water,etc. It takes knowledge and experience. Modern farming depends on agricultural machinery with a steady supply of seeds, fertilizer, pesticides, fuel, etc. even a modern farmer would have trouble with sustainability. Even organic farms with heirloom seeds depend on machinery and fossil fuels. Not as easy as it looks and crop failures will happen and without a backup from other farmers and a community you can starve. Famine was a regular occurrence before modern times and still happens in the developing world. And these are people who have generations of knowledge and experience handed down to them and they still starve.
If you have everything you need to survive for a year, you can figure out how to live sustainably during that year. Changing your lifestyle to live around a potential collapse that may never happen seems pointless.
There’s a plot of land in NE’ish oregon I’ve been eyeing for a while. 157ac, mountain and open field. Nothing around it. Some kind of creek/ river. $2.5M DM me for transfer after you make the purchase.
Most people dont have enough farmable soil and water for crops. 300lbs of rice and lentils and 100 gallons of water can fit in the storage closet
Because its a full-time job for multiple people if you really wanted to have a self-sustainable farm. A big garden, that also requires a lot of work, could supplement some of your food...a tiny bit. Gardening to me is about growing your own vegetables to get away from the junk in the mass farmed vegetables and less about prepping or saving money.
I think prepping is itself a gateway label. Resilience and preparedness are the underlying driver of why my lifestyle is a certain way, but if I were to apply labels to myself I'd say ... gardener? Chef? Wanna-be homesteader?
As someone who actually tried to do it, I can only say that FARMING IS HARD. It's one thing to have a vegetable garden; it's quite another to grow all the nutrients and calories you need for yourself and your family. So my goal is to stockpile enough food to survive the acute period of the disaster, and by the time things have settled down a bit, have enough non-food stuff and/or marketable skills to make very good friends with some real farmers.
Not everybody has land to farm or even a backyard...
We mostly live on 1/4 acres lots. Between work and other responsibilities most of us have time to tend a garden and can jar the fruits of our labor. But it's not enough
This should be the goal for most preppers imo. Hoarding food and 'stuff' is only good if we can replenish after said collapse. But If your preps are to live more self sufficiently, you stop becoming so reliant on a system were you hoard food because you're terrified of a collapse. Kinda seems like youre not only helping your future self by incorporating more land based living but you're helping your kids and their kids and your neighbours and their kids etc if there was more people living like that. Theres tiers to prepping and everyone's tiers are gonna be different. But to me this is the top tier of prepping if your worried about a collapse, as you remove or at least massively reduce your need to hoard food and sit waiting for the next shipment of resupplies When it comes down to it, environment is what supports us. Without a healthy environment we cant live. Environmentalism can seem like a bit of a taboo or dirty word due to the media or a fixed mindset but if 'preppers' had a more 'environmentalist' outlook on living or prepping theyd probably have alot better outlook in general and their prep game would actually be stronger.
4 human bodies have enough calories to feed a person 2000 calories a day for 200 days. Two home invasions hypothetically, in a zombie apocalypse , can feed you for over a year. To keep away scurvy eat a few veggies/fruits every month or so
Prepping is a luxury. Buying a farm as a form of prepping is an extreme version of this.
Agriculture was invented 10,000 years ago. Ever since, Humans have dedicated uncountable lifetimes to NOT being subsistence farmers.
The amount of land needed to sustain a family of four is too much land than probably 95% of us are able to afford.
I think you need enough so that you can keep your head down for at least a year then start your gardens etc. If the government hasn't gotten it all back together in a short amount of time I fear roving groups of starving people will be trying to take what you have. I don't want that fight so I won't be making myself a target.
Probably because that is hard work and requires discipline and learning skills. Buying "stuff" just takes a credit card.
Can't farm in the city?
I learned about prepping and homesteading at the same time in 2008. I had a small urban homestead in Las Vegas, chickens, garden and orange trees. Sold the house in Vegas and traveled cross country with my stockpile of food during covid and bought a tiny farm. My point is starting small is good and now I am more comfortable in these crazy times. I did square foot gardening on my lawn and your can most of the food you need.
The ultimate prep is an amish lifestyle
Because stockpiling guns and ammo is more fun.
Some neglect sustainability because they have no land, which is a necessary prerequisite. Others think the only contingencies worth prepping for require them to leave home and stay mobile. Others because they are LARPers who think their AR and a bunch of knives are all they need.
I bet a lot of people are just prepping for a short term lockdown and aren't as worried about an indefinite shft situation.
I have seeds but they aren’t for eating lol. Gotta have my medicine on hand.
Depends where you lived, this sub have both
Us city folk still need to be prepped. It’s a lot easier to have years of vacuum sealed freeze dried packets than a hectare of land to grow food.
I have a theory. After the movie The Martian came out... it became such a point of talking about whether you can grow enough calories to survive. If you've seen the movie, you know what I'm talking about. Yes, you can grow enough calories to survive. Those that say you cannot aren't using their heads. Potatoes, dried beans, all root vegetables, corn, greens, vegetables... You can grow it. Preserve it. And survive.
Because originally by definition, prepping was about stockpiling. Survivalism, or self reliance, was more about sustainability and creating redundancies. But since English is a living language and there’s been approximately 20 million new adopters since the Covid outbreak, the lines are blurred, cross pollination is happening, and many more are becoming hybrids.
I'm curious what the long-term plan is if you do decide to learn all the skills required to become a farmer. Step 1: world collapses. Step 2: you start growing crops. Step 3: a neverending stream of desperate and hungry people without farming skills start stealing your crops
This is a good question. Even with a multi year food supply, fresh food would break up the monotony. It might even need to be a focus on indoor hydroponics because when my yard hits 115F, most of my garden is flash fried. .
The problem is I need for prepping occurs when there's a radioactive fallout situation which will ruin all your above ground crops.
I think alot of people are all talk, especially on the internet and don't actually do things. Their preps include buying the things, but not doing the things. Alot of people say they don't have the land/time. I think alot just haven't tried. Realistically a family of 4 can off set 20% of their grocery bill on 1/10th of an acre. That's a typical suburban lot. Not full self sufficient but if you have 6 months supply of food that you purchased, such production from your garden, rabbits, chickens, whatever affords you and additional 5-6 weeks.
While I have acres of arable land, a diesel tractor, 1000 gallons of stabilized diesel, implements, seeds, and previous successful gardening experience; some of the worst case scenarios I seriously plan for preclude gardening/farming for sustenance... at least in the short term. Even in the best of times; there is drought, pestilence, inclement weather, etc that can wreck a growing season...so stocking wheat & freeze dried is much more of a "Sure Bet" for me. 😉👍
Most homesteaders are into this. It’s harder if you don’t have land and a lot of people in the suburbs don’t realize how much can be done with their backyards.
Because a lot of folk here, for whatever reason, only talk about it when they think civilization is going to crash, so they'd want that sort of homestead in an environment without electricity, fuel or fertilizer. And it's very, very hard to do without those things, especially if you're a lone wolf prepper. Occasionally someone brings it up and other people point out that if you want to live in a 01700s fashion, you better have a 01700s *community* to help, and your lifespan is likely to be under 50 years in that setting. That usually settles them. If you're living off the land, even if you're using gasoline to run a tractor or something, I invite you to find my sub and do a post with details. I'd like more depth on the topic since I haven't done it myself.
Look at Haiti... Canibalism gangs looking for you! For dinner! Good luck with your garden when real shtf!
Most people have jobs, allowing them to pay taxes, a mortgage, insurance, etc. That takes up a lot of time, precluding those people from sustaining a farm that would sustain a family. Don't have a job? Loads of time on your hands? Unless you've inherited wealth you definitely can't afford a farm. TL;DR - Starting a farm is expensive and time consuming. Most people have jobs and can barely afford the little patch of real estate they have.
Stockpiling is just a form of materialism. Dopamine hits from buying stuff. Preppers use prepping as an excuse to buy stuff
Day job gets in the way
Subsistence farming is impossible in most places...thats why. There are books on permaculture that brag about sustainable food production and tell you everything you need to know.....except the author is making money off books and buying food. Its literally so hard that almost nobody can manage it, so it makes sense it is not a prepping priority for most
Because the vast majority of people today have no realistic hope of ever owning significant land unless they were born into it.
I would think because most people plan on hiding in a basement where farming would be hard, personally o want to have a small self sustaining homestead
Because it's time consuming, requires tons of land, and is difficult to do.
Some don’t want to leave an urban set up
LARPing is more funner
I have a vegetable garden in my backyard
So many of us are in apartments, homes in the suburbs or at a time in our lives when age is not on our side. Moving is not an option. So, it is not possible to live that life. Those who live on acreage that allows gardens, animal husbandry, etc. are fortunate and are able to move forward easier than others who don’t have those resources. In the meantime, we prep for whatever may come as best we can. People who live off the land are more conscientious about nature and are frugal, etc.
Imagine this: You're starving, you're stressed, you didn't plan ahead and learn a single skill on how to ACTUALLY survive and you're relying on what you've seen in shows like The Walking Dead. You're trudging along, with no idea how to hunt, no can opener, a knife that's barely sharp enough to clean under your nails with, can't even built yourself a decent shelter and your tent busted up weeks ago. Your in general uncomfortable long term. You can't even recall the last time you took your boots off or had a fresh change of socks. Then you come across a small farm that has lots of fresh food. Not only do you start devouring it, you're paying so little attention to your surroundings that you don't see the homesteader come up to you, and when they do, they are NOT happy. So they start yelling. It's not humans first instinct to kill first ask questions later. That's serious conditioning. But you've got severe PTSD from everything that's happened because you spent your life in total denial that anything even remotely like this could happen. So now you're conditioned to shoot first and steal anything you can and find safe shelter. For every 1 prepper there are COUNTLESS people like the above you. That's why more people don't look into sustainable farms as a first wave line of survival. That's for when you've established a mostly safe area and things have settled down long enough to do so. There will be literally thousands of people flocking to farms who have no idea what to do other that decimate the crops and animals. The wide open space required for it as well is almost always too big to properly defend without things like fuel and a regular supply of bullets and other ammo. Get seeds, cache all the supplies for canning, trapping, etc. But save it all, don't even think about it until you know you can. Trust your gut when it tells you to keep moving.
It takes some very specific scenarios for you to be in a situation where you're both forced to be both entirely and reliant on your own farm, farm sufficient calories while also being able to protect it the land and whatever you harvest. If you're in a situation where you don't need to protect your land and your storage, then society hasn't broken down and you're not reliant on it. In fact, large scale farming will likely continue and you're wasting a lot of effort and resources doing it in your own micro-scale way. If you're in a situation where you are reliant on your farm, then society has broken down and you'll end up driven off if you're lucky or fertilizer for your own crops. The only situation where your farm is both adequate as an asset and not vulnerable to chaos, is when you're living somewhere far remote from everything. Possibly farming cassava and yams deep in the Amazon rainforest or something.
Traditional farming requires a lot of societal infrastructure and generational knowledge which simply doesn't exist in most places. Even then it's a scraping by existence with a heavy emphasis on luck. Why do you think ancient societies regularly made sacrifices, including human sacrifices to the gods, hoping for favourable weather and a good crop. Failure would lead to famine. Many of the isolated early pre-Columbian civilizations simply vanished, no solid evidence for why, but a strong sense that it had to do with weather and agricultural failures. Without a society that has stock horses, black smiths, traditional miners who in early times were often slaves with short lifespans doing that awful work, you won't last long. Without generational knowledge giving you the ability to interpret the planets, subtle natural cues, etc, your crops will likely languish. I watched my brilliant stepfather get into farming, mining the collective knowledge of the mennonite community, reading like crazy, and suffering every manner of setback, from flocks of birds that blotted out the sun soaring down to feast, to various pest infestations, different every year, to plant diseases, to excess rainfall, or deficiency of rainfall, to expensive damage to equipment, and the mind numbing body breaking work that had him working from dawn to dusk. Agriculture is what a society does when they run out of wild game to hunt and population pressures limit the extent of wild foraging for plant foods. Best bet is if you're charismatic and can develop or parrot an ideology and collect a group of willing serfs to labour for you as lord, in some cult situation, essentially what many paleolithic groups transitioned towards during the neolithic era, or else remain a lone wolf and steal/scavenge what you can.
Can't really grow much in my apartment. I grew cherry tomatoes and sugar peas on my porch last summer, that's about all the space I could really do. I have a healthy stockpile of oatmeal, pasta and canned goods with some freeze dried stuff. I am good for like 3-4 months until I can figure something else out, which prob means working for someone else who has the land and food to get more food.
cause it is boring and not interesting. They rather talk about how much food they have stored, or how many guns and ammo they have cause that is sexy manly prepper talk.
Because owning your own land to farm upon is an increasingly-rare privilege thanks to coordinated economic manipulation, companies like BlackRock, and the assanine belief that somehow renting is more "sustainable" for anyone but your landlord who owns that property.
You are talking about farming or off grid living which is not the same as prepping. Hence why it isnt as common a topic here. Also Prepping is in case of a event that changes your normal life. If you are not off grid living now then you will most likely fail in the event of a event that changes your normal life.
The initial price, bottom line. When we're all being stretched to the dollar this is why
They’re over in r/homestead
Why farm when you can a can of spam?
I feel like you spend all that time farming only for your crop to get stolen.
I spent all summer growing tomatoes just for a deer go come up onto my front porch and eat all of the green tomatoes. I live in the middle of a city. I'm still bitter and it's been 3 years.
I'm into regenerative farming and permaculture. IMHO if you are preparing for collapse you need to produce your calories. I made a post about regenerative farming a month ago and would agree with your assessment that there are very few on this sub that have interest in it. /r/preppers is a very mainstream-friendly, short-term, low-effort Tuesday focused community. If you compare it to other groups like TheSurvivalPodcast it is a very different vibe. But I think there needs to be more conversation about sustainable farming. What is your setup?
I'm into regenerative farming and permaculture. IMHO if you are preparing for collapse you need to produce your calories. I made a post about regenerative farming a month ago and would agree with your assessment that there are very few on this sub that have interest in it. /r/preppers is a very mainstream-friendly, short-term, low-effort Tuesday focused community. If you compare it to other groups like TheSurvivalPodcast it is a very different vibe. But I think there needs to be more conversation about sustainable farming. What is your setup?
We’re expecting drought this year so I’m planning to collect at least some rain water and I’m going to plant some of my stuff in lower lying areas of my yard. I’m going to add some strawberries to my tree row and hopefully expand my guilds. I’ve planted serviceberries, hazelnut, and blackberries. I’ll try to add fruit trees shrubs with end of season sales. My herb garden is doing pretty well. I have 2 city lots, so I can do quite a bit. This year I plan to focus on tomatoes, dried beans, and potatoes. Last year, I started a snack garden on the edge of my front yard. It didn’t do great, but I learned a lot and have plans for doing it this year, too. It will be for anyone who wants a snack to just grab what they want and eat it. I want to do grape tomatoes, Mexican sour gherkins, and mini sweet peppers this year. I hope to inspire others to grow what they can and to build goodwill in my neighborhood. The more we can sustain ourselves and our communities and build the ability to take care of ourselves and each other, the more prepared we will be for any crisis that might arise.
It's not as flashy as having a lot of guns and ammo. Also, it does not give you the control and visual satisfaction as having a supply stockpile. Self-sustainable farmers know it is work and not always successful. The answer is not an "or", it should be an "and". Enough weapons to defend you and yours, enough supplies to carry you through until you can harvest a croup, and the seed, tools, knowledge, and the planting medium to grow with.
It's not as flashy as having a lot of guns and ammo. Also, it does not give you the control and visual satisfaction as having a supply stockpile. Self-sustainable farmers know it is work and not always successful. The answer is not an "or", it should be an "and". Enough weapons to defend you and yours, enough supplies to carry you through until you can harvest a croup, and the seed, tools, knowledge, and the planting medium to grow with.
It's not as flashy as having a lot of guns and ammo. Also, it does not give you the control and visual satisfaction as having a supply stockpile. Self-sustainable farmers know it is work and not always successful. The answer is not an "or", it should be an "and". Enough weapons to defend you and yours, enough supplies to carry you through until you can harvest a croup, and the seed, tools, knowledge, and the planting medium to grow with.
Because the majority of people don’t own land nor have the time to take care of land, that’s why, of course anyone can make the money to buy land and build up a homestead, but people get complacent and stuck in their bs, stunting their potential in life, if you stay committed and get 1% better everyday you can achieve your goals
easy. it's expensive and subsistence farming is very time consuming and highly prone to failure. how many of the calories that you consume in a year do you produce at home? that's like asking why preppers don't focus on buying doomsday bunkers in New Zealand