Category: Harvesting Mindset

Survival Harvesting Local Resource Inventory

The premise of this site is that survival in groups is preferable to survival as a lone wolf. A highly skilled and prepared lone wolf may very well have an excellent chance at getting through a very bad time, though I question what kind of an existence that would be. A highly skilled and prepared group has a better chance, I would maintain, simply because of the range of skills and abilities available. Medical knowledge, mechanical knowledge, knowledge of crop raising, hunting, animal husbandry, fishing, and organizational skills, as well as security knowledge and skills, are going to be higher in a community group than in a single individual in most cases.

What Do You Need

Thinking in terms of a community means much larger requirements for food, energy, water, everything. Unless you have formed a group of likeminded preparedness oriented people, the only way you get a community is if you bring your existing community along with you. You aren’t going to be able to take care of all of those people’s needs. Therefore you need to look to the community for internal resources.

In a large scale disaster, you are going to need to know where local resources are available

I am going to engage in a mental exercise and I am going to start with what I consider to be the best circumstances. The process I am describing in this article will be much easier to accomplish in a small rural community than in the middle of a big city. It will be more applicable to smaller satellite towns that provide workers for the city. I DO believe you can take these principles and apply them to almost any situation, but there is no doubt that things will get hairy in a large urban area

Very few of us really know our own community in terms of survival resources. We probably know a few folks that live around us, but we don’t know much about most of our neighbours, most of the businesses or even our own municipal organization.

Resources Are All Around You

Let me tell you a personal experience from this past winter.  I arrived at our local Civic Centre for a presentation I was delivering about 6:00 pm, just as it was getting dark. The town I was entering has a population of about 1200. I pulled up to the door of the centre, got out, entered the building and realized there was a noisy engine running outside. The maintenance guy who was there and who let me in told me it was the facility’s generator, which had kicked on automatically when the power outage struck. It was just starting to get dark, so I hadn’t noticed the lack of lights in the houses as I entered town. It turns out that this Civic Centre was also the emergency resource centre for the town in a disaster. There were a certain number of supplies stockpiled there and the generator had enough fuel for three days of continuous use. The generator could power the lights, the kitchen facility, and the library upstairs with its computer stations and internet hook up etc. Used just four hours a day, the fuel supply would be good for 3 weeks and that would be enough for hygienic purposes, food preparation and to provide relatively comfortable shelter purposes for a lot of people. The town had a large water tower so the water supply would be available through gravity feed until the tank emptied.

I didn’t know that the Civic Centre had this secondary function even though I had lived in the area for 10 years. This experience got me to wondering what else I didn’t know about my community.

Local Community Resource Inventory

As I said before, the area I live in is rural, so here is a list of things I think I should know about:

Cattle farms, dairy farms, chicken/poultry operations, pork operations, sheep operations, cash crop operations, market gardeners, orchards, grain storage facilities, game farms, apiarys, antique/vintage agricultural equipment museums or clubs or collectors, fuel depots, farm supply stores, farmers co-ops or feed stores, firewood suppliers, feedlots, abattoirs, refrigerated storage capabilities, food processing operations, metalworking or repair shops, gun clubs or firing ranges, firearms or ammo retailers or suppliers, greenhouses, fish hatcheries, outdoor adventure tour operators, RV parks, public or government land, parks or woodlots, solar cell arrays etc.

I could go on for quite a bit, but you can probably understand where I am coming from. My small community probably has everything it needs to take care of the local community for over a year but also enough extra for a large influx of people. One small beef operation might have 30 animals. An average 1200 pound steer will provide about 500 pounds of boneless meat. But in an emergency situation, you wouldn’t be throwing out the bones. A lot of them would wind up being cooked up in soups or to make broth. Let’s ignore that for now though. Thirty animals would yield 15,000 pounds of meat. A sedentary man needs 56 grams of protein a day. He can get that from about 1.2 pounds of beef.  Using the sedentary man requirements as representative of our population as a whole, men, women, and children, those cattle meet the protein requirements of the whole town for about 10 days.

Well, that’s not much help, is it? The truth is, not many people meet all of their requirements for protein from eating nothing but beef. In an emergency, beef could be used to make other sources of protein more palatable. Checking on livestrong.com, we find this:

“Black beans and rice served together form a powerful nutritional team. A 1-cup serving of cooked, long-grain brown rice contains 5 grams of protein, 45 carbohydrate grams, 2 grams of fat and 216 calories. The same serving size of cooked black beans without salt has approximately 15 grams of protein, which is 30 percent of the daily value set by the FDA based on a 2,000 calories per day diet, 41 grams of carbohydrate, less than 1 gram of fat and 227 calories.”

Two Cups of Rice and Two Cups of Beans

So a cup of beans and a cup of rice will provide over a third of our required daily protein. With two cups of rice and two cups of beans a day, that small herd of cattle is suddenly good for a month. And that ignores everything else that might be available in peoples pantries, freezers, refrigerators, root cellars, or available from other sources. Think back to that list I compiled at the top of the last page; in addition to beef operations, I listed dairy farms, chicken/poultry operations, pork operations, sheep operations, cash crop operations, market gardeners, orchards, and grain storage facilities along with numerous others. It’s not a lack of resources that is the big problem. It’s coordinated action involving the resources that are available.

In my local area, there are a pile of agricultural operations that could wind up in dire need in a grid down situation. Not only would they need feed and water, but with no or limited access to electricity, they will need labour and cooperation to continue operating.

In a truly widespread disaster, when it takes people a while to get organized, and when the scope of the disaster isn’t recognized, many of the possibly useful resources in many of these locations could be wasted or ruined. Most agricultural operations are going to have power and fuel for several days at least. Whether they have large portable generators or depend on PTO driven units they can hook their tractors up to, they can power ventilation units in their poultry barns or run the machinery for their dairy operations for a while at least. But in a situation in which distribution channels are tangled or stopped completely, a lot of nutrition could go to waste at the same time a lot of people are going hungry. An organized list of resources on the one hand, and needs on the other, could go a long way to solving a lot of problems.

Recognize, I am not suggesting creating a list of places that are targets for looting in a disaster. I AM suggesting we all need to look further than our downstairs pantry to find our way out of a serious grid-down situation. This is especially true if we are located within a weeks walking distance or a two-hour drive from a major urban area. If you aren’t thinking in terms of a major disaster will create refugees, you aren’t thinking ahead enough.  We have had years of the Syrian conflict and also years of having to deal with Syrian refugees Europe as a partial example.

Admittedly, for most of us, I am talking about a low probability event.  But what if an incident is widespread enough and lasts a couple of week or more? Think of the Northeastern blackout of 2003 that affected 55 million people for two days, because of a tree branch rubbing on power lines. What if it had been caused by hackers who selectively targeted hard to replace high voltage transformers? You aren’t replacing high voltage transformers in two days; weeks or months are more likely. The fact that it is low probability doesn’t mean we shouldn’t think about it.  But we should consider it in terms of an extension of our existing preps. And simply because it would affect so many people, it makes sense to think of a community response.

Let me know what YOU think. Use the contact form to send me your thoughts, or get in touch with the Survival Harvesting Facebook page.  

Resources

All Hazards Preparedness for Rural Communities:  https://www.cfba.org/images/resources/all-hazards-preparedness-for-rural-communities-book.pdf

Farm Planning: Emergency PReparedness on Farms:http://wvats.cedwvu.org/media/1560/emergency-preparedness.pdf

Planning for and Responding to Disaster in Canada, An Approach for Farmers: http://www.ablamb.ca/images/documents/resources/planningforandrespondingtodisastersincanada.pdf

Survival Harvesting – Stocking Up at the Store

Years ago I came across two books that left a big impression on my ideas about buying and storing things that you need. They have both informed my regular purchase strategy, even if I don’t follow them to the letter.

The first book was called “Cut Your Grocery Bills in Half” by Barbara Salsbury. The book was written in 1983. The copy I have is a discard from the Peterborough Public Library that I bought at a book sale. It is essentially a grocery shopping planner. The first couple of hundred pages of the book explains how the average consumer shops and how grocery stores work.

The last hundred pages of the book describes the steps you take to effect the promised cost savings in your grocery bill. There are worksheets, tables, checklists galore in the book but let me simplify it for you.

Survival Harvesting philosophy extended to the grocery store.

Most products in the grocery store go through sales cycles. An item that normally sells for $4.00 will be reduced to $3.50 once every three weeks or so, down to $3.25 every two months and as low as $2.25 a few times a year. These aren’t exact, just a simple example. Salsbury advises you to start recording the cost of items in a workbook or on a spreadsheet. You don’t have to run around to all the different stores, just look through the sales fliers, or subscribe to get their email copies. And record the prices. Different stores will be in a different location in their cycles, so in a few months you will have a really good idea of what the likely best price for a product is going to be.

I am skipping over consideration of store brand, national brand and generic products, but you obviously want to compare apples to apples. For instance, there is a name brand of coffee you like, and a generic that you hate. There’s no point in comparing the prices on these two items. Focus on the one you love the taste of. If the two pound can usually sells for $10.00 and your records show that it goes down to $5.50 three times a year, then whenever it goes down to the low price, you purchase enough for four months (or longer). That’s it. Track prices, determine the cycle timing, train yourself to only buy when the cycle is at it’s lowest price and then buy enough to get you through to the next low.

The book goes into things in more depth and discusses meal planning and substitutions of basic items for more expensive ones etc. But the summary above should allow you to seriously start saving, and stocking up. Barbara hasn’t stopped writing. Go over to Amazon and look her up. She is obviously into prepping and has written eight or nine volumes on the storage and stocking up theme.

Harvesting deals on food items by being smart with your purchases and following sales cycles

Actually, while doing a little research for this article as I was writing it, I think I discovered that the book to the left of this paragraph is a newer version of “Cut Your Grocery Bills in Half.” Judging from the reviews, it covers exactly the same material in the same depth and structure.

You can currently get a copy at Amazon.ca for eight bucks or as low as five bucks including shipping on Amazon.com.

 

The second book I want to talk about was written in 1980 by John A. Pugsley.

Put your money into hard goods that you know you will use over the next decade and stop worrying about inflation.

It is called “The Alpha Strategy – The Ultimate Plan of Self-Defense for the Small Investor.” Pugsley wrote in a time of inflation and the eroding value of the dollar was a huge concern. At the same time the dollar was going down and able to buy less each year, wages were rising and pushing people into higher tax brackets. It was Pugsley’s view that the dollar you had in your hand today would never be worth as much as it was right then.

He reasoned that under those kind of conditions (which were widely expected to continue for decades) instead of putting money into savings where it lost value, or investments where traders constantly skimmed off the top on every transaction and the government taxed you on every gain, why not just buy things that you knew you would need in the future?

The book is available as a PDF here.

The book cautions the reader that things go out of date, fashion trends change, technology moves on, some items deteriorate with age and you need to assess what the cost of storage actually is. Nonetheless, it essentially lays out just what is required for you to think long term in your buying plans. This book fits in well with the thinking above. Hard items go through sales cycles as well. And bulk buying on non-perishable goods can dramatically lower the cost of goods.

Pugsley covers how long various items will last in storage.  He talks about buying things in bulk to lower the unit cost. That certainly makes a lot of sense in specific instances. OTC medicines and vitamins are good examples. “But what about expiration dates,” you say. Well, read what the Harvard Medical School has to say about that in an online article about the stability of drugs and what their expiration dates might actually mean.

“Most of what is known about drug expiration dates comes from a study conducted by the Food and Drug Administration at the request of the military. With a large and expensive stockpile of drugs, the military faced tossing out and replacing its drugs every few years. What they found from the study is 90% of more than 100 drugs, both prescription and over-the-counter, were perfectly good to use even 15 years after the expiration date.”

Technology can throw curves at you in your stocking up Alpha Strategy purchases. Take razor blades. When I started shaving, a razor blade was good for about five shaves. Today I use a multi-blade cartridge for over a month. I’m not sure if buying thirty years worth of “Gillette Blue Blades” would have been a good deal, even if the price was fantastic.  But the concepts are worth keeping in mind.

Combining the purchase of hard goods with the sales cycle knowledge in the grocery shopping book can lead you to some excellent buys. I used just this strategy when I went shopping for a snowblower a couple of years ago. I went shopping in the spring, just as winter was over. I found just the model I wanted, at about 60% of retail price. A small one family operation, selling small gas engine equipment, didn’t want to go through the summer with money tied up in stock. So I got my purchase at wholesale or below. Sales cycles are a thing for any seasonal equipment of products, not just soup and dishwashing detergent.

Together, these two books, “The Alpha Strategy” and “Cut Your Grocery Bills in Half” (or “Beat the High Cost of Eating”) compliment each other very well. They arm you with strategies to maximize your purchasing when you are buying things that you just need to buy. A little forethought, some planning and recognizing that almost all consumer goods go through sales cycles can save you big dollars, can ensure you have what you need on hand when you need it and will also see you better able to cope with emergencies.