Since we cannot know for sure what is to come or what is in store for us in the future, he who takes responsibility for himself, expects the unexpected and prepares accordingly, will be better prepared than the rest.
One difference between a prepper and non-prepper is that we know we are at risk for some form of disaster. Therefore we prepare accordingly.
Becoming or being prepared for circumstances beyond our control is a proactive process involving varying degrees of adjustment to our way of life, and typically employs a more self-sustaining lifestyle and high level of readiness while you take control of your own destiny.
Preparedness is having the means and know-how to face head-on the potential problems of supply and commodity shortage, systems breakdown including distribution and utilities, and threats to your security.
Essential to preparedness is risk awareness, being aware and alert to the possible reality of a disaster happening to you. Once aware of risks and their potential effects, you can then minimize them and plan for them.
Being prepared invokes an extremely powerful and secure feeling of self reliance. It will completely change your outlook and will make you an independent force among the rest. While you will ultimately need the help and cooperation of others, and while no one is ever truly fully prepared, the process of ridding yourself of a number of ‘system’ dependencies is invigorating, rewarding, and calming.
Why not try it for yourself?
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“BUT I surely would miss things like my morning coffee , mountain dew or nice soft toilet paper when I run out…”
…I will have plenty of stored cans of coffee, so how about I trade you for some of your bountiful garden booty? 😉
All joking aside, yes there will be certain items that will eventually disappear because they simply cannot be grown successfully in our region of the world. Coffee will be one of the most sought after commodities!
Christine… I believe these rules will change. There used to be chickens and livestock in towns, until people got to be snobby. And then big cooperations shot down the idea of raising your own.
Everybody has these coleman gadgets, LP cookers, and fancy what nots. I have them too. They’re not any good past a week or two at the most. It will take a #100 for a family of two for a year. When the LP and coleman fuel runs out, what then? I love fried food, the doctor can vouch for that, but what if the olive oil & the vegetable oil runs out? If you will notice that one pot meals, stews, & soups doesn’t require a non stick surface. Can you cook without frying?
Speaking of coffee, how about cowboy coffee? Does starbucks sell cowboy coffee?
@sixpense, Soup is my specialty… you can actually find an article I wrote for Ken labeled creature soup. As far as oil goes if you raise sunflowers and have an oil presser you can press yourself some oil if you have to have oil. As far as just frying that is what lard is for…..If the ground is worked very carefully you can become quite self sufficient on 5 acres. The design must be very carefully thought out, crops rotated etc. Alfalfa planted for the goats provides ample protien for their milk production. Alfalfa provides 18-22% protien while the milk-maker grain only has 16%. The chickens love scraps and grasshoppers which are plentiful in my area and while they like their scratch there have been times when I did not have any and they still had full crops. I do not have to raise rabbits for meat as they are more than abundant here and survive well on their own. There are always left overs in the big fields of green beans and soy beans to be had after the pickers go thru here. Maybe our big farmers just do not have the new fangled super efficient equipment like farmers near you have. Like I said my goal is to be as self sufficient as possible. I am about 3 acres short of having enough to plant the wheat and oats for my family. A good year of harvest will generally provide more than a years worth to make up for bad years. For example my garden had a rough time with the drought this year. We have been in one of the areas deemed “exceptional drought” I babied my garden and still got out enough to put up for more than a year. The farmers corn crops failed to the point that they could not harvest commercially but there was still plenty for hand picking. So I guess we just have to agree to disagree an whether or not 5 acres can feed a family of 5. The book “the self suffucuent lifestyle and how to live it” by John Seymore has been most helpful in designing and planning in order to make the land as efficient as possible. It also helps to be blessed with the fact that my 5 acres is totally flat with awsome top soil and no rocks. You could not ask for more fertile bottom land.
Christine…. yes I read the article, went back & checked for sure. I wasn’t disagreeing so much as stating it was tough being self sufficient on five acres. Glad your 5 acres is working out for you.
I am more of a stew person rather than a soup person. But I like everything with a gravy or rue. I do raise rabbit due to the wild ones are skinny and dark meat. Tame rabiit is all white and low in colesteral. Food is my downfall. I also like to cook. I do have one of those large kettles for the stew, maybe hold 25-30 gal.? Good for making lard, turtle soup & etc… My wife is the greatest cook at home , but I play in the fire when we go camping.
sixpense,
My bad I thought disagreeing. Hard yes.. Tedious.. Yes… Lots of planning and forethought way YES!!! Before we started building one fence I laid out a huge piece of paper and sketched everything where a green house will go, the barn, pens, orchard, pond, garden and on and on. That way every square foot was being used as efficiently as possible. We utilize everything. We are planting grape and berry vines on the fences that way they grow on the fences and the perimeter fences are getting prickly raspberries to also help as a deterrant to someone climbing over but also to provide fruit, I try to dual purpose as much as I can. We know what the next thing is going to be to build three things before we build it. I am very lucky to have such wonderful land. I do hope that someday I will be blessed to be able to get a larger plot but for now this one has no mortgage and with the way I am working it I am being paid to do so, not only in groceries, money from selling my jams, eggs, cheese and milk but also in the peace of mind in knowing that if the SHTF tomorrow we would (hopefully) survive, and oh yes the 1911 and the AR15 that I keep handy along with my hubby’s SKS and 1911 will keep the farmers away if they come knocking! LOL. Just today I waxed 6 pounds of Colby cheese and have 4 pounds of Pepper jack in Brine along with 2 lbs of regular jack, those I will wax tomorrow and put to aging. We just busted out the cheddar that I had made 2 months ago and it was perfect!!
I spend some of my time writing articles for my blog and also that I give to Ken in hopes that I can help others learn some of the things I have taught myself to do without them havving the trial and error part.
I beg to differ Ken, in Texas it would be Dr. Pepper and Big Red. Those are gold here. We still love our coffee too though. 😉
Christine….. I once homesteaded, can’t hardly call that now, although we try raising a lot of vegetables and small livestock for the freezer or canner. While we do all we can in a small area, most people forget that its a long way from being self sufficient. Feed for that rabbit, laying hens, pig or steer in the stable, even a milk goat has to come from somewhere. A good milk goat will not produce without grain. I studied what you can actually raise on 5 acres. It would be tough, to say the least. One bad summer or winter would wipe you out. I used to gleen corn from farmers ‘fields for grain. With these new pickers, there is no grain on the ground! I have even worked on the farm in trade for hay and grain. What happens when these farmers are standing at your door asking for handouts? Ken.. has mentioned EMP attack, think about all the corn, soybeans, & wheat going to waste if that happens.
I appreciate all the comments I read on here, may not agree with or just over the top, It still gives me food for thought.
Christine… yes, been there, done that. My wife & I were raised by self sufficient families. We didn’t know growing up that there was any other way. Raised everything, fed a sawmill crew over a wood cook stove and farmed to boot. Hogs & cattle, chickens for hatching eggs for the hatchery. Sold a beef to buy school clothes, butchered our own, rendered lard, canned the beef, smoked the hams. I remember my father shooting the hog, cutting its throat, hooking a single tree to each leg and a horse dragged it to the barn where we had hot water boiling for scrapping and slaughter. We would butcher maybe 5 or so. If your going to make a mess, might as well be a big one. I enjoy reading about those of you working on your skills, practicing what you read and are taught. It would be nice to have that all again, but a lot of work. You see, I have the knowledge and experience, just not the stamina that I once had. Don’t get me wrong in any way, keep up the good work. We raise a garden, can most of it, raise rabbits & broiler chickens for freezing and canning. Burn firewood for heating. Make our own soaps, stock up on the items I don’t raise. I guess this can all be called a hobby?
It seems as though the government calls it a hobby. As far as cash in I would not make a profit. If you counted the fact that my farm feeds us and my grown daughters family and gives to our church then there would be a nice profit. But that does not matter in the eyes of the almighty whitehouse…. So it is a “hobby farm” in their eyes just not mine. When I get pigs and have plenty of lard then I am going to try my hand at figuring out soap. Maybe I can sell that too or it would be a good barter….
christine… the last hogs we raised, just a couple years ago, we had them butchered by a slaughter house. I asked about rendering the lard, to my dismay, the charge for that was higher than I could walk around to the deli portion of the business and the buy lard. #30 (6 gal bucket) container for $25. We had the scrap ground so I could add my own seasonings for bratworst, summer sausage, breakfast sausage, & etc…It also takes pork to flavor venison to make summer sausage. I usually use 5-6 lb of pork butt to #15 venison. Wonder why they call the pork shoulder “Butt”?
@Ted K, I agree with you the show was fun to watch and there were a great many good ideas. It was interesting to watch it from a survivalist point of view. I just wish they had not portrayed them all as paranoid delusional when they told after each segment how their “experts” say whatever scenario just will not happen. And also I keep up with Killene Bishops blog. She was on one of the first episodes. She has said they really made she and her husband jump thru hoops for the sake of “entertainment” by having them do things like morse code when looking for an intruder. I was really excited to watch the show and then I was really disappointed with how Nat Geo portrayed all who “hope for the best and prepare for the worst” It could have been shown in a much more postive light and actually helped to get more people to prepare and be better off should the SHTF. Then we ALL would have been better off with more people prepared and less looking to steal.
As far as the rest of your comment. Thank you for the story I enjoyed reading it. I could see that happening, you see I am portuguese. My father is the kind that would bend over backwards to help a neighbor as am I. It has been taught from generation to generation to be kind and honorable. My Father told me many times you never know when you will need those favors back. And that people do remember when you have been kind to them.
To Christine and sixpence:
If you have hogs ready for “processing” right now, the lard may be worth more, pound-for-pound, than the pork itself. In the rural/suburban community I lived in, during hunting season, many hunters are looking to make their venison cuts into sausage. You need lots of snow-white fat in order to make really great sausage. The same can be said of processing feral/wild hogs. Both venison and feral hogs are very lean and require processed fat or rendered lard in order to make sausage.
I type this in on 9/13/2012 where I live, hunting season for deer is about to get underway. There is a large ethnic German community nearby. It is an understatement when I say that every part of the hog will be processed except for the squeal. Now is the time to process the hog in order to sell/trade the pork products for the highest value. For a small farmer, it can be a good source of additional income with the arrival of fall/winter.
Sorry about the mis-spelling of the word “Portuguese”. After the war (WW 2) we were taught: The Portuguese were “Good People”. The Methodist church was the only one that allowed us to worship there. (that is why today, the Methodist church has such a large following of Japanese people.)
Prior to the war, there was a lot of barter and trading between the Portuguese ranchers and the Japanese farmers as this was the time of the Great Depression. As a young man seasonally employed, I was working several roundups per year in exchange for the taking of one deer per year off of one cattle ranch. This was several generations after the Great Depression and WW 2. There were many lessons to be learned from the last Great Depression. Survive well to readers of this site.
Ken, great article. I don’t consider myself as hard core as some and am certainly not as prepared (not yet) as I’d like for my family. One aspect you mentioned is that preparedness first requires risk awareness. I agree 100%.
I’d like to comment on that idea from a different perspective. As a business continuity professional, it’s my job to prepare businesses for those threats that could impact their employees, operations and financial stability. The point you make regarding risk awareness is spot on with businesses as well. The most difficult challenge I face in my businesses is convincing companies that those threats are real and most certainly could impact their business. There is a mental wall within the business community and no matter how many awareness courses and training sessions I conduct, the greatest difficulty is breaking through that barrier in the business mind that “it won’t happen to my business.” Second after that is the idea that “there’s nothing I can do” coupled with the “I don’t have the time or money.” All three “reasons” are very wrong. I think families (even non-preppers) understand risk more than the business community does in our Nation.