A Year Supply of Food and More

How much food do you have in your home at this very moment? Go ahead, go open your pantry and check. Do you have enough to feed your family for a month? How about just a week? Or are you going to have to go to the store by the end of the day so you have what you need for dinner?

 

Just imagine with me. Power is off. All the food in your fridge and freezer is completely gone or spoiled.  You go to the store, but there is nothing left on the shelves. The manager says he doesn’t know when they’ll be able to restock because the trucks aren’t moving. Do you have food at home to feed your family indefinitely? Do you have a formula fed baby- if so do you have enough formula to feed your child until there is more formula, if there ever is? How about diapers, toilet paper, feminine products, water?

This is a very real scenario. Just look at the cities every time a disaster strikes. Look at San Diego when the power was down a whole, what? -24 hours or so? No gas. No water. No heat, no air conditioning. The city was poised on the edge of panic, looting and riot. Are you ready if something like this were to happen where you live-either just a small scale problem or even worse, if the grid gets shut down?

In our home I shop once a month. I buy enough for the whole month plus another half a month every time I go, and have built up quite a large pantry of condiments, cans, baking supplies and pastas. Meats and refrigerated items I only buy by the month since my fridge is tiny, but I have plenty running around outside.  But that is not enough. We are working on our food cache. We want at minimum enough food to feed our family for a whole year, minimum. Here I found a nifty little calculator for the bare bones amounts of stuff we would need:

http://lds.about.com/library/bl/faq/blcalculator.htm

just plug in the number of family members and it spits out an amount. That is a LOT of food. To that number I also added things to my list such as canned tomatoes, spices, powdered cheeses, canned and dehydrated veggies and fruit. It was overwhelming at first, but I broke it down like this:

·         Take every number, and divide it by 12

·         Buy the divided amount every month

Or, you could focus on one or two things and purchase them every month until you are done.

To store them, we buy metallized liners, put them in food-grade five galloin buckets and fill the bag with the dehydrated food- rice, beans, peas, wheat, etc. then we throw in some large oxygen absorbes or some dry ice, press all the air out of the bag and heat seal shut, and put the lid on. easy, and it will store for a verrry long time this way, and it saves money from buying them pre sealed.


Here are some resources we use and found helpful:

Home Storage Center ( everyone is welcome, LDS or not)
http://providentliving.org/self-reliance/food-storage/home-storage-center-order-form?lang=eng

Emergency Essentials (best price I've found for a lot of things and also have materials for storing)
http://beprepared.com/default.asp?&SID=GOOGLE&EID=GLB200703013&gclid=CPWI9cmy3rQCFaN_Qgod9RQAXw

Food Service Direct -Bulk Food & Cans by the Case
http://www.foodservicedirect.com/index.cfm/Bulk_Food.htm

The Ready Store (MRES, all kinds of stuff-if you are military you should be able to get mREs even cheaper)
http://www.thereadystore.com/mre?gclid=CJm3lum03rQCFUjZQgodV38Akg

 

Living in LDS country has been a huge help. We can buy bulk goods from the LDS Church Cannery, plus we are in farming country and can buy wheat and beans straight from the farmers or mills. Plus, who is the leading experts in food storage in this country? All of our neighbors. 

We are currently remodeling a blasted cave on the property for food storage. Its ideal because once closed up it will maintain a constant temp, its sandy, and it is dark with just the right amount of moisture. For most, you'll have to make space in a garage or a shed. 

This is a huge reason we chose this property. Call us crazy but we plan on not relying on the grocery store soon. We really foresee our entire country going down the tubes soon, and we don’t want to be affected by it. Here is our plan- and while I realize that if you choose to live in the city you cannot reproduce this plan to its fullest, but I recommend that everyone gets at least seeds, water and a year supply of food just in case.

Water: We have three huge capacity wells, and three pumps. One is diesel which can be run on something like mineral oil (can be collected from downed transformers-each have about 15 gallons in them) . The second is run by a generator that runs on gas, alcohol, or propane (and methane from poop). The third is solar if all else fails we can walk to the creek. All of our pumps run into a gravity fed cistern system except the solar pump, which runs to a small battery and pressure tank cistern system.

Food: along with the year (or more as we slowly build it) storage, we also have heirloom seeds. Heirloom is important because you can harvest seeds from the garden and plant them again in years to come. Normal hybrid seeds do not do this. Beside that fact, heirloom varieties are much healthier and tastier than the manipulated varieties.  I have several hundred canning jars and supplies including reusable canning lids to save our garden produce, as well as all the fruit from the sixty or so cherry, apple, nectarine, apricot and peach trees and the grape vines.we also know how to root-cellar store these perishable items in the cave to preserve them for several months without refrigeration.

We also have chickens and a rooster so we have dozens of eggs per week, plus chicken meat. They can reproduce and provide us with meat and eggs forever. We plan to add to our poultry turkeys and possibly some broiler chickens as well. The plan is to have a minimum of 50 laying hens plus 5 turkeys.

We have goats. They are a clean meat and also provide milk which can also be used as emergency formula replacement in the event someone comes who has a starving baby or something happens to a breastfeeding mother. Cheeses can also be made and stored in the cave from goat milk. They also reproduce very well.

We have rabbits. While they are not a clean meat, they reproduce very well and will become dog food, cat food and even an emergency source of meat or food for any non Jewish or SDA families. Their skins will become gloves, hats, etc.

We plan on getting a small herd of Dexter cattle. We researched well and settled with this breed for several reasons: it’s a small breed sop it doesn’t eat much, is very docile and handles easily. It can be used not only for meat (in the case of any steers) but is also a fabulous dairy cow. And it is also used as oxen, so it provides labor as well. They can be used top pull carts, wagons, plows, stumps, etc. So we get meat, labor, milk, cheese, butter, cream etc. from the cows.

If all else fails, we have deer and elk all over, as well as bear (although its not a clean meat).

We are getting bees this spring. This provides us with not only a sugar source, a pollination source for our garden and orchards, but also raw honey is a probiotic and combats seasonal allergies as well as being a fabulous antiseptic. We also can utilize the beeswax for eating, for candles,for balms and salves, etc.

 

This is just our food and water plan.

As you can see- a LOT goes into food storage and plans to not just survive but THRIVE if something happens. To go on believing that our country is going to last forever in the state that its in is denial. We are told to prepare. I pray that everyone who reads this really makes an effort to at the VERY LEAST have a month of food at ALL times in their home.  I don’t believe it is a waste of time or our life. Not only is it a better quality of life but I think id rather be wrong and ready than right and not prepared for it. So am I crazy, or are you?