As far as food preparedness is concerned, think about having an indoor food gorwing operation to back-up your outdoor one. The reasoning behind having an indoor food growing facility is because it is a lot easier to keep safe from outside intervention. In a civil unrest scenario, outdoor food is going to be picked and eaten very quickly, and hard to gaurd. No matter where you live really...
I'm not saying to ditch your outdoor garden by any means, just to have the lights, fans and controllers set up and tuned to grow indoors when necessary; and always run your system at 10% while not really needing to run it. That way you can just amp production up and not have to start your crops from scratch. Keep up with sustaining your crops, not just buying new seeds. The ability to regenerate crops is key to survival, growing from seed is hard enough, but recultivating seeds time and time again can be quite time/effort consuming to say the least. If you plan on starting when the SHTF; you've already lost the battle.
Choose your crops wisely to save space and get the most nutrients out of your food/best utilize your equipment; this may mean growing veggies you would not really care to eat normally, but in a bad situation, food is food and nutrients are nutrients.
My family always poked fun at me for being "over prepared" which I find to be a misnomer. In the last year or so they have gotten quiet on the subject of demeaning my plans and gotten more involved in the process', asking a lot more questions rather than poking so much fun.
Basic preparedness is great; But being the over prepared guy I am, generally speaking, I took it to the limit of my means. I have a compound that has defenses built into it, escape tunnels dug out, burried generators and exhaust baffles; solar/wind/water power with battery back-up array, a well, fresh flowing water on my property, the ability to camoflauge my house and surrounding structures; and some not too friendly places to be caught up in on my grounds, that only the family knows about and can manuever around.
When; yes WHEN it all goes down, I have the ability to harbor a small community (My entire family, plus those who will more than likely be with them); that can self susatin for quite a while. The veggies, grains/cereals and fruits are already growing and being canned/stored/rotated constantly.
I put up a solar array, wind turbines; and I am just now finishing work on some water turbine/Tesla water engine stuff to generate power from my stream nearby. Bottom line, if the grid goes down; I got power as long as I have wind water and sun. It is all hooked into a battery array that is quite large. I have a well with redundent systems to make sure and be able to to have fresh water, and I have back-up drums of fresh water as well; not to mention a still to re-purpose urine.
I have a working home brewery/distillery (I am a commercial distiller as well, fyi) that has a bigger capacity than the local 3-barrel brewery in town. Alcohol is key in bad situations; for several reasons.
I have a cellar stocked with wine, alcohol, cheeses (We make our own; cheese, wine, beer, liquor, clothes, rope, thread, wick, candles, etc. Anything and everything we can find the time to make on our own), anything an everything you could imagine as far as booze is concerned. I have a grainery burried that will keep grains fresh for the rest of my life.
My whole life people have been telling me I am a fool for putting so much of my life/resources into doing this. But the joke is on them. Not only am I as prepared as I can be for the eventual bad times, but I have saved tons of cash by making everything and anything I can for myself. Not to mention the benefit of having my family close together working together for eachother; the television is rarely used in my home. And I even sell energy to the energy company because I create more than I can use or store in my system.
Next is just to get my ass out there full time (About 1/2 out in the stix, and 1/2 in the city currently) and away form the city, which I hope to do by the middle of this year sometime, but that may be pushed out to the end of the year. Then I can focus more on keeping livestock, chickens, pigs, goats, etc. I do keep some goats and chickens now, but would love to expand to cows, sheep and pigs by the end of the year.
I had to build a small workshop for equipment maintenance and the like, but it is evolving into a 1-in-all workshop now that I can build pretty much anything in; wish I could afford a cnc machine; that would effing rock! Got all the basic for wood and metal working though.
I built an outdoor composting bathroom that helps me cut down on my cost of growing nutrients, you'd be surprised how much "stuff" is in your fecies and urine that can be re-used. I just added a methane collector as well, so I can start utilizing my own poops power!!!!!!!!
Really the hardest part for me was locating and purchasing the medical supplies I required. It is hard to get a doctor to doll out perscriptions for pain pills and penicillin when there is no immediate need for such medicine. I had to go to the vet (Lost of talking, lots of persuading, lots of educating the vet to get what I needed) and sometimes other sources to get what is required for a real medical emergency kit. Without the ability to treat infection; survival gets really hard, and how. Just recently I started reading dental books to better prepare for that inevitability; basic tools are easy to come by, but expensive as hell!
I did all of this over a long period of time, with a lot of help from friends and family. It isn't impossible to get yourself in a better prepared sate of mind and state of being, it just requires some saccrifice. WHile all my college friends were out at the bars trying to pick up chicks and get drunk waisting their dough; going to sporting events and watching television; I was saving, preparing, buying water filtration systms, buying genrators, piecing together my own PV panels, scrounging through junk piles to find good marine batteries that still had enough life to re-use and building supplies; buying long-term stored food bit by bit and rotating it; diggin through construction dumpsters for building materials (Over 1/2 of my home was built with stuff I found on site/in dumpsters that was "trash" to someone else) and for copper wire to recycle for extra funds. You'd be very suprised at the average waste on a commercial construction project. Seriously!
Having a plan is the best thing one can do, and being able to ditch that plan for a new one at a moments notice is key in SHTF type scenarios.
My initial investment was quite large and subsequent investments ove time were medium-large, but now that I own it all, the only cost is maintenance and the occassional addition of new stuff here and there. I make money form the energy I send back down the line, so I am recouping my expenses to a small extent/paying for new systems/equipment. I have done all of this, whilst still being employed full time for 95% of the time. We built 90% of everything by hand by ourselves; with help from friends/family.
Survival during civil unrest is really all about being able to weather the storm; society will flip over and turn on itself, but once the smoke clears, people will want to work together towards common goals again.
All of that and my above explanation doesn't even detail all of my plans/process/equipment/prep.
Sorry for such a long post, but I have given this a lot of thought and wanted to share my experince/preparedness. ( Also I have been sick for a while, since I got better I just wanted to add to M4C again; If my posts can even be considered additions that is...)
Keep on preparing!
Slainte!
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Originally Posted by sadmin
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