Our adventures in micro-homesteading
Food.
Now we need to talk about food. We have taken care of your immediate needs of air, shelter, and water. The next point of security is food. While the Mrs will be handing an in-depth detailed chapter regarding food on the homestead, I will get into some pointers on the storage side of things. While you can technically live for 3 weeks without food, most people are grumpy after not eating for a day, and you start getting very week after just a couple days. Not only do people need food, but remember your critters depend on you for food.
Lets start by briefly talking about your critters. Usually storing feed for critters is easy, you just need more feed on hand. The trick is to keep moisture, mice, and bugs out of it. I store critter feed in either 35 gallon garbage cans (the galvanized metal versions are best, but I do use some plastic cans as well) or open top 55 gallon steel barrels, with matching lids and clamps. I tend to use the garbage cans for the cats and dogs, or wherever I am using the feed every day. I use the 55 gallon barrels for larger stockpiles of feed that I do not go into as frequently, such as chicken feed or overflow of other feed. We have a local source for the barrels, and open top barrels are currently only $25 with lids and clamps. An excellent deal. If you have pasture animals, make sure you have plenty of hay in rotation, along with any required additional feeds sealed in barrels.
Now that we have that covered, lets focus on keeping your family fed.
The absolute first step to keeping your family fed is to know how to cook. Stupid as it may sound, a surprising amount of people in America eat the traditional American diet of boxed food-like products, salt, high fructose corn syrup, and some type of meat-ish based product every day. The microwave has become the most used appliance in too many kitchens, and the oven looks like it has never been used (less frozen pizzas). How far our Republic has fallen. To turn this around, you need to learn how to cook like our great grandparent's did. You will become healthier, full with less food, more energetic, loose weight and overall feel better with real food. Also, it becomes far easier to put some food away for a rainy day if you know how to use basic ingredients. Making foods from scratch will allow you to save money (ingredients are cheaper), buy in bulk (saving more money), shop only the sales (saving more money), and allow you to store large amounts of relatively little variety, which can be cooked into a large range of menu items. When you have 100 pounds of ground beef in the freezer, you have MANY options. In comparison, frozen burritos are frozen burritos, and during a SHTF situation is not the time to test our your skills at making something appetizing from more frozen burritos.
The best place to start with food storage is to extend your usual food pantry: Eat what you store, and store what you eat. A phrase that is commonly used in the prepper community, but it makes complete sense. Using this sytem, organizing your priorities are easier.
We use a 3 Tier method for organizing our food.
Tier 1: The short term items. Think refrigerated items and fresh produce. The most vulnerable category is the refrigerated items. Fresh veggies, fresh dairy, fruits, fresh meats, condiments, etc. If you are without power, these are the first things to go. It would take a LOT of gas in your generator to keep your refrigerator running normally. You can modify your refrigeration scheme to make the fridge last longer, but you can only put off the inevitable so long: Your refrigerated foods will spoil quickly. This means that nothing in your refrigerated category should be vital.
Tier 2: Your pantry. These are the canned, dried, boxed goods. Typically good for 1-2 years. I also put the freezers in the Tier 2 category. The reason is if you can keep the freezers cold, you can maintain well over a year of good animal protein. Obviosly, meat stores well. You should consider getting into buying your meat from the farmer (and pick it up at the processor). You should have little issue finding beef/pork locally, chicken may be harder (and usually very expensive). You typically pay a deposit to the farmer and agree on a price. The benefit is you are buying local, you are buying in bulk, you save money over the grocery store, and you know exactly what you are getting. This is by FAR the cheapest way to get organic (perhaps not certified, but many small family farms grow food using organic methods) and/or grass fed meats. Make sure you research and ask the farmer questions. Avoid old used up dairy cows (unless you get a good discount), and intact boar pigs. Items that freeze well: meats, dairy (as a note: I have bad luck with organic whipping cream and about a 50% failure rate with organic frozen milk thawing properly. Conventional usually does fine due to the additives/processing), cheese, butter, veggies, and you can freeze baked goods as well. Also, baking yeast keeps well in the freezer (but make sure you rotate: it does die). Whatever room you have empty in your freezer should be filled with milk jugs filled with water. This increases thermal mass, ice is always useful in a power outage, and you can simply remove the jugs of water if you add more items to your freezer. I prefer to use multiple smaller freezers instead of 1 or 2 large freezers. This lets me itemize (Beef in this freezer, pork/chicken in that one, dairy in that one, veggies in that one, etc.), and also give me redundency. Should I have a freezer die, I can distribute its contents into the other freezers until I can get a new freezer in. Since it is easy to have thousands of dollars of food in your freezers, you should have at least 1 generator capable of powering a freezer (or multiple. You can get away with a small generator and manually rotate the freezers on the generator), and gas enough to keep them going for 2-3 weeks. Another addition to your freezers should be freezer temp alarms. It is handy to be notified when your freezer reaches about 20 degrees to give you notice that something isn't right, but your food hasn't thawed out yet. You can buy units, but I will have a DIY friendly alarm you can build with prototyping board later. In your dry pantry, include your canned items, spices, un-opened condiments, boxed items, etc. Again, your normal foods that you eat regularly. Put emphesis on spices, as when boughten in bulk are cheap, and give a varity of flavor to dishes. We use onion powder in almost everything, and when we have less than 5 pounds on hand, we are running back to get more! Peppercorns are delicous (pre-ground pepper has no flavor in comparison) and keep much better than the pre-ground stuff. Putting peppercorns in mylar with an oxygen absorber, we have used peppercorns that are up to 4 years old and they taste as fresh as when they went in. Think of Tier 2 as your personal grocery store, and stock it as such. Also be sure you are keeping food of nutritional value. Having stacks of burger helpers or other empty foods is of no use. You should start getting into the habit of cooking and using more basic, natural ingredients for your family. This not only provides better health, savings at the grocery store, but makes stocking a pantry much easier. Instead of a multitude of spice packets (which are mainly sugar, a few spices and loads of salt), store spices. We buy our spices in bulk. We measure things like onion powder and garlic powder by the pound. Oregano, parsley, peppercorns, onion powder, and garlic powder are what we consider primary spices. Once you start learning how to use spices, you can make homemade meals that are not only healthy and nutritional, but cheap!
Tier 3: The LTS (Long Term Storage) or SHTF pile. This is where you have the mylar packed beans, rice, wheat, powdered milk, etc. The stuff you HOPE you never need, but foodstuffs that keep for at least 10 years, and are calorifically and nutritionally dense. Think of this as your food insurance. All else fails, you have this to fall back on. Won't be appetizing, you WILL suffer menu fatigue, but it will keep you alive until you can change your conditions. Some items in the LTS pile you may not consider: sugar, salt. They are preservatives, keep indefinitely, and salt is actually vital to your health. Right now they are both very cheap. However, throught history, there have been points were both were literally worth their weight in gold: they were actually traded on a 1:1 ratio to gold! Since you can buy a lifetime supply easily and cheaply, and they store easily and never go bad (if kept dry), why not stock up? On a further note: consider, if possible, having your Tier 3 pile stored completely separately than your Tier 2 pantry. You will have less in your way in your pantry, and you are avoiding putting all your eggs in one basket. Not always possible, but if you can manage, it is a good idea.
When you are working on food, remember that you need water. Actually, you need water worse than food. You need a combination of water storage AND ability to procure more. You need to be able to clean your water. But, that is a topic we already covered.
So, what should you work on first? Well, there isn't much to do with Tier 1. Fresh fruits/veggies in the fridge doesn't last long anyway. Working on Tier 2 should be your first priority when you begin your food storage journey. Don't worry about mylar packing beans and rice yet: first be able to go through a month without food re-supply. Sure, you may run out of things like fresh fruit and eggs, but you can have preseved versions of a lot of Tier 1 items in your Tier 2 &3 piles. Dehydrated eggs in #10 cans, dehydrated/freeze dried bananas, apple sauce, apple chips, frozen apple pie filling (we have some that has been in our freezer for 2 years, when baked still tastes as fresh as day 1), etc. Of course, constantly producing more food should be the goal whenever possible, and other chapters are dedicated to that.