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Question for the board members: If the SHTF, what food items are you stocking up on for a 3-6 month disruption in supply chains?

I thought the supply chain glitch was gonna happen last year so I stocked up on canned goods, flour, sugar, clarified butter, dry yeast, canned meats, powdered milk, raw honey, paper towels, toilet paper, bottled water, water filters, etc. I’ve got a dozen or so MREs.
 
Food for home:

Tuna, Kippered Herring, Dehydrated Stew Meat
Dehydrated Eggs, Dried Fruit, Nuts, Steel Cut Oats
Peanut butter, pinto beans, SPAM, DAK Ham
Water, Water, Water, Water


Mobile food Preps:

Datrex food bricks
Water, water, water
 
I offer an alternate approach to inevitable food shortages. Rather than stocking up on key food supplies that will eventually run out, why not develop a more sustainable plan? I've always enjoyed growing things.

Brother.. if your plan is to garden while 200k people around you starve, I hope you have lots of help or high walls. Your plan likely needs to have the ability to be hostile, agile and mobile. Unless you are going to live as a hermit where nobody can find you, gardening during a real and long lasting SHTF may not be practical.
 
Brother.. if your plan is to garden while 200k people around you starve, I hope you have lots of help or high walls. Your plan likely needs to have the ability to be hostile, agile and mobile. Unless you are going to live as a hermit where nobody can find you, gardening during a real and long lasting SHTF may not be practical.
Good point. That said, in a real SHTF situation I know exactly where I would be. And nobody else knows where I will be. It's not an easy place to get to and it's unlikely anyone is going to "Stumble" across it.
 
Brother.. if your plan is to garden while 200k people around you starve, I hope you have lots of help or high walls. Your plan likely needs to have the ability to be hostile, agile and mobile. Unless you are going to live as a hermit where nobody can find you, gardening during a real and long lasting SHTF may not be practical.

I garden, mainly because I like it and I know where my food is coming from. I do not have 200k people around me, but if things got bad to the extreme you are talking, I am going to pack up my heirloom seeds, defensive items, gen set, and other survival things and load them into my non computer controlled diesel that can run on almost anything and finding (I know where but not going to share) someplace to make my stand.
The level of shtf you are talking about is going to require people to group up and the key to that going smooth is to first understand who is in the circle and where you all plan on making your stand.
Otherwise in a lesser event of shtf, some rock salt in a shotgun shell will make people think twice about coming on your property. Or even rubber bullets, a pellet gun, bear spray or a sling shot.
 
My grandmother (on my mom's side) froze everything from bread to milk. The only thing I didn't find in the freezer was my grandfather. That came later. She canned and jar's a lot also.
 
I have hunting guns and plenty wild game around and fish in my lake if it were to come to that, which I do not believe will happen, as we have a military Commissary and a Publix nearby (TIC).

We tend to think of these things in the abstract in this nation of plenty. I have had the experience of visiting countries where people are starving, which is hard for us to grasp in the USA in 2021.

My parents were married in the midst of the great depression. They were farmers living in a small cabin on a rented farm, and poor by today's standards. They grew all the vegetables, fruit, eggs, grain, milk, and meat they needed, but needed cash for some items and farm implements. After getting in his own harvest, my Dad traveled to Iowa to pick corn by hand to earn cash money. He took his first pay and bought a .22 rifle and a brick of ammo. His thinking was if nothing else, they could put game on the table. But they were also concerned that things would get so bad that people in the cities would raid the farms for their food, and with a gun he could defend the homestead. Hard to imagine things getting like that or worse again here in America, but it sometimes seems we are charging headlong toward becoming a third world country.
 
I am not much of a SHTF person, I am simply a country boy who plans for short periods of hard times. Hard times which are potentially fostered by weather disaster, contagion such as sars or covid, temporary joblessness or perhaps pockets unrest (ie, protests). My preps are centered around difficulties lasting weeks to a couple of months .. thats it. My personal goal has always been 3 months. I am confident that if I had the luxury of simply sheltering at home during a "crisis", I could last a couple of months without much worry. I cannot imagine at sort of real "collapse" of the societal system but for the sake of giggles, I will offer a few thoughts.

This is not the pioneer days.. there are hundreds of millions of people in this land and few places can really be considered remote. Especially if people are in need of food, shelter and supplies due to a SHTF type of collapse. Hunting and fishing in this sort of imagined crisis is simply not realistic in my estimation. Not unless you can manage to secret yourself and your hunting/fishing spot from thousands upon thousands ( perhaps tens of thousands) of people in the area. Sure, hunting and fishing may answer the immediate need of food for a very short period of time but I cannot imagine what it would be like when darn near an entire populous has the same idea. I have hunted all my life and I can attest to 10 guys ruining the hunting on an entire mountain side. I can simply not imagine how unfruitful it would be if there were 100 guys or 500 guys 3000 guys all hunting roughly the same immediate zone. It doesn matter how much land there is.. we all know that the game has certain ranges and pattern themselves within those range pockets. Thousands of people all running around in the woods essentially ruin the idea of sustained hunting. I wont even get into fishing.. I will just say, good luck.
 
We’ve been buying extra food, meat and non perishables, since May. I had to install another pantry to hold it all. Been hording water too even though I’m on a private well. Likewise things like cigarettes, Guinness and Bombay Sapphire, toilet paper, trash bags, paper towels, laundry and dishwashing detergent, body wash, dryer sheets, furnace filters, cat food, cat litter, caffeine free Diet Coke and as much as I can afford it and find it, ammo.
Try washable metal mesh furnace filters. Easy to clean and if your paper filters run around $10 they will pay for them selves in 3-4 changes and they last essentially forever. Sounds like you're in good shape as long as you have power.
 
This is something I've thought about as well. My approach to this point has been a bit different. After seeing the mad dash from people buying up all the pre-packed prepper food packs of late, it occurred to me that this isn't a lot different than what people do every day...buy their food. If all you're trying to do is bridge a temporary gap in supply, this makes perfect sense. However, what if it's more than a temporary gap? How would we know it's temporary when it starts? We really wouldn't. Most of us would have faith that supply will eventually return but we don't know for sure.

In observing the people in my little part of the world, I'm convinced they all believe that food comes from Walmart (substitute any other big box store if you like). I've observed that these folks can't (or won't) do the simplest of tasks for themselves. They hire everything out. Whether it's lawn maintenance, hanging Christmas lights, pest control, washing out their garbage cans (seriously, there's a service for this), car maintenance (wash, oil change, etc.), cooking for themselves, assembling their latest purchase from Amazon, and even picking up after their dogs. These people are totally reliant on the retail and service industries to survive. I see these people as an opportunity should things go sideways.

I offer an alternate approach to inevitable food shortages. Rather than stocking up on key food supplies that will eventually run out, why not develop a more sustainable plan? I've always enjoyed growing things. I've had all kinds of gardens over the years. I've grown vegetables outdoors and indoors using all kinds of methods. Regardless of the kind of gardening I was doing, the result was the same...I always produced WAY more food than I could eat fresh. This led to preserving some of it, selling some of it, and giving a lot of it away to friends. Gardening can be done by anyone, anywhere, and at any time of year. Constant supply. If SHTF, you already have a steady supply of food. That food not only sustains you and your family but it also becomes an extremely valuable asset for bartering with your highly reliant neighbors that are freaking out because they can't get any more food from Walmart and Uber Eats stopped delivering.

Just a thought.
Make sure you have enough lead to keep off those hungry neighbors.
 
I guess I grew up poor. I did not notice, I just thought that was a way of life. We had a garden, chickens and knew who raised our beef and pork. People ask me how I look like I do at my age (most are bald and fat) I have to think it is that lifestyle and what I ate.
It would not matter how much money we have in the bank (we don't need to garden because of money) it is a lifestyle. My wife says we are preppers. I don't see it that way in the way people use the word now days, I simply see it like poor people used to see it, you had better have enough food in storage and fire wood cut to get you through winter. We don't burn wood, but that thought line of prepping is my point.
I also tend to see things as a downturn or recession and it could get rough for a couple years, but not a complete melt down. Again I think if things melted down you are only going to make it with a group. Skills, ability to defend, and barter among groups would be the only way.
I have tried to keep in contact with some people I know in other countries, because they tend to go through things first and if you think our news is crooked, you are not getting even 20 percent of the truth on the ground in other countries. They all tell us the same thing. That they are waiting to see what America does about things.
 
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