Welcom Farmanons!
Today, I’m giving you a little bit of a different writing style. This one is a little rough, but it’s a good breakdown of how you can plan your food situation for the whole year.
I know twitter accounts love to tell you to bulk buy rice and beans, but let’s face it, who wants to eat rice and beans every day? Not me.
But, Are you worried about food shortages? It seems like a couple of months ago, every day we were hearing news about food crises and supply chain issues affecting the food supply. I’m not seeing as much talk about it anymore, but what has changed?
Honestly, alot of that newsback then was fake. I believe that the free market will work itself out one way or another. Sure, there may be periods of time where certain items are unable to be obtained at the grocery store.
I believe only one thing is for certain, food prices will continue to rise for a long time until something major happens and changes the system.
So why worry about your food supply if there isn’t going to be an issue? Well, have you noticed the prices lately? Everything is high. On top of that, most of the food at the grocery store is low quality. There’s literally no telling what the animals are being fed these days.
I know, I know, your costco meat says organic, free range, pasture fed, blah blah blah. But how do you know? Did you see the cow you’re eating? Well if you find a local source, you could do just that. You could pick the cow you want to butcher. Something to think about. I don’t know about you, but I would rather get my food closer to the source.
Ok, I’ll get off of my soap box.
I thought today would be fun to (ROUGHLY) crunch some numbers and see just how much food you need, if all of a sudden, the grocery stores were bare.
We’ll figure out a general idea of how much food a family of 5 would need to sustain without a grocery store for a full year.
I know I said SHTF in the article title, but we’ll assume everything else holds up, electricity, water, fuel, etc. Just the food supply chain gets rekd.
HINT: This is how you should be doing your meal planning anyway. You should be sourcing local protein anyway. Here’s how I would do it.
How much food to you need for a family of 5 for a full year?
So a family of 5 would need roughly 3650 meals if they eat twice a day. Let’s face it, if the food supply is this bad, everyone is going to lose some weight! You could throw in some eggs in the morning for your third meal IF you can lock up a solid source for farm fresh eggs, or if you have chickens in the back yard.
Milk is not covered in this article, but it’s a huge part of most people’s diets. If you don’t have a cow or dairy goats, guess what… You’re going to need to know someone who does. Do you anon?
Lets say half of those meals consist of a meat and 2 sides, veggies, salad, or fruit, because you will probably have leftovers. The other half of the meals would need to be filled with other random sides or leftovers. Preferably a high protein side like eggs, oats, milk/kefir, whole wheat pancakes, smoothie, etc.
That means 1825 meals need 6-8 ounces of meat. So you need 16000 ounces of meat if you round up to 2000 meals at 8 ounces of meat. You could break that 16000 ounces of meat in a number of different ways, first you have to look at how many ounces of meat with each type.
One 1000 pound steer provides around 7000 ounces of beef.
One 6 pound chicken provides 96 ounces
One wild deer provides 1152 ounces of meat
One fish would provide 12 ounces
One pig provides 2880 ounces
Lets try to get a nice variety of meat for the year:
One pig, one steer, 50 chickens, 50 fish, and one wild deer would fetch us a little over 16,000 ounces.
Now, I know what your thinking, that would take up alot of freezer space! You’re right. But you don’t have to freeze it all at once.
You only need to freeze meat if you harvest it. Caught 20 red fish? Fillet and freeze it. Bagged a nice buck? Butcher and freeze it.
If you are smart and have been following along with me, you’ve already found some local sources for meat buying direct from a farmer. So you can lock in a steer with a butcher date estimated to be ready when you need it. Talk to your local farmer for meat birds and have them slaughtered to pick up when you need them.
You can bag a couple of deer usually in the fall or winter, so plan your steer to be butchered in the spring/summer. If you are able to find a chicken farmer, you could maybe work out a deal to pick up 5 whole chickens per month. This will reduce the amount of freezer space you need.
Go fishing at least once per month in the warmer months and stock up the freezer with fillets. This way you can break up you meals and have some variety.
What’s that? You don’t know how to fish? NGMI You need to learn asap. Best way to learn is to go with a friend, find someone who knows how to fish and start going with them, it’s fun, it’s a great source of free meat, and it’s delicious.
I’ve seen some esoteric twitter chumps saying that eating fish is bad because of all of the pollution in the waters, whatever, that’s a psyop, don’t believe that garbage!
I wrote up a detailed post on inshore Gulf of Mexico fishing (LINK). Pond fishing for bream and bass is even easier.
Farmer’s Note: If you’re looking to buy some land out of the city, keep an eye out for land with river or creek access or even just a large pond can be clutch.
Vegetables and Sides
So if you need 2 sides with every meal, you will need 7300 sides👀 for a family of five.
Easy sides are potatoes, beans, peas, carrots, salad, greens. The good thing about these is with exception to salads and greens, they are pretty easy to store.
Greens like mustard, collard, bok choy, turnips, etc. are not great for storing in my opinion, so these are going to be a side during the months when you are able to grow these in your garden. Probably the fall and early spring.
For those months we’ll just say you have the sides covered with fresh produce. That would cover about 3650 sides that you would need. You could also say that your fresh vegetable garden through the summer will cover a good portion of your sides.
Lets say that 5000 sides will be straight from the summer or fall garden, you do have a garden, don’t you Anon? This leaves you with 2300 sides to cover through the winter months when you aren’t growing. You can jar a lot of the excess peas and beans from the garden through the summer.
Potatoes are a great side, if you wanted to go with potatoes, lets say you were able to grow or acquire a large amount of potatoes, that could maybe cover 300 sides, so we’re down to 2000 sides.
These will probably need to be filled with beans, peas, rice, lintels, etc. Stuff that can be stored easily on a shelf or in a freezer.
A 50 pound bag of rice has 375 servings. Lets say you stored 5 bags of rice, that would give you 1875 servings. This would just about cover you, but let’s face it, you don’t want to be eating that much rice. It’s good to have more options.
A 25 pound bag of dried beans will give you 225 servings. By the way, have you seen the cost of a 25 pound bag of beans lately?? OMG
So we’re pretty much covered with the easy stuff rice and beans. 5 50 pound bags of rice and 5 25 pound bags of dried beans will put a major dent in your sides. Along with the potatoes you’re pretty much there.
I’ve found this cool website (LINK) with great selections of wheat, oats, and much more in bulk sizes and decent pricing. You can even select a local dropoff which makes the shipping next to nothing.
Here you can source your bulk oats and wheat to have fresh bread and warm oatmeal. This will keep you filled and happy through the morning hours too.
From there you’re just building up your storage.
We go to a corn field and pick our own corn and put it up in the freezer, we probably have 200 servings of cream corn. We also go to “you pick” fruit orchards and stock up on blueberries, peaches, figs, and any other fruits we can get and freeze them for the winter. Great for snacks and smoothies.
Freezers
You really need at least one large freezer. I recommend buying a brand new freezer, it’s just easier and you know you got something that is not going to break down. Go for the 16 cu foot chest freezer, they’re cheaper. I buy all my appliances from Lowe’s, they have the best prices. The new freezers are light, you can fit it in the back of a truck and unload it with a friend.
In addition to your large chest freezer, it would be good to have another smaller freezer, like a 6 cubic foot one, to keep ready to eat food like veggies and fruit.
One 1000 pound steer will take up the entire 16 cubic foot freezer. This is why you will have to plan your meats around the calendar year. If you bag a buck in November, it will take up around 5 cubic feet of freezer, so you can butcher your pig from the farmer around that time too. Your freezer will be full and should be getting empty around June/July. So you need to line up your steer for butcher around that time.
You’ll also have your kitchen freezer where you can store your chickens from your farm connect.
Frozen Meat
I’ve heard people make a big deal about vacuum sealed meat, it’s probably better, but it’s not a huge deal. If you plan your meat purchases, you shouldn’t have meat hanging in the freezer for more than a year. You want to be rotating your meat out of the freezer, FIFO (First In First Out.)
Shelves
You will need some extra storage for all of this stuff. Check facebook market place or thrift stores for shelves if you’re in a pinch, if not, just buy them from anywhere. Shelves with rollers on the bottom are very nice, you can roll them around to clean under, or just move out of the way.
Local Markets
I can’t stress enough to find local suppliers of food. When there is a line out to the highway at Costco, you should be at home feeling comfy, or driving in the opposite direction out to the fields to your local farmer’s house to stock up.
You need to find some local farmer frens. Farmer’s markets are ok, but you really want to find the growers. Find someone who processes meat birds, where you can stop by and pick up 15 whole chickens from and throw them in the freezer.
If there really is a shortage, this is the only way I see us getting through it. Buying direct from a small farmer.
How do you buy direct from a farmer? I’m glad you asked! I covered this in detail in a previous post (LINK)
Side Note: If you live in the city or don’t have much storage space, that’s ok. I get it, not everyone can live this way. I don’t think it would ever get like this. This was just a fun exercise to cover some of the bases on what it would look like.
However, even though you live in the city, doesn’t mean you can source some local farmers and start supporting them just in case. Who knows, you might make a new friend and get some quality food in the process.
TL:DR
The moral of this story is to start now. Start preparing yourself to get through anything that comes your way. Get a big freezer. Start learning how to garden if you have space. Start looking for local farmers who sell direct. Start stocking up on bulk food like rice, beans, oats, etc. Start learning how to make your own food like sourdough bread, kefir, kombucha, jelly, canned food, etc. Start growing animals, get you a few chickens. Get off the grid!
You never know, one day it might come in handy.
WAGMI
Farmer