Let’s get straight to it. We need food to survive. At the G&E Ranch, we are diversified in a number of ways to raise, grow, store and preserve this food. We have several freezers full of various meat and other food products. If the power goes out, we have generators capable of powering these freezers and keep it all frozen. If we run low on fuel, we can preserve the food by canning it with off-grid equipment. If we run out of meat, we can harvest animals on the hoof to eat. For example, today we have an emu that could be harvested, and we will have a lamb that will be ready next month. We also have a ram and two ewes on pasture, so we have single and twin lambs born throughout the year to butcher. We also produce over 5 dozen eggs/day, so if we can adequately supplement the chickens with feed while they browse for food on their 1-acre pasture, the eggs will keep coming.
Depending on the season, if it is summer or fall, our garden is typically flourishing with vegetables. It produces more than we can eat, so some can be used to feed animals, and the rest can be stored or preserved for us later. Our primary method of preserving is with our large 20+ quart American Canner and Hunter Silver Fire stove (link, see canning blog). We keep plenty of extra canning jars and lids on hand. We keep regular seeds on hand all year round, and we also have a large assortment of sealed heritage vegetable seeds for 30-year storage. If times got desperate, we would be able to plant a new garden and start harvesting our own heritage seeds for the following years. Future planning, and if time allowed, root cellar storage, smoking, curing and solar drying could also be incorporated. Fermenting is already in place, particularly for cabbage. Fermented food can store and be eaten all winter.
The project we completed a number of years that most people would look at as being more of a typical ‘prepper’ thing is our food buckets. We encourage all of our readers to do something like this. We have 6 five-gallon buckets filled with food. In each bucket, there is a mylar bag filled with rice, beans, noodles and oxygen absorbers. These buckets also have salt, pepper, coconut oil, hot sauce, and several other items. This contains enough calories for our family to comfortably live on for 6 months. It’s not glorious or delicious food, but it wasn’t expensive either. It’s simply another layer of preparedness we have in our arsenal. We figure that this long-term storage will be good for 30 years if the seals aren’t broken.
With all that, you must think, how is that food going to be cooked. The same stove we use for canning off-grid can be used for cooking. It is very efficient and uses scrap wood and wood debris. It also has a chimney, so the stove can be used indoors while the smoke from the stove is directed outside.
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