Survival food expert Jonathan Richards on why we all need food insurance during the climate shift. With his dark blog “Survival Acres”, Richards explores the junction between the ultimate threat of global warming and our way-too-fragile food system. In this rare interview, myths, scams and mistakes are revealed. Why we struggle to survive despite signs of doom.
Listen to or download this Radio Ecoshock show in CD Quality (57 MB) or Lo-Fi (14 MB)
When climate change hits the fragile just-in-time grocery system, where will your food come from? How long can you eat? You probably have house insurance, or renters’ insurance and car insurance. So why don’t you have food insurance?
Our guest has helped Americans prepare with emergency food stocks for almost 30 years. He’s a homesteader, and wise blogger at survivalacres.com, and now at foodassets.com. From somewhere in the Pacific Northwest, we welcome Jonathan Richards to Radio Ecoshock. This is his first interview in 23 years, despite requests from ABC News and others, especially during the Y2K “crisis”.
Every time there is a hurricane or other natural disaster, the TV shows us people crushing the food stores and empty shelves. A lot of citizens have little to no food supplies at home. In these times many people seldom cook. They relying on fast food and restaurants. Apparently tens of millions of other folks can barely afford food, much less stocking up. Jonathan, is prepping just for the middle and upper class? Surprisingly, the billionaires may be stocking up basement shelters in multiple homes, but not so the middle class. Jonathan tells us poorer people know that food can run out, and tend to be more likely to prepare, even on a limited budget. We discuss the most popular options to get started on a food insurance policy.
Jonathan explains the many ways that “climate change means food shortages” here.
Ten years ago, as the world financial crisis shook faith in the system, I put away a year’s worth of wheat and rice. The hard unprocessed wheat berries can last decades or more, but rice I’m not so sure. Next month, I’ll crack open one of my buckets of rice, sealed air-tight in a Mylar bag, and packed with oxygen depletion sacks. Jonathan expects that if my storage techniques were good (air-tight, oxygen depletion, kept cool) the rice will still be edible. Properly packed, rice can stay decently edible for 30 years he tells us. I like rice and canned sea food because in an emergency, both can be eaten without cooking. You just soak the rice overnight to get a mealy but nutritious food.
We know the Mormon Church used to require believers to stock up 3 years worth of food. I think they have since reduced that to 1 year food supply. I learned a lot by watching Youtube videos with Mormon women showing how they did it. Just put these words “mormon canning tips” in the YouTube search bar at the top. In this interview, we talk about the role of religion and preparing emergency food stocks. Some Christians are also preppers, expecting the End Times, although for some reason, even those people are preparing less in the last year or two.
What are the biggest prepper mistakes? Not storing what you really eat, says Jonathan. If you stash food that you actually like, then you can rotate it as part of your diet, and if hard times strike, you can eat what you have.
There are some prepper industry food scams, which Jonathan explains on this site. Prime among them, if you really calculate the number of calories advertised in a “one year food supply” – you may find it realistically would only last 3 months or so. You would need to buy several of those kits to really get by. That’s even more true when you consider: in an emergency situation you will probably be more active. You may be in search of other food, firewood, or supplies, instead of sitting in front of a screen. That means you need MORE calories during an emergency, not less.
THE STATE OF FOOD PREPPING
The state of the prepper “industry” is rather sad. In the last few years people are ignoring the risks of our fragile food system (see below). Sales of long-lasting foods have gone way down. Some suppliers have gone out of business, and even a few canneries may have to close. That’s not a good thing. I wonder: Is the prepper movement itself fading, or just changing to a new generation? Is the ideal of individual (or family) survival actually helping to prop up a dying system?
Jonathan writes to me:
“It doesn’t make any sense. People still haven’t actually internalized that deadly climate change is actually happening. They’re not making the essential preparations to build in the resilience and adaption steps that are necessary. It is my opinion – that they do not really believe bad things will happen to them personally. Or that government will step in and fix any serious issues that will occur. But we’ve seen that already – Trump attacks the people when they’re down. He just pulled the funding for Puerto Rico and I’m sure you know what he said about California.”
BUGGING OUT
Of course there is another side to the prepper coin. We should be prepared to sit out an emergency in our homes and local community, BUT we should also be prepared to get out quick, with a few necessary supplies. Living in the Northwest, we know a fast might need to happen with every summer wildfire season. How do we prepare to leave? Jonathan isn’t a fan of “bugging out”. Read Part 1 of his essay ”’The Fallacy of Bugging Out” here, and Part 2 here. However, the wildfires last year had my wife and I rechecking out “bug out bags”, in case we had to flee. Of course we just needed enough to keep us going until we could reach a safer community, where we might be put up in an arena or something. We didn’t expect the whole system to fail. That is another story.
AN ACCIDENTAL TEST OF AN EMERGENCY FOOD SUPPLY
Let me tell a story of how an emergency food cache got tested by accident. When my wife and I purchased our lot in a rural village, there was an ancient mobile home on it. I ran into a poor man incapacitated after serious heart problems. We agreed to let him stay for a few months while he recovered. Going out the door, I mentioned there was a 5 gallon bucket of rice in the closet, and a stack of 12-can flats of soup – vegetable and mushroom. He was sick, without any real income, and lived on that for almost two months. Afterward our guest said he may never eat rice again. Shortly afterward, he turned 65, got his Canadian old age pension, and found a space in our local old age home. He’s OK now and eating three meals a day.
My point is: as Jonathan said to me in an email, we don’t have to wait for the collapse – sometimes the collapse comes to us, whether it is losing a job, illness, or just old age. Are you prepared?
FOOD RESERVES AND NATIONAL SECURITY
There are no big food warehouses in the cities anymore. In North America, the food is all in trucks rolling down the highways. They call it “rolling warehouses”. I don’t think the public knows that, and they don’t know how totally risky that strategy is. What happens if the trucks stop for any reason? Or what if two or three of the world’s main grain producers have a failed harvest?
The United States has a Strategic Petroleum Reserve. But I was shocked to learn the American grain reserve system set up by President Franklin D. Roosevelt was abolished by the 1996 Freedom to Farm Act. Americans do not have a national grain reserve. Even the ancient Egyptians knew to store grains against a bad harvest. Are Americans immune to starvation?
In 2019, Australia predicts it’s grain production will drop by 20 percent, and climate is a big reason why.
CHINA HOLDS HALF THE WORLD’S GRAIN RESERVES
Back in 2012, the UN estimated world food reserves worldwide would last 74 days. Hundreds of millions more humans, living more meat-intensive lifestyles, have been added to the planet since then.
By contrast to America, half of all world grain reserve stocks are held in China. China began a buying spree around 2013, as part of their national security plan. So when we hear the world has enough grain to last just over 2 months, remember 99.9% of my listeners will be shut out from half of it. So we really only have about 1 month ready, in case volcanoes blow, or a meteorite arrives, or climate heat wipes out major crop areas one year. Doesn’t that seem way too fragile?
The United Nations called for an international grain reserve in 2008 (didn’t happen) and then warned of our fragile food situation again in 2013 (ignored). According to the Guardian article in 2013:
“World grain reserves are so dangerously low that severe weather in the United States or other food-exporting countries could trigger a major hunger crisis next year, the United Nations has warned. Failing harvests in the US, Ukraine and other countries this year have eroded reserves to their lowest level since 1974. The US, which has experienced record heatwaves and droughts in 2012, now holds in reserve a historically low 6.5% of the maize that it expects to consume in the next year, says the UN.”
In 2016, Germans were told to stockpile food and water for civil defense. Even the U.S. government is pleading with people to have a minimum of 3 days of food in the house (most people don’t!). Recently, the American government also announced that both Russia and China had the capability to crash the electric grid over large regions via cyber attacks, and the grid might not come back up for months. That means service stations cannot pump up or accept payment for diesel fuel, and that means the food stops. Would you be ready?
Check out the American FEMA preparedness guide here.
Lester Brown, the founder of WorldWatch Institute, used to hold regular press conferences to discuss prospects for world grains. I recorded several for Radio Ecoshock. You can find info about my 2010 interview with Lester Brown here. At age 85, Lester retired a couple of years ago and dissolved his later organization, Earth Policy Institute. Now, nobody is telling the public how much grain we have and can expect. In fact, it’s almost impossible to find out how near the edge we are. China keeps it’s grain reserves secret. The other largest grain trader Cargill is a very private multinational corporation. We know how much carbon is in the atmosphere, but it’s a huge secret how much food we have left.
When the Soviet Union stopped supply Cuba with food and oil, the Cuban government managed a local food revolution. Even the city of Havana broke out into victory gardens to start feeding itself. Could Americans or Europeans do it in a collapse situation? If the supermarkets of America run out of food for a week, would you expect rioting and gunfire, community organizing, or a huge line of traffic trying to escape somewhere? I worry the explosion of living life online has created humans out of touch with physical reality. If the grid goes down, and Itunes doesn’t work, people are not mentally prepared to cope.
WHY FOOD MAY STOP COMING…
While we know the amount of carbon in the atmosphere, we do not know how long humans could feed the current population if there were multiple failures in major grain producing countries. One such scenario is a volcanic winter. But climate change may disturb rainfall, or deal out heat, or sudden cold shocks, that could kill off some grain. Rice is already at it’s top heat levels, and can’t take much more. Plus, with mono crops on vast scales, a new disease (like a rust) is also possible. Trade breakdowns and civil unrest seem in the cards, in the current collision of ever-expanding population, climate change, and mal-distribution of both food and wealth. Even an EMP (electro-magnetic pulse) event, like a solar storm, could knock out grids and perhaps halt the trucks that must always move to keep cities alive.
This is why each of us who can afford it needs to create a year’s worth of survival food, replacing the missing former food warehouses and national grain reserves. In the age of extreme weather due to climate change, food insurance is more important than house insurance.
BACK TO THE PERSONAL
Getting back to personal food insurance, what do you think about growing more of our own food? I built a small geothermal greenhouse partly to protect against weird weather. I hope to put out a video course about that next fall. Right now in the new winter of 2019, I’ve got cold-tolerant salad greens and herbs in there. But I started thinking, if there was a real emergency, maybe I should be growing a dense food crop like potatoes in the greenhouse instead.
In 2010, the Russian grain harvest was decimated by extreme heat. Russia stopped wheat exports, including to countries like Egypt which is now totally dependent on importing wheat. If a similar heat wave hit the U.S., and then Australia the following winter, there would not be much bread around. It is pretty economical to store raw wheat, if you can find it. Supermarkets do not sell raw wheat “berries” for example. Of course there are no food warehouses stocking it either. I went to a professional “grain seller” – but he asked me how many boxcars of wheat I wanted to buy! Eventually I found a small boutique grain storage place at the edge of town, and purchased enough to fill ten five gallon buckets. Their food usefulness will probably out live me.
But if we survive until the next growing season, wouldn’t we also need a cache of seeds too? Jonathan isn’t a big fan of buying packages of “survival” seeds. Most folks do not know how to grow them, or when the narrow time of planting is. I always keep some extra seeds, and try to harvest more each year from vegetables that are “heritage”. They “hybrid” plants sold by most seed companies can give a better yield, but their seeds may not produce good veggies the next year. Hybrids do not breed true, their seeds are unreliable. Seeds from heritage plants are more reliable.
SENIOR PREPPING
I think preparing to be a senior has similarities for preparing for social collapse. Older people have less and less energy, and less capability. So we need to build personal systems that will work when we are less able. “Prepping for your senior years”. It’s like “when collapse comes to you”. Of course we also need to get in better physical shape, practice the ability to fast, and learn about wild foods. That is all preparation.
Jonathan Richards is not still in the survival food business. But he still volunteers to help with his old food company. In his blog Resolution for 2019, Jonathan said “I want to save the world”. That new stimulus comes from his new grandchild, which has lit up his life and added determination to at least try to save a livable future for him. I am in the same situation.
Jonathan Richards’ survivalacres blog has been influential for me and many others. He also has posts at foodassets.com. Thanks for talking with us Jonathan, and I hope to meet you in person when it warms up.
Thank you for listening – and a very special thanks to all the listeners who have donated in the past few weeks. I’ve seen an increase in financial support which just encourages me to dig deeper for everybody. Thank you for reducing my financial worry. Now I can concentrate on Radio Ecoshock.
PHOTO CREDIT FOR THIS WEEK’S SHOW
“A slightly exaggerated impression of the real shape of our warped and twisted Milky Way.” from Xiaodian Chen (National Astronomical Observatories, Chinese Academy of Sciences).
A REMINDER: DENIAL IS HUMAN (SAYS AJIT VARKI)
At the end of this program, I replay a short except from an interview we must never forget. A listener suggested I contact Ajit Varki, about his book “Denial: Self-Deception, False Beliefs, and the Origins of the Human Mind.”
We spend a couple of minutes with the awe-inspiring Professor of Medicine and pioneer researcher, from the University of California in San Diego. Following his beginning in India, Ajit Varki led American explorations into cellular and molecular medicine. His multi-faceted mind also ventures into the origins of humans, and as it turns out, a critical mechanism of human consciousness. Understand the role of denial, says Varki, and you understand a lot about your own life, and the civilization around us. Read more about it, and get the whole interview here.
This interview was suggested to me by Rob Mielcarski who blogs at undenial.wordpress.com. Rob has prepared a short summary of Varki and Brower’s work. It’s an excellent doorway. Rob has also posted a longer summary of this theory of human denial, as written by Ajit Varki and Danny Brower. Surf Rob’s undenial blog – it is still going strong. It’s worth your effort to get this information about Varki, to see how we manage to deny so many realities. It’s a wonder we survive at all.
Pingback: Climate Food Shock – Survival Acres
“Recently, the American government also announced that both Russia and China had the capability to crash the electric grid over large regions via cyber attacks,”
Oh stop it with the russophobic / sinophobic scaremongering, Alex! You’re just playing into the hands of the Pentagon, who’s been encircling Russia and China with US/NATO troops and constantly trying to provoke them with military maneuvers on their doorstep for the last 2 decades – precisely because the Pentagon wants to start a big war to justify its huge budget and to please weapons manufacturers and “defense” contractors. That’s why all politicians in the US try to prepare the population for a “just” war against China and/or Russia by demonizing these countries in the media. Don’t take part in this malicious nonsense! Neither the Chinese nor the Russian government (nor North Korea or Iran, for that matter) are suicidal, so they will keep their peace as they have been, in the face of the United States’ continuous belligerence, so long as the US doesn’t start bombing them first.
It’s much more likely that a total crash of the electrical grid will be caused by an unusually strong solar storm, like the one that luckily just missed the Earth in 2012. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_storm_of_2012)
It’s rather obvious why China and my own country of Germany still maintain strategic grain reserves – both countries had famines in living memory. (China in the early 1950s, when about 50 million people died due to Mao’s terrible agricultural policies; Germany in the hunger winter right after WWII, due to most men between 16 and 50 being either dead, crippled or stuck in a POW camp for a few years or never to return – where they sometimes, as in the UK, were used as forced labor to prop up the farming sectors of the winners, that suffered from the same lack of manpower. That’s what “war reparations” are for, after all.)
Due to this policy of stocking grains and legumes, I don’t think it makes sense to try and stock up on such basic calorie foods on an individual basis. (I mean in large volumes. Obviously everyone who can afford it should have enough basic foods at home to be able to wait out a local storm or flood event, or so they don’t have to go out to buy groceries for a few weeks if they get the flu.) I mean, if the government really breaks down to the degree that they can’t distribute those communal food stocks like they do today in refugee camps, then there’s no-one left to protect you from being robbed at gun-point either.
From what my parents told me about the post-war situation, it’s much more important on an individual level to know how to grow and preserve perishable vitamin-source foods like vegetables, and to have skills or things that can be bartered with farmers. (My mother likes to tell the story how her mother had to exchange her heirloom china teapot for a mere cup of milk, when my mother was a toddler and needed the milk. And that was even though her father did have a vegetable garden and marketable skills and important stuff to sell as an apothecary. Black markets are seller’s markets. My father, as the son of a traditional farming family, did not have such traumatic childhood memories, but he still always brought along a large pack of cigarettes and some up-market alkohol when we went on holidays around Europe in the 1990s, because he was so used to the need to barter or bribe from a lifetime in Socialist East Germany. (And a longer stay as a doctor in Vietnam, after the US war on the country ended. People there occasionally paid him in chicken or small antiquities, because they were too proud to just take his services as charity.) In East Germany, even at the end when the economy was really suffering under the rise in oil prices in the late 80s, nobody would have starved for lack of basic calorie foods – the Socialist government had many faults, but it did have the right priorities for the use of the scarce oil and fertilizer imports in the State-controlled agricultural combines – but if you wanted much variety in your diet or fresh fruit and perishable vegetables/salads, then you had to grow them yourself.)
Personally, I try to stock up on canned foods, long-storing milk, dried goods (rice, pasta, legumes, etc.) and flour (to bake bread rolls from scratch) for the winter months between Christmas and the end of February. Potatoes, apples, squash and some other long-storing “fresh” fruit/vegetables as well, but I don’t have a really good place to store them anymore, as central heating has made the house too warm (including the cellar), and the garage and greenhouse can get a bit of frost, even if they’re kept closed all winter. And of course this is the time when our very small freezer is full of surplus from our own fall harvest, and some things (leeks, carrots, certain kinds of cabbage) can be left outside in the garden until you need them, with our relatively mild North German winters. (We can occasionally get down to -20°C at night, but for most of the time, it’s just a few degrees below or above freezing.)
I don’t really do this in preparation for societal collapse or even extreme weather events, though. I do it simply because I don’t have a working car and don’t want to have to carry so much heavy stuff or have to go shopping every few days in the usually rainy winter weather, especially when the road is iced over so I can’t use the bicycle. (I work from home.) Besides, it’s quite likely that I’ll catch a bad cold at some point during the winter, at which point it becomes either impossible to go out or irresponsible to do so (risk of infecting others). However, I have started to fill all the larger canning glasses that I didn’t need this year (60 or so) with boiling water and storing them in the cellar. A few plastic 1 gallon bottles as well, but those only for washing, as I don’t trust what might leach out of the plastic over months or years of storage. I did this partially because my elderly mother was getting worried after a TV documentary about a heavy snow period in 1978, when a few hundred people died, especially considering the “snowpocalypse” that they were experiencing in the southern German states last month. Her worries don’t really make sense anymore (they buried the electricity lines in our area a few years ago, so the local grid can’t break down from heavy snow anymore; also, those people mostly died in very rural areas while trying to reach civilization centers on their own because they didn’t have mobile phones back then to call for help; and the East German army was severely lacking in helicopters), but the pump of our house well has been making odd noises and is still pumping a lot of air up. In the summer, I thought this was because of the persistent drought this year, but now I’m starting to get worried that there’s something technically wrong with the pump. So I store some drinking water in case of a sudden break-down of the pump, because the last time we had the thing switched out, it took several days to re-establish a hydrostatic head and get the new pump working. My father thankfully also had the foresight to build a traditional fireplace with a proper large heat-storing mass (if unfortunately in the part of the house that has the worst insulation), not one of those little iron things, and we have a few heating fans and electrical radiators, just in case the gas-powered central heating fails. (The furnace also has been making worrisome noises for years, but we don’t have the money to buy a new one.)
By the way, 2018 was the first year in my active memory when I noticed weather-related food shortages in our rich, Capitalist Western country. (I was 6 years old when Socialist East Germany collapsed, so I don’t personally remember those shortages. I only know that from stories and from the East German cookbooks, which for example always list margarine instead of butter.) Due to the persistent drought in Germany over the last year, we’ve had considerably harvest declines in basic food staples like potatoes, grain and rapeseed. The potatoes were just unusually small (even those that I grew myself with lots of extra watering, so the problem here was likely also the unusually long summer heat wave and not just the drought), and the grain problem made the bread price rise by a few cents, but the shortfall of the rapeseed harvest by 36% compared to 2017 has actually made it impossible for me to find cheap, store-brand rapeseed oil in any of the three different supermarket chains I tried since about October. (For some reason, I also can’t find brown lentils these last few months, though those are mainly imported from Canada, so I don’t understand why there’s a delivery problem.) Apparently, the rapeseed problem is not going to let up anytime soon, because the soil was far too dry in the fall for the German farmers to sow a new rapeseed crop for next year. (German agriculture is almost entirely rain-fed, so there’s no irrigation infrastructure in place.) It has rained and snowed quite a lot by now, but the seed had to be in the field before the start of winter in order to germinate properly. Of course, I can switch to sunflower oil in the meantime (less healthy and slightly more expensive, but otherwise equivalent in its usability for purposes where olive oil won’t do). But still, it’s a worrying sing of things to come… And then there were the sporadic coal and petrol delivery problems in the summer, as many of Germany’s rivers dried up so much that the large barges that still do a majority of raw commodities transportation throughout Germany couldn’t pass anymore. I didn’t personally experience that (the local river system north of Berlin is spring-fed, not rain-fed, which is also why we are one of the few areas of Germany spared during big floods due to too much rain in the mountains, like in 2002) but it was all over the news.
“But I started thinking, if there was a real emergency, maybe I should be growing a dense food crop like potatoes in the greenhouse instead.”
Remember the latitude where you’re living and that plants that store a lot of calories in their tubers/roots also have to get that energy from somewhere. In the winter, there may simply not be enough sunlight in Canada (or where I live, which is on the same latitude as southern Canada) to grow potatoes in winter, no matter how warm you can make that greenhouse. I am currently trying to overwinter cuttings from my new experimental Pepino plants (also nightshades, like potatoes and tomatoes, but the fruit taste more like cucumbers pickled in a sugar solution), and they are just barely surviving – losing a leaf almost every day – even though I’ve put them directly under a slanted, north-west-facing roof window (as in: the leaves almost touch the glass, so there’s as little light lost to diffusion as possible) in a bathroom that drops to a temperature of about 13°C at night (raccoons destroyed the insulation in that part of the roof). So basically the environment for the plants is like in a traditional hot bed with glass covering. Water or temperature shouldn’t be the problem, the cuttings were put in pure compost in the fall, and they did grow properly for the first few weeks, forming new leaves and doubling in size. So my only explanation for why they’re struggling now is that there just isn’t enough light coming from our overcast winter skies, especially considering that the slanted window is also snowed over occasionally. And then there’s also the overall day length to consider that a particular plant needs to know that now is the right time to produce fruit or start storing away energy in tubers/roots for the next year. Plants can measure the number of light or dark hours per day (I think it’s actually the dark hours – but it’s been 15 years since I attended that class in basic plant physiology in University, so I may be wrong about this detail), so it’s not all that easy to trick them into “thinking” that it’s a different season than it really is. (Some plant varieties have been bred not to be able to measure this anymore, though, such as with the newer strawberry varieties that produce fruit all through the summer, and not just once in the late spring as they naturally do. Salads and leafy, temperate-zone herbs can be grown better in the fall/winter season precisely because the plant never gets the “rising day length” signal that will cause it to start blooming and become hard and bitter to discourage animals from eating the seed stalks.)
Things that make more sense in a greenhouse may be overwintering vegetables like kale, brussel sprouts, carrots, leeks, etc. so you can actually harvest them in the winter when the soil is frozen hard outside, or to protect them from extremely harsh frosts (i.e., to grow European varieties in a Canadian winter). Or you could try gradual fall season extensions for only slightly frost-hardy vegetables like broccoli, swiss chard, or turnips/rutabaga. Or use the space as a root cellar (ideal temperature: 6-8°C) to store the calorie-rich vegetables and fruit that only grow well over the summer but store all winter if treated properly (potatoes, winter squash, cabbage heads, storage apples and pears), so it makes sense to grow a bumper harvest of them in the summer. Your ancestors developed those vegetable and fruit varieties to store summer sunlight energy to get through the European winter before freezing or even canning food was a possibility (other than sauerkraut, which is actually salted/pickled/fermented, not heated and canned) – so maybe make good use of all that effort and knowledge before you try to grow non-frost-tolerant plants in the middle of the Canadian winter?
I’m currently reading an old gardening manual that my father bought when I was born, which deals specifically with building home-scale greenhouses on a budget and how to grow vegetables (and some flowers) in them. (As I wrote above, some food growing at home was a necessity in Socialist Eastern German, plus there was the culture of weekend “dachas” imported from Russia.) Turns out these old gardening books give you much more detailed information than the modern gardening books for pure hobby gardeners with many pretty pictures. Anyway, the book contains a graph based on a scientific study published at the time, that shows that there only is enough sunlight in Northern Germany for optimal plant growth from mid-February till mid-October. And in the greenhouse, because glass and plastic both absorb quite a lot of light, even if we humans can’t see the difference, the plants will go into “light deficiency” from mid-September till mid-March. So in winter, a greenhouse without a lot of costly indoor lighting is really only useful to keep fully grown plants alive for a few weeks longer (i.e. preventing frost damage) or to start seeds a few weeks earlier in the spring (when the plantlings are still getting their energy from the seed and what matters most is providing the minimum soil temperature necessary for germination as well as protecting them from the odd late frost night).
By the way, may I suggest you find a copy of the old British TV series “The Victorian Kitchen Garden” (1987) and “The Wartime Kitchen and Garden” (1993)? They’re not really step-by-step instructions, and of course the UK has far milder winters than Canada, but you’ll find lot of suggestion there, especially regarding what is possible with a large system of fairly low-tech greenhouses. (The kitchen garden shown is that of an old noble estate, with the elderly head gardener showing how things where still done to provide the big house and all the many servants with year-round fresh food, when he was a boy.)
I will not try to discuss F1 hybrid seeds with you, as North Americans simply don’t seem to have the basic education to really understand that topic and why seed companies producing those hybrids are not evil or GMO-peddlers. (I learned Mendel’s basic rules of genetic cross-breeding and what “F1 hybrid” means in high school biology class.) However, I would seriously advise everyone who wants to save seeds at home to read “Gardening when it Counts” by Steve Solomon. The author actually worked as an industry-insider in the seed trade for years, so he has a lot to say about the low quality of the seeds sold to hobby gardeners in general. But unlike all those well-meaning magazine articles for well-off hobby gardeners, he’s writing for people who actually need to be able to rely on their homestead harvest for years on end (due to poverty or in a prepping situation), and so he is honest about which kinds of seeds it makes sense to save at home, and which vegetables will lose their useful characteristics within a few generations, due to wild interpollinating with similar plants grown miles away or simply due to the fact that a normal home-sized garden can never grow enough of these vegetables to maintain a decently sized genepool. As a rule of thumb, you’re better off trying seed-saving with plants that are insect-pollinated (or could even bring fruit if the blossoms are brush-pollinated and then sealed in a plastic bag to prevent cross-pollination, like tomatoes and bell peppers) and that produce a large number of large seeds, so the seeds have enough energy stored to still be able to germinate several years later. In that case, you can save seed from one plant grown from highly vigorous store-bought seed, and then use it that seed for half a decade, instead of saving seed every year. This works well for squash (as long as you and your neighbors only grow one variety of each of the 3 squash species and especially no-one close-by grows the poisonous decorative gourds in the Cucurbita pepo species) and legumes, for example. And I’ve once saved seed from Mizuna salad (Asian mustard greens), because I simply couldn’t find replacement seed anywhere. That also got me enough seed for many years from just a couple of plants, and because the plant is unusual to grow here, I probably didn’t have cross-pollination in that one flowering. But trying to seed-save on a home scale from anything from the brassica family is normally futile, at least for more than one or two generations. And saving potato tubers essentially clones the plant from one year to the next, so it keeps accumulating viruses. I don’t bother buying proper virus-free seed-potatoes for my ongoing learning experiment (that is, I’m trying to learn how to get a reliable harvest from just a handful of plants, not to grow so many plants as we would need to eat), instead just using normal, store-bought potatoes that I let germinate in spring. But I wouldn’t try re-using my own harvested potatoes for re-seeding unless I absolutely had to in order to survive. Too much risk of a total harvest failure due to multiple accumulated virus infections.
Re: Bugging Out
After reading (with some amusement) the „Survivalist Challenge“ on your guest’s website (https://foodassets.com/info/survivalist-challenge-putting-the-bs-to-the-test.html), it occurred to me that what he describes there is actually quite close to a male puberty ritual common in many “native” societies, when they were still more or less hunter-gatherers. Usually the boy would only have to survive on his own for a few days or weeks, not 6 months, and of course he would have been properly trained all his life in hunting and gathering, and his environment would actually still provide enough food to find, which today is not the case anymore. But still, after reading that article, I had the insight that this temporary ritual exile was less meant as an opportunity for the soon-to-be young man to prove his hunting and survival skills, and more meant to teach him early on (at a time when boys are testosterone-addled and thus at their most cocky) exactly how screwed he would be without the support of his community/tribe all working together towards their common survival. And maybe to make him delirious with hunger so he would hallucinate his “spirit animal” or whatever.
Excellent interview with a personal ambiance that is most always lacking from other people’s similar efforts. You really hit it off with Jonathan! I’ certainly going to pass this on tot my circle of friends here in Hamilton.
By the way, while Lester Brown will of course be missed, there is still plenty of data on world grain stocks out there to be found. This stuff is not kept secret. The term you need to google is “stocks to use ratio”. Which will give you plenty of websites and analysis written for commodity traders, but also this brief overview of the current worldwide grain supply / demand situation by the rather more trustworthy FAO:
http://www.fao.org/worldfoodsituation/csdb/en/
In the middle of that text, we find the following information:
“World cereal stocks are projected to fall by 45 million tonnes (5.6 percent) from their record high opening levels to 772 million tonnes – some 10 million tonnes above the December forecast. At this level, the world stocks-to-use ratio of cereals would remain relatively comfortable at 28.5 percent, albeit down slightly from the 2017/18 level of 30.8 percent, the highest since 2000/01.”
28.5% of 365 days are 104 days.
2012 was just a particularly bad year, due to the harvest failures in Russia that happened just before. Don’t leave yourself open for accusations of cherry-picking particulary bad years for scaremongering effect, if there is newer data easily available.
Oh, and regarding the need to be able to heat the stored food when there’s no electricity:
Anyone who can’t have wood-burning fireplace in their house could at least build themselves a little rocket stove, which can be used to boil water or a pot of soup or similar on just twigs and kindling as fuel. It’s really not that hard as a DIY project – all you need is a large tin can, a smaller tin can, maybe some clay or gravel or similar filler material if you want it to be a bit more sturdy, and maybe a metal grid or something like that, to put the pot on. And some tool to cut the tin cans with, of course.
Alternatively, you can just stack a bunch of bricks or concrete blocks in a special way, if you have some left over from home building projects. This way it could even be done right when you need the thing. You can even build a rudimentary rocket stove from moist sand, in a real emergency, as it’s really just a sensibly enclosed and ventilated small bonfire.
Building instructrions for various designs:
https://morningchores.com/rocket-stove-plans/
So you see, there’s really no need to eat your soaked rice all cold. 😉
(And from what I can see on the website of your guest, those professionally prepared food stocks are mainly freeze-dried stuff that people just need to add hot water to. So a simple rocket stove would be enough to prepare those emergency rations.)
For those wanting to grow their own food, I can’t overemphasize the value of permaculture and perennial polycultures, rather than expecting to grow the annual vegetables and grains we’re used to from agriculture. As Alex and Jonathan lamented, the latter are labor-intensive and unreliable, plus almost inevitably harm the soil and your landbase.
Perennial polycultures are much more resilient, require very little work once established, and enhance the soil and biodiversity. In Portland Oregon, I was on track to grow & harvest one person’s calorie needs with about 2 hours “work” (mostly wandering the yard and picking what was ready) per day. It really doesn’t need to be difficult if you break away from agriculture.
That said, for growing annuals, I second Vivi’s recommendation of Solomon’s Gardening When It Counts, and would add Carol Deppe’s The Resilient Gardener. (That links to my blog, which you can explore for documentation on my Portland experiments.)