7 ms·

I've been wondering about this in the context of supply chain disruption and food security. I live far from farmland and fear what might happen if that connecti

I've been wondering about this in the context of supply chain disruption and food security. I live far from farmland and fear what might happen if that connection were cut due to war or civil strife. How well could I survive eating local plants and whatever I can grow? How well could what we have nearby support the local population? Resources like the ones mentioned here could prove lifesaving.

fny 4y ago
You can't. We have not engineered life to work this way.
- eru 4y ago
  It's not a binary thing. There's graduations.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
swagasaurus-rex 4y ago
Maybe it's not a bad idea to keep a cellar of canned, non-perishable food and water stored in containers that do not leech. You would want to replace the stockpile every few years so it doesn't spoil.
- jefftk 4y ago
  Instead of a stockpile you replace every so often, it's a lot cheaper to just buy extra of the long shelf life things you use. Instead of keeping one jar of peanut butter, you have ten (or however many you'll reliably use before they go bad).
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - dredmorbius 4y ago
    Regular rotation of shelf-stable products is the way to go. Water is often the under-appreciated stock --- people use a lot of it for drinking, cleaning, and cooking (espeically with dried / reconstituted foods). Here a supply, and means of producing more potable supply (a quality filtration system, backpacker and marine filtering systems are useful) and purification (chlorine or iodine in liquid or tablet form) help. It's possible to store grains (whole or ground, flour, wheat, rice, maize) for years, though you need to get rid of moths / worms first. That usually means freezing in smaller portions (2.5 -- 5 kg / 5--10 lb), and then transferring to airtight storage. Rodents can and will chew through both plastic and metal, isnpect frequently. Invest in a cat (or snakes). A chest freezer won't survive a long-duration power-outage, but is useful so long as juice flows, and can make this pest-proofing much more viable. These consume very little power.
    - eru 4y ago
      How much water you'd need to store depends a lot on where you are. I'd say you have more of a need for a water stock pile in Arizona than in Singapore. We get more than two metres of rain a year here. (Of course, even in Singapore you can get unlucky and hit a dry spell for a few weeks. But they are rather rare. The city has dedicated a lot of its land to water reservoirs.)
      - dredmorbius 4y ago
        For water, quality has a quantity all its own. The 2m of rainfall in Singapore won't do you much good if it's contaminated. And water is far more essential to life. A person can survive only a few minutes without air, or a few days without water. It's possible to live without (or with sharply limited) food for weeks or months. A single closet shelf might provide a very rudimentary sufficient food supply for weeks. Average per-person household water usage in the US is 80--100 gallons/day (300--380 liter). About 1 gallon (4 liter) is for drinking, roughly twice that for food prep / cooking, and the remainder for cleaning and sanitation. A 1m x 1m x 2m closet (2 m^3) could hold a bit over 500 gallons (2,000 liter), or about a week's worth of average daily water use for one person. Under emergency conditions that could be stretched considerably, but even at 5 gallon/day (~20 liter), a week's supply of water for a household of four would be over 0.5 m^3. My point: You need a lot of water, and will suffer quickly without it.
- _eht 4y ago
  Something to also consider is how you would protect your supply (and children) from your less prepared neighbor and former friend, Alex Jones.
  - phyzome 4y ago
    The way I've prepared is to have extra on hand for my less-prepared neighbors. And the way I hear it, a lot of "preppers" do the same. Strength in community.
  - nightfly 4y ago
    People over-prepare for that aspect and under-prepare for the food part
- phyzome 4y ago
  Rather than canned goods, prefer dry goods. In our basement we have 5-gallon buckets of lentils, chickpeas, millet, sunflower seeds, pepitas, and various other things. (Also cases of peanut butter, jarred tomatoes, various flours and such.) This isn't hoarding -- these are things we use! But we always make sure to reorder before a container runs out, which usually takes 6 months to a year. When the pandemic hit, we just bought another 25 lb bag each of lentils and millet and called it good.
jacobr1 4y ago
I've seen difference estimates, but you need ~5 acres of land to feed one person for a year with a balanced diet. Intensive farming can reduce that if you focus on monoculture grain crops. Meat increases the land need. A backyard garden and local foraging doesn't cut it. And if you are feeding a whole community ... you need a lot of land.
- tipoftheiceberg 4y ago
  Vertical indoor farming is the paradigm shift we’ve been waiting for. Thanks in part to advances in LED lighting efficiency and cost. Much more land and water efficient.
  - dredmorbius 4y ago
    Under the scenario mentioned (supply-chain disruption), vertical farming might prove somewhat less productive than you envision.
  - tomcam 4y ago
    There’s plenty to do for vertical outdoor farming right now, especially in constrained circumstances.
  - ClumsyPilot 4y ago
    vertical farming makes no sence : you are loosing 90% of energy converting light into electricity and back into light for the plants, or you are burning fuel. Normal greenhouses are much simpler, more efficient and have been in use for decades. They make full use of the sun.
- voisin 4y ago
  > I've seen difference estimates, but you need ~5 acres of land to feed one person for a year with a balanced diet. Check out “The Market Gardener” by Jean Martin Fortier. The quoted statement is a myth. Farms historically were nowhere near as large as today and we able to provide a balanced diet to those literally on the same block (think “in-fill market gardens”)
dredmorbius 4y ago
It would be exceedingly challenging. It's probably best to think of supplementing rather than replacing external food supplies and sources. Raising perishable / vegetable crops and having a source of protein (fowl -> eggs, goat -> milk) would probably be your best bets. You'd need to spend an extraordiary amount of time preserving harvest: drying, salting, smoking, curing, fermenting, and canning. On a per-acre and per-hour basis, potatos are probably your best bet. A carb-heavy diet will tend to add pounds. The traditional native American crops were the Three Sisters: corn, beans, and squash: https://www.almanac.com/content/three-sisters-corn-bean-and-squash https://www.almanac.com/content/three-sisters-corn-bean-and-... These are mutually symbiotic (the beans add nitrogen to the soil, I believe there's some pest-management aspect to this as well). Preindustrial communities also relied heavily on fishing and shellfish --- another iconic pattern are shell mounds, literally the remnants of shellfish eaten. (See Shell Mound Road in Emeryville, as an example, in the SF Bay Area.) Grazing livestock was another standard. Note that the native population of regions such as the Los Angeles basin may have been a few thousands, and for pre-Columbian North America (including Mexico and Central America) roughly 50 millions.
- HWR_14 4y ago
  > These are mutually symbiotic The squash creates a dense ground cover that clogs out weeds. The beans add nitrogen. The corn provides a trellis the beans can grow up.
  - dredmorbius 4y ago
    Thanks!
- ClumsyPilot 4y ago
  > You'd need to spend an extraordiary amount of time preserving harvest: drying, salting, smoking, curing, fermenting, and canning. back in soviet times, we didn't have 365 day a year avaliability of fruit from another side of the planet, and our grandmother used to can hundreds of kilos of fruit and veg in the summer. She would fill up a storage room and that wouod supplement our diet in the colder months. Its quite a bit of work, like a week or 2, but was normal withing living memory. Also you need equipment: a canning machine, and like 30+ 5-liter glass jars. And this is just one aspect of what you would need.
ravenstine 4y ago
> How well could I survive eating local plants [...]? I don't recommend this. As someone who has been foraging for over a decade, I believe you are much better off stockpiling food, learning to raise chickens, owning some fishing gear, maybe growing your own crops, and even learning to hunt small game. Here's my educated opinion: Foraging is fine as a sort of hobby or interest, but most people shouldn't consider it for survival and the vast majority of people have no business doing it at all. That might sound extreme, but trust me. I've witnessed so much stupidity in foraging communities, online and offline, that I completely gave up participating. Having to constantly correct bad and even dangerous advice got really tiring. Being good at ID'ing and using plants requires adequate time spent gathering knowledge and experience. Most people won't come close because they don't have the interest. Many people just don't have the visual processing skills. Foraging is a very visual skill. Some people have it. Foraging came natural to me because I'm highly visual. I can ID things very easily after an experience. Others I've known are nearly incapable of ID'ing plants reliably. I'd say at least half of people are not good at ID'ing and probably never will be without some app on a phone connected to the internet. Foraging is and historically has been tertiary to hunting and agriculture/livestock. Most wild plants simply don't have the energy density to justify the energy spent to collect and eat them. Those that are energy dense are usually only around for a few months out of the year and still may not be that plentiful. At best, foraging is a stopgap while crops are growing. I'd love to say that it's practical merely live off the land, and while I think I might be able to get away with it longer than the average person, it's just not viable for most.
- EdwardDiego 4y ago
  And also, Hunting & gathering/foraging will only support a far smaller population than our current agriculture based society. So sure, you can live off foraging alone. When everyone else is not. But when _everyone_ starts hunting and gathering you'll quickly realise how far agriculture has displaced us from the basic carrying capacity of the land, and then move onto the realisation of what happens in nature when the population of an animal exceeds the carrying capacity of their territory. Starvation, conflict. Nothing great. That's the problem with post-apocalyptic day dreams, they usually posit you as one of the few survivors. In reality, there'll be way more other survivors, either competing with you for resources, or, if you have a sweet bunker filled with supplies, forming a coalition that can overcome any advantage you have in firepower, by sheer numbers of desperate people. (Peter Thiel take note, if the apocalypse comes, you can't shoot every Kiwi, and we're mighty interested in what's in your bunker. #AotearoaIsNotYourLifeboatRichPeople)
ls15 4y ago
> How well could I survive eating local plants and whatever I can grow? Most likely not engough calories, but for growing your own greens in order to complement stockpiled food, I would recommend looking into passive hydroponics ("Kratky method"). It's easy, cheap and fun and it can provide a small constant supply of fresh food.

fny 4y ago

You can't. We have not engineered life to work this way.

eru 4y ago
It's not a binary thing. There's graduations.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

swagasaurus-rex 4y ago

Maybe it's not a bad idea to keep a cellar of canned, non-perishable food and water stored in containers that do not leech. You would want to replace the stockpile every few years so it doesn't spoil.

jefftk 4y ago
Instead of a stockpile you replace every so often, it's a lot cheaper to just buy extra of the long shelf life things you use. Instead of keeping one jar of peanut butter, you have ten (or however many you'll reliably use before they go bad).
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- dredmorbius 4y ago
  Regular rotation of shelf-stable products is the way to go. Water is often the under-appreciated stock --- people use a lot of it for drinking, cleaning, and cooking (espeically with dried / reconstituted foods). Here a supply, and means of producing more potable supply (a quality filtration system, backpacker and marine filtering systems are useful) and purification (chlorine or iodine in liquid or tablet form) help. It's possible to store grains (whole or ground, flour, wheat, rice, maize) for years, though you need to get rid of moths / worms first. That usually means freezing in smaller portions (2.5 -- 5 kg / 5--10 lb), and then transferring to airtight storage. Rodents can and will chew through both plastic and metal, isnpect frequently. Invest in a cat (or snakes). A chest freezer won't survive a long-duration power-outage, but is useful so long as juice flows, and can make this pest-proofing much more viable. These consume very little power.
  - eru 4y ago
    How much water you'd need to store depends a lot on where you are. I'd say you have more of a need for a water stock pile in Arizona than in Singapore. We get more than two metres of rain a year here. (Of course, even in Singapore you can get unlucky and hit a dry spell for a few weeks. But they are rather rare. The city has dedicated a lot of its land to water reservoirs.)
    - dredmorbius 4y ago
      For water, quality has a quantity all its own. The 2m of rainfall in Singapore won't do you much good if it's contaminated. And water is far more essential to life. A person can survive only a few minutes without air, or a few days without water. It's possible to live without (or with sharply limited) food for weeks or months. A single closet shelf might provide a very rudimentary sufficient food supply for weeks. Average per-person household water usage in the US is 80--100 gallons/day (300--380 liter). About 1 gallon (4 liter) is for drinking, roughly twice that for food prep / cooking, and the remainder for cleaning and sanitation. A 1m x 1m x 2m closet (2 m^3) could hold a bit over 500 gallons (2,000 liter), or about a week's worth of average daily water use for one person. Under emergency conditions that could be stretched considerably, but even at 5 gallon/day (~20 liter), a week's supply of water for a household of four would be over 0.5 m^3. My point: You need a lot of water, and will suffer quickly without it.
_eht 4y ago
Something to also consider is how you would protect your supply (and children) from your less prepared neighbor and former friend, Alex Jones.
- phyzome 4y ago
  The way I've prepared is to have extra on hand for my less-prepared neighbors. And the way I hear it, a lot of "preppers" do the same. Strength in community.
- nightfly 4y ago
  People over-prepare for that aspect and under-prepare for the food part
phyzome 4y ago
Rather than canned goods, prefer dry goods. In our basement we have 5-gallon buckets of lentils, chickpeas, millet, sunflower seeds, pepitas, and various other things. (Also cases of peanut butter, jarred tomatoes, various flours and such.) This isn't hoarding -- these are things we use! But we always make sure to reorder before a container runs out, which usually takes 6 months to a year. When the pandemic hit, we just bought another 25 lb bag each of lentils and millet and called it good.

jacobr1 4y ago

I've seen difference estimates, but you need ~5 acres of land to feed one person for a year with a balanced diet. Intensive farming can reduce that if you focus on monoculture grain crops. Meat increases the land need. A backyard garden and local foraging doesn't cut it. And if you are feeding a whole community ... you need a lot of land.

tipoftheiceberg 4y ago
Vertical indoor farming is the paradigm shift we’ve been waiting for. Thanks in part to advances in LED lighting efficiency and cost. Much more land and water efficient.
- dredmorbius 4y ago
  Under the scenario mentioned (supply-chain disruption), vertical farming might prove somewhat less productive than you envision.
- tomcam 4y ago
  There’s plenty to do for vertical outdoor farming right now, especially in constrained circumstances.
- ClumsyPilot 4y ago
  vertical farming makes no sence : you are loosing 90% of energy converting light into electricity and back into light for the plants, or you are burning fuel. Normal greenhouses are much simpler, more efficient and have been in use for decades. They make full use of the sun.
voisin 4y ago
> I've seen difference estimates, but you need ~5 acres of land to feed one person for a year with a balanced diet. Check out “The Market Gardener” by Jean Martin Fortier. The quoted statement is a myth. Farms historically were nowhere near as large as today and we able to provide a balanced diet to those literally on the same block (think “in-fill market gardens”)

dredmorbius 4y ago

It would be exceedingly challenging. It's probably best to think of supplementing rather than replacing external food supplies and sources. Raising perishable / vegetable crops and having a source of protein (fowl -> eggs, goat -> milk) would probably be your best bets. You'd need to spend an extraordiary amount of time preserving harvest: drying, salting, smoking, curing, fermenting, and canning. On a per-acre and per-hour basis, potatos are probably your best bet. A carb-heavy diet will tend to add pounds. The traditional native American crops were the Three Sisters: corn, beans, and squash: https://www.almanac.com/content/three-sisters-corn-bean-and-squash https://www.almanac.com/content/three-sisters-corn-bean-and-... These are mutually symbiotic (the beans add nitrogen to the soil, I believe there's some pest-management aspect to this as well). Preindustrial communities also relied heavily on fishing and shellfish --- another iconic pattern are shell mounds, literally the remnants of shellfish eaten. (See Shell Mound Road in Emeryville, as an example, in the SF Bay Area.) Grazing livestock was another standard. Note that the native population of regions such as the Los Angeles basin may have been a few thousands, and for pre-Columbian North America (including Mexico and Central America) roughly 50 millions.

HWR_14 4y ago
> These are mutually symbiotic The squash creates a dense ground cover that clogs out weeds. The beans add nitrogen. The corn provides a trellis the beans can grow up.
- dredmorbius 4y ago
  Thanks!
ClumsyPilot 4y ago
> You'd need to spend an extraordiary amount of time preserving harvest: drying, salting, smoking, curing, fermenting, and canning. back in soviet times, we didn't have 365 day a year avaliability of fruit from another side of the planet, and our grandmother used to can hundreds of kilos of fruit and veg in the summer. She would fill up a storage room and that wouod supplement our diet in the colder months. Its quite a bit of work, like a week or 2, but was normal withing living memory. Also you need equipment: a canning machine, and like 30+ 5-liter glass jars. And this is just one aspect of what you would need.

ravenstine 4y ago

> How well could I survive eating local plants [...]? I don't recommend this. As someone who has been foraging for over a decade, I believe you are much better off stockpiling food, learning to raise chickens, owning some fishing gear, maybe growing your own crops, and even learning to hunt small game. Here's my educated opinion: Foraging is fine as a sort of hobby or interest, but most people shouldn't consider it for survival and the vast majority of people have no business doing it at all. That might sound extreme, but trust me. I've witnessed so much stupidity in foraging communities, online and offline, that I completely gave up participating. Having to constantly correct bad and even dangerous advice got really tiring. Being good at ID'ing and using plants requires adequate time spent gathering knowledge and experience. Most people won't come close because they don't have the interest. Many people just don't have the visual processing skills. Foraging is a very visual skill. Some people have it. Foraging came natural to me because I'm highly visual. I can ID things very easily after an experience. Others I've known are nearly incapable of ID'ing plants reliably. I'd say at least half of people are not good at ID'ing and probably never will be without some app on a phone connected to the internet. Foraging is and historically has been tertiary to hunting and agriculture/livestock. Most wild plants simply don't have the energy density to justify the energy spent to collect and eat them. Those that are energy dense are usually only around for a few months out of the year and still may not be that plentiful. At best, foraging is a stopgap while crops are growing. I'd love to say that it's practical merely live off the land, and while I think I might be able to get away with it longer than the average person, it's just not viable for most.

EdwardDiego 4y ago
And also, Hunting & gathering/foraging will only support a far smaller population than our current agriculture based society. So sure, you can live off foraging alone. When everyone else is not. But when _everyone_ starts hunting and gathering you'll quickly realise how far agriculture has displaced us from the basic carrying capacity of the land, and then move onto the realisation of what happens in nature when the population of an animal exceeds the carrying capacity of their territory. Starvation, conflict. Nothing great. That's the problem with post-apocalyptic day dreams, they usually posit you as one of the few survivors. In reality, there'll be way more other survivors, either competing with you for resources, or, if you have a sweet bunker filled with supplies, forming a coalition that can overcome any advantage you have in firepower, by sheer numbers of desperate people. (Peter Thiel take note, if the apocalypse comes, you can't shoot every Kiwi, and we're mighty interested in what's in your bunker. #AotearoaIsNotYourLifeboatRichPeople)

ls15 4y ago

> How well could I survive eating local plants and whatever I can grow? Most likely not engough calories, but for growing your own greens in order to complement stockpiled food, I would recommend looking into passive hydroponics ("Kratky method"). It's easy, cheap and fun and it can provide a small constant supply of fresh food.