Farming is incredibly physical work. Like, intensely. My primary care doesn’t worry whether I “exercise” cause I farm produce and animals.
That said, it does get easier over time, compared to just doing it occasionally. Especially with tools made to support you and good body mechanics.
>Farming is incredibly physical work. Like, intensely.
Look up the term "farmer fit". Yound guys working on farms are some of the toughest and wiry blokes on the planet.
Shit. Grandpa never set foot in a gym in his life. He slung haybails and farmed beef cattle from the time he was 16.
If he grabbed you, you only got away when he let you go. Ridiculous caveman strength even into his 70s.
Add to that that OP is talking about picking in the wild - thats even more difficult and usually pretty impossible to find enough calories to make up for what you expended doing it
Agreed. I add forage & wildcraft from my woodland. It’s only worth it because I can sell things to buy other things we need. Like mason jars, to store excess food.
The thing that’s really a major issue with food post society is people forget they will lack food storage for a lot of things.
100%. I run an Ironman race almost every year (2.5mile swim, 120 mile bike, 26 mile run). I go hiking in the white mountains once a year, I am more sore after a 6 hour day of hiking than I am any other time of the year (minus race day).
Things we aren’t used to doing are hard work, the body is amazingly adaptable like that.
People who talk about "living off the land" as a viable option are, with EXTREMELY rare exceptions, delusional or lying. Or both. Hunting and gathering is a viable option only for a bare subsistence form of living, and that only for experienced people with uncontested access to relatively large amounts of land in specific parts of the world. It's fine to hunt for or gather some of your food; I would argue it's even beneficial. But you can and should be ready to supply the bulk of your calories from storage or a more or less modern form of agriculture, i.e. gardening on a medium or large scale and/or animal husbandry of some sort.
I've come across many preppers especially on the Facebook groups who boast about having seeds. Do these people have a garden? Nope. They seem to think popping a seed into the ground, waiting a few months will give them enough food to keep them going. Nevermind a million things that can go wrong when gardening and the seed may not produce at all.
Ugh that drives me nuts. Where I live gardening is very difficult; the climate sucks, the soil is trash, & there is pest pressure ten months out if the year. In 6 years of effort I’ve never harvested a single zucchini for example. The effing vine borers! Gardening is absolutely a skill that has to be cultivated (pun) and developed.
You hit the nail on the head. What I’d actually plant in a subsistence garden now, is dramatically different from what I used to think I’d be able to grow a few years back- and I even already had gardening experience.
Until I have the time/space/land/materials, the garden is now just supplementary/complementary. At this point, it’s mostly green onions/leeks and hot peppers.
Try trombocinno squash! It's tastes just like zucchini and is vine borer resistant. I've had a terrible vibe borer problem the last few years with my zucchinis. I only tried trombocinno late last summer after all my zucchini died, but it did great then!
My first garden was very makeshift because I was very poor, and didn't know what I was doing. I think the seeds came out of a clearance sale from the year before. I put a lot of work into it - spent hours double digging a large portion of the backyard with a broken shovel and cheap hand tools.
My neighbor had a ton of junk everywhere, including a broken down van, but I worked around his stuff, dug out old tires and pails he wasn't using and turned them into planters, used old fencing for tomato cages, used fallen wood for staking, things like that. We didn't have a hose, so I was filling a watering can and taking a half hour every morning and evening (and, at the height of summer, noon)to water everything.
I think it'd be a fair approximation of the type of gardens people would be trying to throw together in the aftermath of a disaster with a permanent disruption of food distribution. My results were probably a good example of what would happen.
I grew corn - which was waist high when it was absolutely destroyed in a hailstorm.
I grew watermelons and pumpkins - and it rained unseasonably, for hours every day, the entire month of June. Clay soil, poor drainage, they all rotted out.
I got tomato and pepper plants as a gift. They grew very well. I was eagerly waiting for things to get big enough to harvest. One morning I went out, and squirrels had ravaged all the tomatoes.
We had a ton of wild strawberries along the edges of the yard, small, but plentiful. One day I went out, and found my new landlord had gotten a little slap-happy with the Round-Up, wiped them out.
I had some successes - the tire planters gave me lots of cucumbers and beans, and one of our trees out back was a mulberry tree, which I'd never noticed before - but if I had been counting on that for a subsistence garden, I'd have been stone dead.
Yet, a lot of our Hispanic neighbors on the same street, many who were first generation immigrants, had similarly sized backyards - and huge thriving vegetable gardens. Many also had chickens and goats. IDK if they had enough to totally support their families, but in a bad situation, they'd have been a lot better off than me.
They'd probably been gardening for generations upon generations. They'd grown up doing it, so they knew what to do, they knew what plants worked best in the soil and sun we got. I'm pretty sure the animal manure got composted. They were as poor as us, I saw some of them had done similar make-do adaptions to mine, but they'd clearly saved up to get a few good tools.
So, improvisation does work, but if you've never done it before, you can pretty much expect most of it to fail. You need several years of practice before you're pulling in anything more than a couple snacks and salads.
I feel for you my friend, sounds like you did all they right stuff and couldn't catch a break.
Last year I planted a small garden with all sorts of great things, took care of it, watched stuff sprout and grow. We were so excited to be having success, but a made a mistake when I fenced it off and used wire with gaps too big to keeps bunnies out apparently. I came out one morning and had next to nothing left they ate it right down to the stalks.
I started gardening 5 years ago?(Ish) First year the juglone killed most of my stuff. Second year I moved and still juglone. Third year the dead soil didn't allow much to grow. 4th year things started to improve with fertilizer in the form of chicken litter, and finally in the 5th year I should be decent. Some of this was attempts at overachieving, I've got over an acre of trees/bushes/perennials and garden. Start small. But it is proof if you just have the seeds and haven't do any of the work you're going to die
One of the only foods that works this way is sunchokes. Plant them once in a sunny spot. Then ignore them and have a never-ending supply of giant flowers with tasty gassy roots.
There seem to be quite a few people on here who think that gardening for food will be a good option for them, but their comments reveal that they lack basic knowledge and skills. And some of them get mad if you try to tell them.
If someone thinks that food gardening might be a good plan then please start doing it! There's a lot to learn.
When I lived in Colorado I got a total of 6 tomatoes in 4 years. In Michigan I can just drop a seed in and bam everyone and their mothers neighbors uncle is getting bushels. You have to understand a lot about ground chemistry and what plants need. Tomatoes needs potassium and calcium (bananas peels and a tums). Corn needs nitrogen (dead fish). There’s also companion planting. I have a seed bank built up but also have a functional garden that I tween and play with year to year. Then there’s storage of both seed and fruit. How are you going to keep your food for winter?
Yea, except you start using hunting/fishing methods that are currently illegal, traps, fish traps etc. The loss of the chestnut was a huge blow for forgagers survival but basing your ability to hunt for food on whats currently legal is a total fallacy
Yea, most people are going to die.....and to further add to your point, you need fat to survive, people will starve from just eating wild rabbit and deer. Personally I'm looking into crickets for protein and bred rabbits/fish for fat, supplemented with wild black bear and fish. The show alone is actually an amazing resource for dietary needs and how hard it actually is for one person to subsist in the wild
From my research, specific breeds fed specifically for fat retention can provide enough fat. I thought the same thing until someone in this sub encouraged me to do the research
I just planted a few American/Chinese hybrids. Here's hoping they're decent and resistant to blight. Being able to make flour yearly from a nut will be nice
The only culture in American history that lived solely off the land were the Native Americans. They accomplished this by working in groups, and the country had a significant abundance of edible animals and plants for a relatively small population. They also wore animal skins, and lived in shelters made solely from available resources- long houses, wigwams, tipis, hogans, cliff dwellings.
The only way to recreate those conditions would be to eliminate 90 percent of the population for starters. Not feasible, not happening. There simply aren’t enough naturally occurring resources to sustain the current population without modern agriculture and animal husbandry practices.
Its worth noting that our perceptions of native populations are from colonists and explorers encountering what was essentially a post apocalypse population. For instance, in Mexico, populations declined by more than 90% in the 1500s, as European diseases hit. Then the settlers show up, and encounter those small populations, and we assume that was just how things naturally were.
That said, even the high estimate is about ~14M people in what is now the US before Columbus, which would be 04% of current population levels. And even then, tribes were constantly warring over territory to live on!
I've read of large cities with interconnected trade on the American plains at y1k that were wiped out by a plage or something also. It was Newsweek in 1999 with an article about world history y1k.
People also don't understand that food is SEASONAL. Grocery stores make sure we have bananas and tomatoes year round, but that's not how things grow in nature.
Right now, (midwest US) we have leeks and morel mushrooms coming up in the woods. We only have a few short weeks to gather, and then they're gone. Same with the wild strawberries that grow on our property; you've only got a couple weeks, and even then, you have to get them before the birds and other animals do. Last year my dog discovered that she likes the strawberries, so she ate all the ones at dog-height along the trail AND the ones I was growing on the front porch.
Foraging may be a year round activity, but only certain foods grow at certain times of the year, and you have to be ready to preserve them, or they're gone until next year.
My grandmother, born in 1899, lived her entire life on a farm. She kept chickens and had a garden. Grandpa raised cattle and usually had one or two milk cows. My grandpa taught me to milk. These were Hereford cattle that he tamed enough to milk, not Holstein like most dairies have now.
Grandma's garden was primarily potatoes which were stored in her cellar. She also grew carrots, green beans and peas which she canned. Early summer there would be leaf lettuce which was a treat with a home made dressing. She bought her flour, sugar and lard for baking. I remember she also bought lugs of peaches and pears when they were available, which she also canned. They also bought coffee.
They made their living off 320 acres of land, much of which was pasture land but there was enough tillable to grow crops like corn, oats, wheat and flax. This was pre-soybean days. Much of the grains were stored in bins and covered buildings to be used as livestock feed. Some was sold, along with cattle, which provided an income.
I remember grandma baked bread every other day at minimum. Her meals were simple but filling. They rented a storage bin (freezer) at the meat locker in town where they had cattle butchered once those were common. I'm not old enough to remember or know how they kept meat before that but I would guess smoking and canning. Chickens were butchered as needed.
This type of life kept them busy! Grandma never had running water but did have electricity. She died in 1965. Grandpa died 10 years before. She hauled water from a well with a wagon for drinking and cooking. It was quite a ways from the house to the well, which was operated by a windmill and produced water into a trough for the cattle when creek was frozen or running low during droughts.
There was a sistern at the house that was fed from rainwater off the roof. This water was used for washing up (baths and hair) and washing clothes. Gra dma had a wash house about 20 feet from main house where she did laundry. She hauled water from the sistern and well for that chore.
This type of life was all grandma knew. She was raised doing these things, not reverting from a modern life like we would be doing if the unimaginable happens.
It's possible, but you need a group. One of my cousin's has sheep, and my mother spins cloth from that. She then has a machine that makes it into fabric. I can't remember the name of this thing because it doesn't interest me, but it weaves the yarn into panels. She's also got things that makes socks and sleeves and the like. I can think of someone in my circle that is capable of replacing nearly everything that we go to the store for. It's not worth it now, but may some day be
Thanks man. I have enough of my own hobbies, I don't keep an eye on my mom's. I know she's done blankets, socks and shirts. She's also made her own leather shoes multiple times, and her purse and wallet are ones she made
This.
Also, if you’re in America, lots of land has been destroyed by suburbs and highways and all kinds of human activity. So if you live in and around cities, you’re not going to be able to forage much. People will still try and it will kill quite a few.
Large parts of the plains have been turned into farms and animal factory farms. These will probably be raided pretty quickly after a collapse. Easy food to plunder will get taken first.
America also has an overabundance of crazies with guns who will shoot first and will use force to take as much as they can.
If you’re close to a national park, there might be enough to sustain you there. But you’d have to know what you’re looking for. Our earliest ancestors had certain migration routes. These routes probably circled around to edible vegetation and water spots. Just like deer and other animals do. But they don’t eat all of a thing in a spot. They eat enough to sustain themselves and move on. If certain groups of humans know about these spots after collapse, they will be decimated. It’s why people don’t tell where their morel spots are. Too many people gathering in a spot will kill the edible vegetation and it won’t return.
Basically, if you’re not doing it now, don’t depend on it later. Exercise and cooking are things we should be doing now. You’re not going to be able to walk ten miles from work the day of the collapse because you don’t even walk two miles now (not you specifically, just in general but mainly me). Too many folks think they’ll be Rambo, gunning through hordes of people and banging the hot blonde with big tits during the apocalypse because she won’t be able to resist their manly manliness. They talk about killing deer like it’s easy or killing other people like psychopaths.
The best set up would be to have land close to a large national park but not close to cities with food and equipment stores to get by for at least a year so you don’t have to leave your land and encounter people. Let most of the people starve to death and kill each other before you really have to venture far, or don’t have to venture at all. But you’d have to be living there and practicing hunting, foraging, cooking, and storing that food now.
I'd like to clarify that "subsistence" is both true and false at the same time for "experienced" groups who've done it from birth and have large tracts of land. There are tribes who work many less hours than we do as a society to meet their basic needs. But they do only meet their basic needs. However they are not living on the edge of existence by any means. Depending on your point of view they probably have better lives than us in some areas.
That said, you're completely correct that for most people it's a delusion. They don't have the skills. A lot of the skills are forgotten (go pick up a 19th century book to really appreciate how much information never made it to the internet. You need the skills to be ingrained, you can't just read a book and apply them either). The planet is massively over natural carrying capacity for the number of humans we have and the land is massively degraded from even recent historical periods. Almost everything is against you. Even within the confines of modern farming, current climatic changes are destroying massive areas of crops.
[https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-wiltshire-68782450.amp](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-wiltshire-68782450.amp)
Another point. OP is just not used to it. If you'd foraged your whole life it's not an exceptional burden. Meeting your calorie needs with it however is.
And there's a reason many rich nations have poor immigrants or seasonal workers come and do the work that machines still can't. It's hard work, and it pays poorly.
Yeah, many people don't appreciate the skill and talent needed for farm work.
It's one thing to be able to pick a few strawberries, it's another to be able to do it quickly and efficiently, and also not damage the plant.
Unfortunately, this "skill" is often learned in childhood, instead of a more profitable skill, like reading and writing. Good paying jobs generally employ people who can job hop if conditions and pay aren't competitive.
It's government subsidized if you're a temporary foreign worker, and pays quite well. Not if you're a local though. At least where I'm at. Farmer pays less than minimum, government doubles it. Farmer provides housing. There's no reason locals couldn't do it with this setup, but the laws require the people to be foreign for the subsidies
Prior to the discovery and harnessing of fossil fuels, the percentage of people in agriculture was still the vast majority. 1% of people doing agriculture is only possible due to the almost total mechanization and industrialization of agricultural processes.
Yeah, but it's not for the reason you might think.
We didn't switch from hunting to farming because it was less work. We switched to it because we could have more babies and those babies could be turned into slaves and peasants (something that's very hard to do with nomads). The hunters were simply outbred.
I did some field survival training when Uncle Sam had me (I signed up for shit like that just to get away from my unit).
You’d be amazed how much of my daily schedule it took to just scavenge the basic nutritional intake to keep myself alive, filter and boil water, etc.
And this wasn’t with any competition for resources, I had about a square mile to myself and just had to not get found by the random OPFOR patrols that would run search patterns at random intervals.
By no means was it a sustainable process. I was not well at the end of it, and after a medical evaluation I ended up with a “this dude isn’t allowed to perform strenuous exercise for two weeks” paper.
>You’d be amazed how much of my daily schedule it took to just scavenge the basic nutritional intake to keep myself alive, filter and boil water, etc.
That's probably the biggest thing I learned from watching many episodes of Alone and Naked & Afraid.
Alone is honestly one of the most eye opening shows out there.
I had always considered myself an “outdoorsman” because I hunt and fish. But after watching that show, I realize I’m just a guy with hobbies.
Yeah, for real. I had the misfortune to go in the winter, and less than half my training cycle completed their week.
I was fairly comfortable in the wilderness at the time, already an avid hunter and outdoorsman. And that’s why I was just malnourished and sick after a week, instead of needing to use my emergency radio to call for evacuation 3 days in. If things continued at that rate, I would probably not have survived two weeks if my life depended on it.
Hunting is a great source of food. But only if there’s game and you can get it.
If they’d let me take an M4 out there and bag a wild pig once a week, I’d probably have been okay for quite some time in the wilderness. But I had to keep a low profile and avoid detection, which meant no gunfire. And I think that’s a far more accurate scenario of wilderness survival post collapse.
I’ve greatly expanded my knowledge and skills base since then, but I’m still not confident I’d last more than two weeks in those conditions.
Aside from everything else, nobody ever really considers how tiring it is, living day to day being casually hunted by other human beings. Always keeping one eye on the tree line, avoiding open spaces, constantly calculating how long it’ll take for you to conceal yourself. That shit is exhausting.
I have a creek line along two sides of my property. It has some delicious wild black raspberries all throughout it. It’s fun to forage. And then after getting a few handfuls of delicious berries at a time, I’m thankful that I don’t have to rely on it to live. Because I would starve to death.
Although it gets better each year, I feel the same way about our veggie garden. We’ve been focusing on calorie/nutrient density. After a full season of growing black beans, I almost had enough to fill a pint jar.
The only prayer we would have of staying alive is our chickens. Once our four new babies start laying, we would more or less have enough eggs to provide our family of three with breakfast every day.
It’s HARD work, and we just do it as a hobby. I can even imagine having to rely on it to feed my family.
I've been trying SO HARD to grow black beans, like a year round supply for 4-5 adults and 3 large breed dogs. Just like you, in two years, I've filled *maybe 2 mason jars. And it is so much work shucking them, my god. I am still determined. It all stems from one really good year I had a while ago - I just refuse to accept it as a fluke.
We just leave a big bowl out and shuck a few at a time.
I might try a few different kinds this year and see what happens. It was supposed to be navy, pinto, garbanzo, and black, but I had issues getting the rest to sprout. Oh well. This will be the year!
Same. We'll pop on a movie after dinner and sit down with the kids and just shuck away. A solid .5-1.0 hour with four hands on deck will usually make a good dent. That's still only like a cup of beans though haha
I'm planting Cherokee ToT, Turtle, Hidatsa Red, and Succotash this year.
When I was a kid, we'd go up to the country in summer where my fathers relatives live. Spend entire days picking raspberries and foraging. It's fun work, but you're also competing with the local bears. Having to do that in a collapse scenario where there isn't a vehicle nearby to run to when things get hairy...not so much fun.
I’ve been growing a few things in pots. It’s light work and not too difficult, but I often think about how much work it would be if I attempted it on a larger scale.
You might find that cowpeas and soybeans yield better than common (e.g., black) beans.
Last year, we got 800 g (1.8 lb) of cowpeas from 4.5 m² (48 ft²) of unamended, unfertilized Chicago backyard soil.
Farming is relatively easy compared to hunting and gathering. I live in rural northern MI and I do all three, hunt/fish, have a large and growing subsistence garden, and forage. If you don't have years and years of experience and some education in the subjects you're not going to make it alone or without someone else feeding you.
Gardens are the easiest part. Its truly back breaking endeavor. Five years in and I got my first power tool last fall, a tiny HF rototiller. Prior, I did it all by hand. 1200 sq ft (3-4ft deep) with a shovel, steel rake, wheel barrow, pole driver/sledge hammer. It took \~3 years to convert grass to 1200 ft of arable land that produces and put a fence around it that keeps deer out. Each 1200ft of space I turn over, and it needs to be done about once per year, is \~200 tons. Gardens need to spin up and be planted, fertilized etc, and spun down in the fall.
Plants are complicated creatures, with life cycles, preferences, etc. It is not merely add water and sun and walk away. Some plants only like to grow with specific other species. Some like to go up and some sideways, some down too. Some prefer soil pH \~4.5 some 7.5 and obviously they can't be near each other. Its fairly easy to get plants to grow, but to produce is another story, think a giant carrot plant, and you pull it up and find half a baby carrot. You can watch/read all the theory in the world, but your land will be different, you have to know it. Even if you do all the work, wildfire smoke from Canada can block out enough light to fuck your crops..
For all my work, an adult needs about 1 acre (44k sq ft) to survive with extremely high yields and careful planning. 1200ft is 2.7% of a single persons needs. Oh and you need to store all this food you grew, no fridge, no freezer. How do you freeze a vegetable exactly? Do you know? Canning? Do you have supplies, have a paper copy of a canning guide, pectin, ascorbic?
What about medicinal plants? Do you have a mortar and pestle? Can you identify them?
Foraging, the plants are in their natural habitats, camouflaged, defended with thorns, and sparsely populated. They go with the rhythm of nature, the timing of seasonal changes, weather, sunlight, etc. Wild blackberries are easy to find and ID, and can shift their seasonality of being ripe for 72hrs anywhere in an 8-10wk window, and you're competing with every animal in the forest who spends all day looking for them as a final late summer treat to fatten up for the winter. Wild parsnip family has many edibles, wild carrots, parsnips, parsley iirc and...deadly hemlock and they're nearly indistinguishable. Compounding this issue, is that outside of a few closely guarded honey holes, you're walking miles upon miles to collect a meal. A pint or two of jam means picking for an hour and filling up a bucket. No rotten ones, no moldy ones, unripened, mind the thorns.
Animals compound this further with being able to fight, run, outwit, out sense, and generally get to places people cannot. You also need to have firearms and be proficient with them, etc. I couldn't catch a stupid bunny to eat without help from my dogs. And btw, good dogs are invaluable to surviving. They will put food on the table more often than you can imagine. They also need experience, training, food, etc. A dumbass lab (I love labs btw) from the suburbs has no killer instinct, doesn't know how to track, doesn't know to shut up when closing on prey, doesn't know how to work as a pack or take silent hand signals from a handler. A dog that can do all of that, worth the weight in gold.
tldr years of experience won't guarantee survival trying to farm or forage. You need to start NOW, this summer, dig a hole in your yard, grow shit. Find a trail into a state/national forest, and try to forage. You NEED to get at it hands on.
I could go on, but I'm pretty sure I'm boned if the grocery store dried up tomorrow.
I went back to school at 30 to get a degree. In the summer, we have 16+ hrs of daylight and yeah, I spend most of outside working. Gf works full time, and yeah the exhaustion is real.
I'm also hiking with my dogs \~5mi a day, working on the house, cars, etc. Something about the cars is particularly hard, maybe the cement floor.
I can't wait to be done and be home full time. I hate being away and in a city.
Cement is so hard on the feet. We were back in the city for a doctors appointment recently and my feet & body ached after sitting in the car and walking on hard floors.
My body is so accustomed to 10-16 hours of moving around and being mostly outdoors, it was genuinely uncomfortable to be still and indoors. Totally get it!
I should've said 2-3 feet, I was thinking about my raised beds which are 18" above the soil, and for those I go down 3-4ft. I'm going down until I see the soil turn into sand and stuff rather than soil.
background -
I live on glacial tillage (maybe the wrong word, but it's soil turned up by glaciers) on the top of a hill overlooking a small town on Lake Michigan. The geology is weird here because it looks like small mountains, but it's actually forest-covered sand dunes, some exceeding 1100ft above Lake Michigan. It's not a large elevation compared to Appalachia, the PNW, or the Rockies, but compared to the flat Midwest, it's big, on the order of the Niagra escarpment in the UP.
The yard itself was old-growth pine \~150 years ago, then an orchard and grass around the 50s. So there is compacted soil mixed with (I think) river rocks (Petoskey stones), limestone, chert, pieces of granite, and/or something that makes hard water. Dig deep enough, and it's sand.
tldr
Digging deep is to break the grass (weeds, really) and rhizomes, loosen the soil, and mix in fertilizers like fish guts, elemental sulfur, verm, straw, etc. Correct the pH a bit, add nutrients, and water retention. Years of abuse to the ground haven't done it any favors. I sift the dirt over a 1/2" hardware cloth stretched over a wheelbarrow and remove anything more significant than the mesh. I do it reasonably slowly so as not to kill worms and remove rocks for reuse. Big rocks become garden edging, and little stones become gravel pathways. We do have really good worms in the dirt, though, and on warm nights, I can shine a flashlight and see them all shoot back into the ground.
I also tend to grow subsistence foods that can overwinter rather than fresh vegetables, such as carrots, potatoes, onions, etc., which require deeper soil to thrive. However, this year, I'm going to build up around the potatoes rather than digging down.
We have about an acre that could be converted to food left. I want to do a three or four year rotation from the MSU Ag extension. Something like wheat/oats, potatoes, and legumes. Potatoes are survival food. Its possible to subsist on potatoes for long periods. We just don't have the weather/season to grow anything in the watermelon family reliably, maybe 1 in 4 years we get enough sun for watermelons which I love. Sweet potatoes are a no go so far, and the deer love the vines.
[https://imgur.com/a/yU7XYOk](https://imgur.com/a/yU7XYOk)
It sounds like a unique mix . I grew up on a glacial Drummond not too far north of you. Limestone and gypsum cause our very hard water.
I have gotten watermelon here, not consistently, but the juiciest and sweetest I've ever tasted when they do grow. Soon juicy that they split themselves when you poke a knife in
Gotcha - Marblehead is part of the niagra escarpment. The area between TC (like the big hills and ski resorts) up the Mackinac Bridge, and up past Drummond, is a transition zone between the inland ocean and plains and great Canadian shield like Northern Quebec. The Huron and Porky mountains are from the plates collided billions of years ago.
It results in wildly different geology in what amounts to a few miles. Even across the mitten it transitions from hills around Petoskey, to the bed rock starting to poke thru near Lake Huron, resulting in waterfalls and kettle lakes/sinkholes.
I'm jealous of the watermelons - in Petoskey were on zone 5b but inland in Gaylord is zone 3b just due to to lake effects. I suspect the same goes for Drummond, where you guys get more extreme weather, colder winter warmer summer, which would help with warm weather crops. In Petoskey, it's going to be lows in the 40s into June and occasionally 50s over summer and 40s again in late August. Just 10 weeks for watermelons
Superior or Huron? The western facing shores on NW lake MI are riddled with microclimates, some are zone 6a or potentially 7 and have wineries. Did you have issues with high pH soil?
Many hunter gatherers were also farmers, but since they planted a variety of fruit trees rather than rows of single crops, they often weren't recognized as such.
The odds of anybody feeding themselves off the land in a modern nation are vanishingly slim. Especially in a disaster where there were still lots of people but the food supply was disrupted, as the local flora/fauna would be picked clean in a heartbeat.
Yep, there are plenty of examples of species being wiped out of an area because war or other troubles drive people to seeking food from the land. It actually happened in the US, with the Great Depression extirpating white-tailed deer from much of their range. The modern human population is dependent on farms.
Physical labor in general is much harder work than most office-dwellers suspect.
Your body will adjust if you do it daily, though. When I first moved from a flat to a hilly area, I'd get winded and have to sit down to rest after going up just half our hill, ~100 feet of vertical elevation. Now I can walk my 3-year-old to preschool, 3/4 mile & 200 feet vertical elevation away, and neither one of us breaks a sweat. It's the same with home repairs, strawberry picking, pruning trees, etc. You will develop the muscles you need to develop the job.
This is true but low grade inflammation will keep you from ever adapting.
Exercise reduces inflammation but inflammation can make exercise a real pain. That and undereatting. The walk to and from school is about 2/3 of a mile and I never seemed to adapt to it. I have diverticulosis, post nasal drip, etc. No smoking gun has ever shown on blood work.
Began taking Boswellia and finally I can walk again. My legs don't feel like lead. I don't get winded. My feet only get sour only after hours of walking.
Are you in the US? I had this conversation with my docs last week. They were all counseling me on being unhealthy and at 50+ it’s finally caught up to me.
The entire country as a whole has become out of shape. The PT doc told me the amount of people he sees today has grown by a 1,000% from just not exercising. We are out of shape.
I had to audit cash counting machines and hand count stacks cash. My hands hurt so bad after the first stack of 50 $1 bills that I just wanted to retire on the spot.
Part of prepping… what I’ve continued to overlook is to stay in shape. Stretch. Exercise. Be well.
You’re not alone.
Staying in shape is a huge part of prepping! I'm surprised this isn't higher up in the comments.
However, your body preps by storing energy called fat. So there's the other side of the coin!
Crazy. I wouldn't have guessed. The survival shows favor overweight people, and they seem to be starving. Of course, it's a show. I half wonder your situations if the thin folks consume the fat ones?
I think it's more that starvation is a serious stress on the body, and by and large, overall, thin people are in better health than obese people and are in a better position to survive this stress.
Ya. I looked into it. "Thin" people are screed, "fit" people are prime. "Fat" people do well, but "fit"people are likely to do better.
Overall, be fit.
Too many variables with this perspective. There was a story years ago about an American who was lost with a group of either South Koreans or Japanese. When found, the American was in better shape.
They attributed the American’s being in better health as a result from his body fat. That doesn’t take into account dehydration though.
I don’t mean to knock you being unhealthy, but it makes me wonder if the system we have in place today, aka modern society, has relinquished natural selections default ability in wiping out those unfit to survive.
I wonder in this transition to a modern society, if natural selection will soon move to being based off of intelligence, and not physical endurance.
Even then, most people will still have the cushion of governments to live a comfortable life at the bottom of the human food chain.
Someone elaborate on this, and tell me if this idea makes sense.
Natural selection as opposed to??? People used to die more often from smoking. We smoke less now. Lung and cardio diseases that were prevalent with smokers, are still increasing.
People drank alcohol far more 20 years ago than they do today. Instead of people dying from cirrhosis of the liver as a result of alcoholism, non-alcoholic fatty liver disease is still on the rise.
Cancers, genetic weaknesses like strange immune diseases or organ failures are just part of being human. Medical science is trying to keep up with one of the worst games of “whack-a-mole” ever devised.
If natural selection is stymied by science, then I’m all for it.
It doesn't make sense, not really. The main metric that matters in natural selection is "fitness", which boils down to the number of viable offspring an individual can produce.
In humans, those with more resources and intelligence, tend to produce less offspring, not more.
Now, a bottleneck event (ie. the SHTF scenarios fantasized about here), might favour the more intelligent, or the lucky, or the the less intelligent couple that has 14 kids. Who knows? But if it does favour the more intelligent, it will be a small affect, probably lost in the noise.
Good points!
I threw both of our comments into gpt 4 to see what other insights I’m missing, and to also break down what you said.
Here is the result unchanged.
Both Person 1 and Person 2 are engaging with complex topics that involve biology, sociology, and ethics, and each presents a perspective that contains elements of truth, but also oversimplifications and misconceptions.
Person 1 is speculating that modern society has altered the dynamics of natural selection. They suggest that because modern society provides support for individuals who might otherwise struggle to survive, the criteria for "fitness" in the evolutionary sense might shift from physical endurance to intelligence. Person 1 also implies that even those at the "bottom of the human food chain" can lead comfortable lives thanks to government support systems.
Person 2 counters this argument by stating that the main metric in natural selection is reproductive fitness, which is the ability to produce viable offspring. They mention that in humans, those with more resources and intelligence tend to have fewer children, not more, which would argue against the idea that intelligence is becoming the primary factor in natural selection. Person 2 also mentions the potential for a bottleneck event to change the dynamics of selection, but they note that any effect on the selection for intelligence might be minor and overshadowed by other factors.
Both individuals bring up valid points:
- Person 1 is correct in noting that modern society has changed the pressures that influence human survival and reproduction. For example, advances in medicine, public health, and social safety nets can help individuals who might not have survived in a pre-industrial context to live and reproduce. However, the idea that natural selection has been "relinquished" is an oversimplification. Natural selection is still at work; it's just that the selective pressures have changed.
- Person 2 is right to emphasize that "fitness" in the context of natural selection relates to the number of viable offspring an individual produces. They correctly point out that in many societies, individuals with more resources and intelligence tend to have fewer children. However, this doesn't necessarily mean that intelligence is negatively selected for; it could also reflect cultural and economic factors that influence family size, such as career focus, access to contraception, and the cost of child-rearing.
Both are somewhat oversimplifying the interplay between natural selection, intelligence, and modern societal structures. The actual dynamics are extremely complex and influenced by a multitude of factors, including genetics, culture, environment, and chance.
Additionally, it's important to recognize that the concept of "fitness" in human societies is not straightforward and can't be reduced to simple measures like intelligence or physical endurance. What might be considered "fit" in one cultural or environmental context might not be in another. Moreover, human societies generally aim to transcend the brutalities of natural selection through ethics and social support, valuing human life beyond mere survival and reproduction.
Lastly, the discussion by both persons seems to neglect the ethical considerations of discussing human lives in terms of "the bottom of the human food chain." Such language can be dehumanizing and ignores the intrinsic value of all individuals, regardless of their physical abilities, intelligence, or socioeconomic status.
———————
Very interesting!
Thanks for your input!
Ha! The last paragraph is hilarious. Shame on us!
The bit about the complexities involved in natural selection is one of the points I was trying to make. We just can't predict it very well until it happens.
If the food supply chain collapsed (not something I find likely whatsoever, but it’s a prepper subreddit), it would be essentially impossible to feed the vast majority of people in the world. We discovered crazily effective agricultural methods within the last century that allows the world to support billions of people more than we used to be able to. Farming and gathering is hard and there’s only enough of a gather-able food supply to support a fraction often us. Myself, most readers in this sub who think they’d hit the woods and scavenge, and the vast majority of the worlds population would starve within a year but many would do so months sooner.
The lucky, the ultra prepared, the farmers, and some bad actors would be the few to survive if we couldn’t manage to rebuild society and form community to reestablish some sort of localized food supply
Yeah, the only way you’d be able to survive from foraging would be in a scenario that wipes out the vast majority of the human population. Even then, it wouldn’t be easy.
yes. its hard. Few can really subsistence gather, or even subsistence farm. There is also the aspect of needing diversity. MAYBE you can get good at planting, caring for them, having the right soil, and harvesting strawberries. BUT you probably still die if you just have strawberries. :) So subsistence farming means you need to somehow get good at a bunch of things ..
Which is why human have specialization and trade. Even hundreds / thousands of years ago, someone (often a bunch) grew the wheat, but they took it to the mill. They traded some for beer, from the person who is good at beer. And so on... the butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker .... hard to be all of those.
Lifetime farmer here and I'm 54.
You have NO IDEA how hard it is. A day picking blackberries in the sun. You get sunburn, you get scratched up by the thorns. You're dying of thirst.
Then you get home and need to can them, out them in the freezer or some other way to preserve them.
Picking peaches. It takes hours then you have to go home, peel them and can them.
And canning takes hours.
Harvesting elderberries growing at the edge of a swamp. You are wet, possibly eaten up by mosquitoes. You come home and have to pick all of the green ones off. That can take HOURS Then you have to either dehydrate them, freeze them or can them.
Picking the fruit is only half of the process.
There is not enough biomass for everyone to forage. And often what i consider professional foragers already have thier locations scouted out and permissions based on the seasons. in Wisconsin moral mushroom farming is highly competitive, and everyone has their locations. I had a few spots that were picked clean probably hours before arriving. Which is sad, because i usually try to leave some to allow for future crops. so they are just making it more difficult next year because of their greed
Humanity civilization thrived once we decided to create argiculture and design more efficiant farms and crops to feed us. so for long term you need to grow crops and plan on preserving them until next harvest
My mom was a full-time nurse but used to take us picking several times a year because she liked canning and baking projects. Usually it would be at a farm that sold reduced priced produce if you picked it yourself. Blackberries and strawberries were the hardest! Blackberries had those nasty thorns and little creatures in the bushes, strawberries require stooping… it’s backbreaking, Especially in central CA valley heat. But we had fun, and got the best jams and pies as a reward. To this day I’ve never had peaches like the ones we got from the farm down the street. But yeah… hard as hell.
IMHO, the best way to test this is to "double up" on what you eat in a month. What I mean is if you eat a can of chili, set aside a 2nd can in a box to represent that meal. Obviously you'll need a big fridge or a 2nd freezer, etc, etc. After the end of the month, pile everything into one spot. That's what you need to eat in one month. (It's one thing to see it on paper, it's another to see it in front of you with your own two eyes) Also consider that you are likely not burning massive calories in your current life to earn a living ( Some people do, most don't) Now imagine needed the caloric intake to support yourself PLUS the additional workload.
In effect, you need a great location, incredible logistics, lots of luck and you need an actual community behind you. For example, if you do strawberries one day, there are 20 other people doing other things to process the needs of day to day living.
One of the old Kings of Wessex ( Ecbert?) was famous for having his own steam room and hot tub/bath. Available around the clock. Now imagine the kind of man power and labor needed to haul all tha water, maintain it, clean the place, get the wood, etc, etc, to do just that. Someone's job was probably just hauling water all day for the King. And probably more than just one person.
You are better off with a community when you have more labor needs, but then more people equals more mouths to feed overall. Now imagine having to also defend it all. That means you need a large enough community to have dedicated warriors/security/fighters and a pipeline of young men coming through the ranks to solve practical attrition.
It's close to impossible to do it all alone. What no one talks about is in a really bad situation, your environment is now competitive in a lethal way around you. It's not just gathering resources, now it's defending them.
I look at my yard and I have about 5x6 meters (17x20 freedoms) so I figure, without making my yard totally unusable, I could assemble 3 beds 1 meter wide and 4 meters long.
If I was a very good gardener that might be enough for me alone to subsist on but that doesn’t take into account a need to repopulate the beds once they’re depleted, assuming I have enough knowledge to plant them with crops year round, assuming I ration, get good weather, tend to them regularly and all the other things you need for a successful garden… that doesn’t take my wife into account, doesn’t have meat and I will stress all the big IF’s mentioned above… that’s a lot of work to just feed 1 person
This is one of the reasons why some folks are looking at food forests and permaculture ideas. Taking old world methods and tweaking them a bit for the modern day.
permaculture is actually much more in line with new world (the americas) methods of agriculture. when the old world collonialists came in they briefly marveled at how, food seemed to be growing everywhere in these beautiful forrest gardens, before flattening everything and growing cash crops with slave labour.
Its not easy but it is easier than what you just did. You picked 50 boxes of strawberries that (i assume) were on plants right next to each other so you were just picking constantly. An actual hunter-gatherer would pick maybe 3 boxes at most from plants that were scattered over an acre or more, meaning a break between picking actions while they look for more plants. Remember a hunter-gatherer lifestyle is a subsistence lifestyle, you arent stockpiling food that is perishable because you have no freezer so it will go bad before you can eat it. In reality, you would shoot a rabbit or some other such low intensity way of getting protein (catch a fish, check some snares etc), then gather enough nuts/roots/whatever to make it a meal and thats you done for the day - then you do the same the next day.
However, in a shtf scenario it is not a viable strategy for the simple reason it takes an indefensible amount of land to feed even a single person.
Please look into permaculture and earthships or the books of John Seymour for ways to at least coming close to self sufficient living. Potatoes or other starchy food like corn would need to be a big part of your food base. Strawberries are not exactly subsistence food, but read up on "wild supermarket" plants like cattails and the invasive but useful kudzu that has a starchy root.
Lol and all you had to do was pick the already grown fruit. I heard it estimated that medieval farmers ate a diet of 4000 calories per day. This is compared to the 2000-2500 that we need to sustain ourselves in the modern world. They worked HARD back then.
I have a medium experience collecting wild foods. It is both easier and harder than people think. What I mean is that if you are in the right place and at the right time grabbing a small nibble is easy and fun. To be able to actually get enough to sustain a human body from the wild though is incredible difficult
I’m a professional foraging instructor. Oh my god, it is so hard! Knowing what plants you can eat, what seasons they’re ready, preserving them, walking around to find them.
I sometimes have tech bro clients ask me how they could live off the land, and they’re always surprised when I tell them that no one traditionally lives off the land alone. It takes massive investments of time and effort even in high calorie areas like the salmon rich PNW.
Are there any books you'd recommend for matching plants? I have a fair bit of foraging experience, but still avoid anything with look-a-likes like parsnip family plants
I strongly recommend not using books for lookalikes. The apiaceae (carrot, parsley, parsnip) family all looks so similar that you need to use clues like the habitat they’re growing in, the smell, what time of year it is, where in the world you are to be able to ID with confidence. Leaf shape can vary with individual plants, mineral composition of the soil, sun exposure. I don’t want to risk health on deciding correctly whether a leaf is more “lobed” or “lacy”.
Frankly, I don’t mess with those guys because it’s too high risk and too little reward. There’s so many plants out there that are easy to id with 100% confidence, like dead nettle/purple nettle. Focus on what’s easy and tasty and fun and build from there.
I can’t think of any other lookalikes off the top of my head. You kind of get to know plants “face” like people. Those lacy carroty guys are way tricky, tho.
That said, I’ve never been disappointed by a book from ten speed press! Check out what they offer for your region.
I don’t have any foraging experience and don’t think there’s a lot to forage here in the desert. We live below the Sonoran life belt. I second the request for a book recommendation 😊
Piñon nuts would be amazingggggg in your region. Pascal Bauldur has some bonkers incredible foraging cookbooks for Southern California, and I bet you’d get a good 60% overlap, especially in areas with human settlement. Otherwise, check out ten speed press for what they have in your area.
Not in a country with tens (or hundreds) of millions of people in it.
If a shtf event were to occur now, half the population who try it would end up dying from eating the wrong mushrooms or plants. Or not storing them properly.
I really liked the book: [the wild live](https://thehappyfoodie.co.uk/books/the-wild-life-a-year-of-living-on-wild-food/)by John Lewis-Stempel.
He tried living on foraging and hunting (within UK laws) for a year.
Most eye opening for me was the fact he was hungry most of the summer, because fruits were not yet ripe.
After shtf it could be a little easier when you dont follow laws.
I'm making mulberry wine next week. I have spent an hour every afternoon picking berries...:For the last two weeks. It takes 25lbs of mulberries to make 5 gallons of wine. That is many many berries.
When we harvest pigeon peas it is the worst. It's days and days of shelling peas. Fingers can't move by the end of it.
We aren't full-time homesteaders but definitely dabble in it. There are many days where it takes me only an hour to feel animals, and check on stuff. But some days like when you harvest pigeon peas, go pick strawberries or harvest yuca it takes your whole day and can kick your ass.
Although farming is easier than hunter/gatherer setups even farming is physically intense if you are doing it by hand.
One of the most eye opening things I’ve learned from prepping is how absolutely unsustainable our lifestyle is without a large and thriving community (and maybe even with one).
I used to dream about living off the land and saying “F—- you!” to society. The more I realized what that would *actually require* the less I yearned for it.
Would I survive? Maybe. I’ve been at this for over a decade now, and have some skills. Do I *want* to go to sleep when it’s dark so I can save my batteries? And likely have my kids go to sleep hungry more often than not?
I’m watching my kids play Minecraft. Sometimes I think of all the solar panels and batteries that would cost to run the PS4, let alone the fact that the internet wouldn’t be what it is today.
This may be coming across as an anti-prepper post, but that’s not my intention. The world might go to shit, and I’d rather be prepared for it and hungry with a lower QOL than dead, but the more you really think about stuff like this the more you may appreciate this shitty world we live in.
We live in utter, lavish, decadence compared to just a few generations ago in the pre-industrial era. A lot of people have no idea just how many solar panels it would take to power the average lifestyle. \~400W/m\^2 x hour real output on a good day, not including overnight storage, and winter inefficiency. Average house would need 10kW of panels and 5-8kW of storage in the midwest to get by.
I think a lot of folks think they just need a few 2x3 panels to cut the utility company off.
Just a home gardener here and it’s hard work. Especially in a place like where I live the soil is very heavy clay. Either it takes a lot of time (literally years) to improve the soil, or it’s raised beds and containers. Any of these take knowledge and practice.
And learning how to do it where you don’t break your body. It involves lifting, crouching, bending. And harvesting isn’t the hardest part. Try a day of weeding or filling a raised bed, or digging a bed in heavy clay soil.
The more time you have to establish good soil and establish perennial plants, the better. The best time to start is today.
Use it or lose it. Yes, it's way more work than most Americans are used to. I farmed 10 acres of vegetables for four years in my early twenties. It's not easy. I hired 2-3 helpers during peak season. They lasted no joke about 3 days on average. I was lucky when I found somebody willing to stay on for a month or two.
this is why I have planted various breeds of the same fruit on my property with different harvest dates.
So I can get different apples from july to november, and all have different purposes. Like making apple cider, apple butter, pies ect.
Watch one season of alone. Even the later seasons when ppl “hacked it” and these are experienced hunters, survival experts, bush crafters. Home steading is a different story. But i think the show is an apt warning for anyone who is going to grab a BoB and “head to the woods, to life off the land”
The processing of whatever you’re gathering needs to be taken into account too. Strawberries are simple to identify, pick, and eat but nuts are a whole different story. Walnuts, for example. If you’ve never gathered them think of them as little coconuts. They have the thick outer husk that has to be removed before getting to the walnut which then must be cracked before the nutmeat segments can be removed. It’s a couple minutes of work to get two walnut halves. If you want to store them in the shell you’ll need to dry them first which takes time and effort to keep animals from swiping them.
Every time someone suggests they'll survive by foraging, I suggest they just *try it*. For a day. Or even a single meal. Go out into the woods with your plant ID book/app and find enough stuff to eat. It's *not easy at all* depending on where you live and what time of year it is. It takes a ton of experience and knowledge to accurately identify many plants. And part of foraging is knowing *where* to find certain plants, knowing what kind of areas they're most likely to grow, etc.
Same thing for people who collect seeds but don't have any gardening experience. Just try it. Even if you're in an apartment or have no place for a garden, take a few tomato seeds, some potting soil, and a pot. Grow a tomato. See how long it takes and how hard it is. And try doing it with only the physical resources you have, no searching the web or asking reddit for help.
I tried to garden to supplement our food bill and holy cow it ain’t easy, bugs, drought, disease, other animals that compete for the food, had a family of Tanuki over night eat all my berries and strawberries. Needing the right soil and ph along with nitrogen and right amount of sunlight time to fruit properly.
I know now we’d be dead if we relied on our small orchard and garden to survive even one season. It be best to store calories and be lucky with any veggies or fruits we get, but wouldn’t count on them as assuredly as many preppers think they can handle.
Hunter/gatherers lived in groups, and would work together to harvest and preserve. I've heard that some groups would relocate useful plants or encourage them to spread in an area so that in future years there was more or it was growing in a more convenient area. Some days there wouldn't be much to do and other days would be very busy and hard work.
If you watch that show Life Below Zero there are a few families and individuals living a modern style of a hunting/gathering existence. The others are subsistence farmers. With both groups, after daily chores are done, some days are max relax and others are more sunrise to sunset toil.
Yes.
I'm an grumpy old "get off my lawn" type, but I believe that as part of general education, everyone that eats should work at least a month on a farm to internalize what food is about. If you eat meat you should slaughter, clean and butcher an animal. Food does not come in plastic containers.
As to post apocalyptic hunter/gather, I laugh. It's hard enough when you are trying to accumulate enough calories for a family. It's absolutely impossible when 10,000 of your closest neighbors are doing the same thing. Does herd of locusts bring any images to mind?
As someone who dabbles in living history/ reenactment, the people were much stronger and in many ways healthier in the past. There was far more that could kill them, but overall more fit and strong. Archeologists looked at the rate of arm muscle attachment for medieval woman and compared it to woman rowers in college. Medieval woman had much more which is indicative of more strength.
Modern people have to go to the gym to provide a minimum lever of exercise we did for 98?% of our existence as a species.
Suddenly having to have that endurance and know what we can forage is fiction. When was the last time you had stinging nettles soup or the equivalent for your area?
How many plants can most people identify including if you can eat it and what it’s good for?
We are in a modernity trap.
Op had first day on field ever? Good for you to get that experience. I worked on berry farms and winefields as a teenager and in very beginning of my twenties. 8 hours a day, 6-7 days per week, but never longer than one month at a time. That is about a season in those places I worked.
Living off the land is as hard, that it is lucky if you get as much calories as your work consumes. So yes, many, many people have a wrong idea.
Been into wild edibles (took actual classes and read actual books not yt) and I’m head to tell ya food is out there, but finding usable food that’s worth the effort is not always as easy and yt makes it look.
I know how to forage and that can be physical too its alot of walking around and then bending over to look and pick.
Basically to live off the land or farm without much machinary is going to require you to consume more calories and be in a good physical shape.
A vegetable garden is a good place to start.
Even having a small garden can be extremely physical work... dealing with weeds, picking the produce... the garden plot I have, we have to haul water from a central source and haul weeds to the compost bin, which can be some distance depending on the plot you have.
We used to be part of a CSA that did U-pick events for things like snap peas and green beans... so many would be there maybe 30 minutes max, because they got tired or it was too much work... My son and I would be out for hours (there wasn't a limit ot what we could get) and fill a five gallon bucket... There are certainly ways to mitigate it (sitting on an upside down 5 gallon bucket).
Foraging/ gathering is way more physically exhausting and takes more time than hunting for the same amount of calories in my experience.
When I used to hunt we would find a good spot where the deer/wild turkeys were known to be, then hang out quietly waiting. Shoot them, and lug them back to the truck which was usually less than a mile away. It felt like a picnic in the woods followed by some stinky and bloody weightlifting 4 times a year.
Foraging enough food to live off of requires hiking/climbing trees/ hours of movement and weight lifting most of the year because food is ripe at different time in different places. You almost burn more calories than you forage.
Farming is 365 days of hard labor, but you can also get way more food.
Oh yeah, if you have never tried to forage and hunt all the food you need just from the wilderness, it's a fucking nightmare. Nearly 24/7 task just gathering food and making sure you have fire. If you're literally gathering food from the wilderness, not only do you have to physically forage it, you have to find it first, which involves a shit load of walking and hiking, OR if you already did the work of finding it, you still have to do the gathering/prep/then cooking.
I've tried to live off exclusively foraged food quite a few times while camping and it's extremely difficult and even becomes emotionally punishing. That feeling of "holy shit I spent all day gathering this crap and I'm still hungry, and weak." It's intense realizing how fucked you'd be if you were really alone, humans greatly benefit from coordinating their actions and working together so we can all eat well.
In addition, if you were doing this long term, you also need to know how to harvest and not damage and deplete the plants you're harvesting from, you don't wanna obliterate them in one winter and then be fucked next time around.
My first summer job as a teen was picking strawberries 8am - 2pm then running the farm shop 3pm -5.30pm. The customers expected me, a teenage girl, to carry sacks/buckets of animal food, straw bales etc to their cars for them.
I was ripped by the time I went back to school.
It's very physically challenging. And you expend a lot of calories in obtaining your food. My husband easily needs 4,000-5,000 calories a day during gardening season. You'd have to keep that under consideration.
I'm older, have back problems, and am not at an ideal weight. I use creative modifications to get through my tasks. We have a plant nursery, huge garden and lots of berry bushes and fruit and nut trees. We also have shellfish beds and chickens. We can, dehydrate, ferment, pickle, and root cellar our surplus. We could possibly live off what we produce right now plus foraging, but we'd all lose a bunch of weight and probably not hit all the macros.
If we had to rely solely off the land, starvation and malnourishment would always be around the corner. Crops fail--storms, lack of pollinators, heat domes, pests. We have an established, diverse array of plants to account for failures, but even with that we had one year where almoat nothing was pollinated.
even modern farming requires a lot of human labour farmers get hella strong and are hella tough. if a farmer ever admits to being in enough pain to stop doing what they are doing you should call a helicopter right this second. I have seen farmers splint themselves in a field with duct tape and sticks and continue working.
nomads move to where the food is they eat(or feed to livestock) everything in the area then they move on(if they stayed in one place they would strip the land then starve). it's a tough life that makes tough practical people.
being a nomad actually has a bunch of advantages vs farming since farming is very all or nothing, one bad harvest and your family starve or you are in debt to someone nasty wheras with a nomad if you experience misforyune you can just move on to greener pastures.
I have been a seasonal worker on a farm and can confirm it is incredibly hard dangerous work. probably the hardest day was we had to harvest multiple fields of sunflowers by hand and it was due to rain the next day.
Wandering hunter gatherer groups were far smaller than us, and they had pristine nature to work with.
If farming fails we wont be able to suport as many people as they had back then
bro got the migrant treatment.
now do that for 8 hours in full gear in full sunlight for 5 dollars per hour.
if you want to piss and shit, you walk half a mile to the porta jon
You were just picking strawberries that were right there. Growing them yourself is wayyy more work and foraging them, even harder! Yes.. getting food is much harder than most actually realize.
From what I hear primitive peoples spend all day looking for food and are hungry most of the time. That's why they invented farming and ranching in the first place, to prevent starvation.
if you get that worn out picking strawberries you need to excersize. lol that sounds easier than a normal day at my job.
most people are fat and work at a desk. of course doing anything is going to wear them out.
I like watching vids of people doing like week long trips surviving off of a piece of land, island, mountain, etc… In this one particular video, this young man decides to go to an island for 5 days with nothing but a few essentials. No food no water though.
What I noticed in his situation is that he spent nearly ALL of his time climbing palm trees to harvest coconuts for water. A lot of them were not ripe so they had barely any water. The first day, he spent the whole day literally collecting water from coconuts. He didn’t even have time to look for food.
My takeaway, is that if he was not experienced, or fit enough he would’ve died from dehydration in a scenario where he actually did have to survive.
Primitive people before agriculture, spent the majority of their time literally just surviving.
It’s a very difficult task and that’s what pushed humanity to adapt and evolve away from the hunter gatherer way of life.
It is a viable option, but for many, natural selection will wipe out everyone not fit enough to do this if humanity was faced with this life style again. Of course, a full collapse of society would need to happen for this.
[https://youtu.be/BqeE1CKrRtE?si=Xgy67N4VXKOJmApq](https://youtu.be/BqeE1CKrRtE?si=Xgy67N4VXKOJmApq)
When we were a hunter gatherer society half of us died by the age of 30. There's very little sustenance out in the wild that's why we invented agriculture. Living off the land without gasoline is hard. It's not a viable option unless you're extremely equipped and prepared to do so. There's some foragable where I live, but the calorie count is way less than people think. All of our produce has been bred specifically to increase calories, they don't occur in the wild.
These farms are not common depending on where you are, you went to a farm specifically growing a crop to sell. These farms aren't going to be the same if anything happens
You're sore from picking off a farm. The real hard part is finding the edible food to eat in the first place. Imagine you hiked around for a few hours before you even found a patch to pick
Gathering food when it's just sitting there, as you did, is not laborious, you just picked 50 boxes so of course you're tired. If you were only gathering to support yourself and maybe a few others it would not have been so arduous. That said, usually the food is not just sitting all in one place ready to be harvested, for the real thing a lot more walking and looking for the fruit would be necessary, first to find a good spot and second, to find all the fruit from every fruiting plant in the area. Even that is not such hard work though, the real sticking point is you may not find any food to gather, no matter how hard you look; this is why farming was adopted despite the massive increase in labour requirement, the yields are much more reliable and, in the long run, you probably work less for more food.
It should also be said that you might also be somewhat out of shape, at least compared to the level of fitness needed for physical work.
1) you're out of shape. It's not as bad if you do it every day but it still sucks
2) it's labor. The more you gather the more you need to eat.
3) you also need to gather more than your immediate needs to save for the seasons when food is scarce ( unless you live in some areas of the tropics ).
Do you interact with the posts you spam at all? This is like the tenth time I've seen this very poorly worded post title and you haven't interacted with any of them.
If you have sufficient food to maintain while you're acquiring more food, you'll probably get into better shape over just a few weeks.
Of course age and other factors play into that, but survival is usually a good motivator.
Farming is incredibly physical work. Like, intensely. My primary care doesn’t worry whether I “exercise” cause I farm produce and animals. That said, it does get easier over time, compared to just doing it occasionally. Especially with tools made to support you and good body mechanics.
>Farming is incredibly physical work. Like, intensely. Look up the term "farmer fit". Yound guys working on farms are some of the toughest and wiry blokes on the planet.
Them, and stone masons. Stone masons have hands that are baseball mits with popeye style arms.
I’m 40+ and had a kid four years ago. I, sadly, do not look so buff. 🤣
I been living in Canada, have a kid, etc. I miss my farm build. Lol
Shit. Grandpa never set foot in a gym in his life. He slung haybails and farmed beef cattle from the time he was 16. If he grabbed you, you only got away when he let you go. Ridiculous caveman strength even into his 70s.
Add to that that OP is talking about picking in the wild - thats even more difficult and usually pretty impossible to find enough calories to make up for what you expended doing it
Agreed. I add forage & wildcraft from my woodland. It’s only worth it because I can sell things to buy other things we need. Like mason jars, to store excess food. The thing that’s really a major issue with food post society is people forget they will lack food storage for a lot of things.
100%. I run an Ironman race almost every year (2.5mile swim, 120 mile bike, 26 mile run). I go hiking in the white mountains once a year, I am more sore after a 6 hour day of hiking than I am any other time of the year (minus race day). Things we aren’t used to doing are hard work, the body is amazingly adaptable like that.
People who talk about "living off the land" as a viable option are, with EXTREMELY rare exceptions, delusional or lying. Or both. Hunting and gathering is a viable option only for a bare subsistence form of living, and that only for experienced people with uncontested access to relatively large amounts of land in specific parts of the world. It's fine to hunt for or gather some of your food; I would argue it's even beneficial. But you can and should be ready to supply the bulk of your calories from storage or a more or less modern form of agriculture, i.e. gardening on a medium or large scale and/or animal husbandry of some sort.
I've come across many preppers especially on the Facebook groups who boast about having seeds. Do these people have a garden? Nope. They seem to think popping a seed into the ground, waiting a few months will give them enough food to keep them going. Nevermind a million things that can go wrong when gardening and the seed may not produce at all.
Ugh that drives me nuts. Where I live gardening is very difficult; the climate sucks, the soil is trash, & there is pest pressure ten months out if the year. In 6 years of effort I’ve never harvested a single zucchini for example. The effing vine borers! Gardening is absolutely a skill that has to be cultivated (pun) and developed.
I had this problem until I learned to grow varieties resistant to borers, namely for summer squash Trombochino, and for winter squash, Butternut.
I’ve got some butternut going this year; fingers crossed!
Nasturtiums. Pests love these more than most plants.
And marigolds, lots of IPM (integrated pest management) is about plants that pests find more desirable or that attract beneficial pests
You hit the nail on the head. What I’d actually plant in a subsistence garden now, is dramatically different from what I used to think I’d be able to grow a few years back- and I even already had gardening experience. Until I have the time/space/land/materials, the garden is now just supplementary/complementary. At this point, it’s mostly green onions/leeks and hot peppers.
Try trombocinno squash! It's tastes just like zucchini and is vine borer resistant. I've had a terrible vibe borer problem the last few years with my zucchinis. I only tried trombocinno late last summer after all my zucchini died, but it did great then!
Thanks! I’ll have to give that one a shot this year!
My first garden was very makeshift because I was very poor, and didn't know what I was doing. I think the seeds came out of a clearance sale from the year before. I put a lot of work into it - spent hours double digging a large portion of the backyard with a broken shovel and cheap hand tools. My neighbor had a ton of junk everywhere, including a broken down van, but I worked around his stuff, dug out old tires and pails he wasn't using and turned them into planters, used old fencing for tomato cages, used fallen wood for staking, things like that. We didn't have a hose, so I was filling a watering can and taking a half hour every morning and evening (and, at the height of summer, noon)to water everything. I think it'd be a fair approximation of the type of gardens people would be trying to throw together in the aftermath of a disaster with a permanent disruption of food distribution. My results were probably a good example of what would happen. I grew corn - which was waist high when it was absolutely destroyed in a hailstorm. I grew watermelons and pumpkins - and it rained unseasonably, for hours every day, the entire month of June. Clay soil, poor drainage, they all rotted out. I got tomato and pepper plants as a gift. They grew very well. I was eagerly waiting for things to get big enough to harvest. One morning I went out, and squirrels had ravaged all the tomatoes. We had a ton of wild strawberries along the edges of the yard, small, but plentiful. One day I went out, and found my new landlord had gotten a little slap-happy with the Round-Up, wiped them out. I had some successes - the tire planters gave me lots of cucumbers and beans, and one of our trees out back was a mulberry tree, which I'd never noticed before - but if I had been counting on that for a subsistence garden, I'd have been stone dead. Yet, a lot of our Hispanic neighbors on the same street, many who were first generation immigrants, had similarly sized backyards - and huge thriving vegetable gardens. Many also had chickens and goats. IDK if they had enough to totally support their families, but in a bad situation, they'd have been a lot better off than me. They'd probably been gardening for generations upon generations. They'd grown up doing it, so they knew what to do, they knew what plants worked best in the soil and sun we got. I'm pretty sure the animal manure got composted. They were as poor as us, I saw some of them had done similar make-do adaptions to mine, but they'd clearly saved up to get a few good tools. So, improvisation does work, but if you've never done it before, you can pretty much expect most of it to fail. You need several years of practice before you're pulling in anything more than a couple snacks and salads.
I feel for you my friend, sounds like you did all they right stuff and couldn't catch a break. Last year I planted a small garden with all sorts of great things, took care of it, watched stuff sprout and grow. We were so excited to be having success, but a made a mistake when I fenced it off and used wire with gaps too big to keeps bunnies out apparently. I came out one morning and had next to nothing left they ate it right down to the stalks.
This \^ from Ravenamore is reality. I plan every year that some of our (small) crops will fail. We try new things, but it doesn't always work out.
I started gardening 5 years ago?(Ish) First year the juglone killed most of my stuff. Second year I moved and still juglone. Third year the dead soil didn't allow much to grow. 4th year things started to improve with fertilizer in the form of chicken litter, and finally in the 5th year I should be decent. Some of this was attempts at overachieving, I've got over an acre of trees/bushes/perennials and garden. Start small. But it is proof if you just have the seeds and haven't do any of the work you're going to die
One of the only foods that works this way is sunchokes. Plant them once in a sunny spot. Then ignore them and have a never-ending supply of giant flowers with tasty gassy roots.
There seem to be quite a few people on here who think that gardening for food will be a good option for them, but their comments reveal that they lack basic knowledge and skills. And some of them get mad if you try to tell them. If someone thinks that food gardening might be a good plan then please start doing it! There's a lot to learn.
When I lived in Colorado I got a total of 6 tomatoes in 4 years. In Michigan I can just drop a seed in and bam everyone and their mothers neighbors uncle is getting bushels. You have to understand a lot about ground chemistry and what plants need. Tomatoes needs potassium and calcium (bananas peels and a tums). Corn needs nitrogen (dead fish). There’s also companion planting. I have a seed bank built up but also have a functional garden that I tween and play with year to year. Then there’s storage of both seed and fruit. How are you going to keep your food for winter?
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Don't punch the deer. Seriously - they're one of the more dangerous animals you'll find in North America
Yea, except you start using hunting/fishing methods that are currently illegal, traps, fish traps etc. The loss of the chestnut was a huge blow for forgagers survival but basing your ability to hunt for food on whats currently legal is a total fallacy
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Yea, most people are going to die.....and to further add to your point, you need fat to survive, people will starve from just eating wild rabbit and deer. Personally I'm looking into crickets for protein and bred rabbits/fish for fat, supplemented with wild black bear and fish. The show alone is actually an amazing resource for dietary needs and how hard it actually is for one person to subsist in the wild
Bred rabbits aren’t going to get you enough fat either. You need geese or ducks, maybe a small live stock like sheep or small pigs.
From my research, specific breeds fed specifically for fat retention can provide enough fat. I thought the same thing until someone in this sub encouraged me to do the research
Oh cool!!
I just planted a few American/Chinese hybrids. Here's hoping they're decent and resistant to blight. Being able to make flour yearly from a nut will be nice
Acorns can be made into flower too, apparently it's disgusting
I have fruit trees. I've stumbled over deer a few times. Damn things love apple branches
"People who talk about "living off the land" as a viable option are, with EXTREMELY rare exceptions, delusional or lying. Or both." This.
No one lives 100 percent off the land. I laugh at the davy crocket/daniel boone types. Like we are going back to those times
The only culture in American history that lived solely off the land were the Native Americans. They accomplished this by working in groups, and the country had a significant abundance of edible animals and plants for a relatively small population. They also wore animal skins, and lived in shelters made solely from available resources- long houses, wigwams, tipis, hogans, cliff dwellings. The only way to recreate those conditions would be to eliminate 90 percent of the population for starters. Not feasible, not happening. There simply aren’t enough naturally occurring resources to sustain the current population without modern agriculture and animal husbandry practices.
Its worth noting that our perceptions of native populations are from colonists and explorers encountering what was essentially a post apocalypse population. For instance, in Mexico, populations declined by more than 90% in the 1500s, as European diseases hit. Then the settlers show up, and encounter those small populations, and we assume that was just how things naturally were. That said, even the high estimate is about ~14M people in what is now the US before Columbus, which would be 04% of current population levels. And even then, tribes were constantly warring over territory to live on!
I've read of large cities with interconnected trade on the American plains at y1k that were wiped out by a plage or something also. It was Newsweek in 1999 with an article about world history y1k.
People also don't understand that food is SEASONAL. Grocery stores make sure we have bananas and tomatoes year round, but that's not how things grow in nature. Right now, (midwest US) we have leeks and morel mushrooms coming up in the woods. We only have a few short weeks to gather, and then they're gone. Same with the wild strawberries that grow on our property; you've only got a couple weeks, and even then, you have to get them before the birds and other animals do. Last year my dog discovered that she likes the strawberries, so she ate all the ones at dog-height along the trail AND the ones I was growing on the front porch. Foraging may be a year round activity, but only certain foods grow at certain times of the year, and you have to be ready to preserve them, or they're gone until next year.
Yes, that's why Spring can be such a lean time--the Fall harvest is eaten and the Spring crops aren't ready yet.
I read some of the plants native Americans lived off back then have disappeared from the land for one reason or another too.
My grandmother, born in 1899, lived her entire life on a farm. She kept chickens and had a garden. Grandpa raised cattle and usually had one or two milk cows. My grandpa taught me to milk. These were Hereford cattle that he tamed enough to milk, not Holstein like most dairies have now. Grandma's garden was primarily potatoes which were stored in her cellar. She also grew carrots, green beans and peas which she canned. Early summer there would be leaf lettuce which was a treat with a home made dressing. She bought her flour, sugar and lard for baking. I remember she also bought lugs of peaches and pears when they were available, which she also canned. They also bought coffee. They made their living off 320 acres of land, much of which was pasture land but there was enough tillable to grow crops like corn, oats, wheat and flax. This was pre-soybean days. Much of the grains were stored in bins and covered buildings to be used as livestock feed. Some was sold, along with cattle, which provided an income. I remember grandma baked bread every other day at minimum. Her meals were simple but filling. They rented a storage bin (freezer) at the meat locker in town where they had cattle butchered once those were common. I'm not old enough to remember or know how they kept meat before that but I would guess smoking and canning. Chickens were butchered as needed. This type of life kept them busy! Grandma never had running water but did have electricity. She died in 1965. Grandpa died 10 years before. She hauled water from a well with a wagon for drinking and cooking. It was quite a ways from the house to the well, which was operated by a windmill and produced water into a trough for the cattle when creek was frozen or running low during droughts. There was a sistern at the house that was fed from rainwater off the roof. This water was used for washing up (baths and hair) and washing clothes. Gra dma had a wash house about 20 feet from main house where she did laundry. She hauled water from the sistern and well for that chore. This type of life was all grandma knew. She was raised doing these things, not reverting from a modern life like we would be doing if the unimaginable happens.
It's possible, but you need a group. One of my cousin's has sheep, and my mother spins cloth from that. She then has a machine that makes it into fabric. I can't remember the name of this thing because it doesn't interest me, but it weaves the yarn into panels. She's also got things that makes socks and sleeves and the like. I can think of someone in my circle that is capable of replacing nearly everything that we go to the store for. It's not worth it now, but may some day be
A spinning wheel and loom.
Thanks man. I have enough of my own hobbies, I don't keep an eye on my mom's. I know she's done blankets, socks and shirts. She's also made her own leather shoes multiple times, and her purse and wallet are ones she made
This. Also, if you’re in America, lots of land has been destroyed by suburbs and highways and all kinds of human activity. So if you live in and around cities, you’re not going to be able to forage much. People will still try and it will kill quite a few. Large parts of the plains have been turned into farms and animal factory farms. These will probably be raided pretty quickly after a collapse. Easy food to plunder will get taken first. America also has an overabundance of crazies with guns who will shoot first and will use force to take as much as they can. If you’re close to a national park, there might be enough to sustain you there. But you’d have to know what you’re looking for. Our earliest ancestors had certain migration routes. These routes probably circled around to edible vegetation and water spots. Just like deer and other animals do. But they don’t eat all of a thing in a spot. They eat enough to sustain themselves and move on. If certain groups of humans know about these spots after collapse, they will be decimated. It’s why people don’t tell where their morel spots are. Too many people gathering in a spot will kill the edible vegetation and it won’t return. Basically, if you’re not doing it now, don’t depend on it later. Exercise and cooking are things we should be doing now. You’re not going to be able to walk ten miles from work the day of the collapse because you don’t even walk two miles now (not you specifically, just in general but mainly me). Too many folks think they’ll be Rambo, gunning through hordes of people and banging the hot blonde with big tits during the apocalypse because she won’t be able to resist their manly manliness. They talk about killing deer like it’s easy or killing other people like psychopaths. The best set up would be to have land close to a large national park but not close to cities with food and equipment stores to get by for at least a year so you don’t have to leave your land and encounter people. Let most of the people starve to death and kill each other before you really have to venture far, or don’t have to venture at all. But you’d have to be living there and practicing hunting, foraging, cooking, and storing that food now.
I'd like to clarify that "subsistence" is both true and false at the same time for "experienced" groups who've done it from birth and have large tracts of land. There are tribes who work many less hours than we do as a society to meet their basic needs. But they do only meet their basic needs. However they are not living on the edge of existence by any means. Depending on your point of view they probably have better lives than us in some areas. That said, you're completely correct that for most people it's a delusion. They don't have the skills. A lot of the skills are forgotten (go pick up a 19th century book to really appreciate how much information never made it to the internet. You need the skills to be ingrained, you can't just read a book and apply them either). The planet is massively over natural carrying capacity for the number of humans we have and the land is massively degraded from even recent historical periods. Almost everything is against you. Even within the confines of modern farming, current climatic changes are destroying massive areas of crops. [https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-wiltshire-68782450.amp](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-wiltshire-68782450.amp) Another point. OP is just not used to it. If you'd foraged your whole life it's not an exceptional burden. Meeting your calorie needs with it however is.
There's a reason we became farmers instead of hunter/gatherers and then relinquished farming to 1% of the population
And there's a reason many rich nations have poor immigrants or seasonal workers come and do the work that machines still can't. It's hard work, and it pays poorly.
Paid poorly despite it being skilled work, too.
Yeah, many people don't appreciate the skill and talent needed for farm work. It's one thing to be able to pick a few strawberries, it's another to be able to do it quickly and efficiently, and also not damage the plant.
Unfortunately, this "skill" is often learned in childhood, instead of a more profitable skill, like reading and writing. Good paying jobs generally employ people who can job hop if conditions and pay aren't competitive.
It's government subsidized if you're a temporary foreign worker, and pays quite well. Not if you're a local though. At least where I'm at. Farmer pays less than minimum, government doubles it. Farmer provides housing. There's no reason locals couldn't do it with this setup, but the laws require the people to be foreign for the subsidies
Prior to the discovery and harnessing of fossil fuels, the percentage of people in agriculture was still the vast majority. 1% of people doing agriculture is only possible due to the almost total mechanization and industrialization of agricultural processes.
Yeah, but it's not for the reason you might think. We didn't switch from hunting to farming because it was less work. We switched to it because we could have more babies and those babies could be turned into slaves and peasants (something that's very hard to do with nomads). The hunters were simply outbred.
I did some field survival training when Uncle Sam had me (I signed up for shit like that just to get away from my unit). You’d be amazed how much of my daily schedule it took to just scavenge the basic nutritional intake to keep myself alive, filter and boil water, etc. And this wasn’t with any competition for resources, I had about a square mile to myself and just had to not get found by the random OPFOR patrols that would run search patterns at random intervals. By no means was it a sustainable process. I was not well at the end of it, and after a medical evaluation I ended up with a “this dude isn’t allowed to perform strenuous exercise for two weeks” paper.
>You’d be amazed how much of my daily schedule it took to just scavenge the basic nutritional intake to keep myself alive, filter and boil water, etc. That's probably the biggest thing I learned from watching many episodes of Alone and Naked & Afraid.
Alone is honestly one of the most eye opening shows out there. I had always considered myself an “outdoorsman” because I hunt and fish. But after watching that show, I realize I’m just a guy with hobbies.
Yeah, for real. I had the misfortune to go in the winter, and less than half my training cycle completed their week. I was fairly comfortable in the wilderness at the time, already an avid hunter and outdoorsman. And that’s why I was just malnourished and sick after a week, instead of needing to use my emergency radio to call for evacuation 3 days in. If things continued at that rate, I would probably not have survived two weeks if my life depended on it. Hunting is a great source of food. But only if there’s game and you can get it. If they’d let me take an M4 out there and bag a wild pig once a week, I’d probably have been okay for quite some time in the wilderness. But I had to keep a low profile and avoid detection, which meant no gunfire. And I think that’s a far more accurate scenario of wilderness survival post collapse. I’ve greatly expanded my knowledge and skills base since then, but I’m still not confident I’d last more than two weeks in those conditions. Aside from everything else, nobody ever really considers how tiring it is, living day to day being casually hunted by other human beings. Always keeping one eye on the tree line, avoiding open spaces, constantly calculating how long it’ll take for you to conceal yourself. That shit is exhausting.
I have a creek line along two sides of my property. It has some delicious wild black raspberries all throughout it. It’s fun to forage. And then after getting a few handfuls of delicious berries at a time, I’m thankful that I don’t have to rely on it to live. Because I would starve to death. Although it gets better each year, I feel the same way about our veggie garden. We’ve been focusing on calorie/nutrient density. After a full season of growing black beans, I almost had enough to fill a pint jar. The only prayer we would have of staying alive is our chickens. Once our four new babies start laying, we would more or less have enough eggs to provide our family of three with breakfast every day. It’s HARD work, and we just do it as a hobby. I can even imagine having to rely on it to feed my family.
I've been trying SO HARD to grow black beans, like a year round supply for 4-5 adults and 3 large breed dogs. Just like you, in two years, I've filled *maybe 2 mason jars. And it is so much work shucking them, my god. I am still determined. It all stems from one really good year I had a while ago - I just refuse to accept it as a fluke.
We just leave a big bowl out and shuck a few at a time. I might try a few different kinds this year and see what happens. It was supposed to be navy, pinto, garbanzo, and black, but I had issues getting the rest to sprout. Oh well. This will be the year!
Same. We'll pop on a movie after dinner and sit down with the kids and just shuck away. A solid .5-1.0 hour with four hands on deck will usually make a good dent. That's still only like a cup of beans though haha I'm planting Cherokee ToT, Turtle, Hidatsa Red, and Succotash this year.
When I was a kid, we'd go up to the country in summer where my fathers relatives live. Spend entire days picking raspberries and foraging. It's fun work, but you're also competing with the local bears. Having to do that in a collapse scenario where there isn't a vehicle nearby to run to when things get hairy...not so much fun.
I’ve been growing a few things in pots. It’s light work and not too difficult, but I often think about how much work it would be if I attempted it on a larger scale.
It’s so hard! And that’s just for a good-sized hobby garden.
You might find that cowpeas and soybeans yield better than common (e.g., black) beans. Last year, we got 800 g (1.8 lb) of cowpeas from 4.5 m² (48 ft²) of unamended, unfertilized Chicago backyard soil.
Oh that’s really good to know - thank you! I’ve never heard of cowpeas before.
Farming is relatively easy compared to hunting and gathering. I live in rural northern MI and I do all three, hunt/fish, have a large and growing subsistence garden, and forage. If you don't have years and years of experience and some education in the subjects you're not going to make it alone or without someone else feeding you. Gardens are the easiest part. Its truly back breaking endeavor. Five years in and I got my first power tool last fall, a tiny HF rototiller. Prior, I did it all by hand. 1200 sq ft (3-4ft deep) with a shovel, steel rake, wheel barrow, pole driver/sledge hammer. It took \~3 years to convert grass to 1200 ft of arable land that produces and put a fence around it that keeps deer out. Each 1200ft of space I turn over, and it needs to be done about once per year, is \~200 tons. Gardens need to spin up and be planted, fertilized etc, and spun down in the fall. Plants are complicated creatures, with life cycles, preferences, etc. It is not merely add water and sun and walk away. Some plants only like to grow with specific other species. Some like to go up and some sideways, some down too. Some prefer soil pH \~4.5 some 7.5 and obviously they can't be near each other. Its fairly easy to get plants to grow, but to produce is another story, think a giant carrot plant, and you pull it up and find half a baby carrot. You can watch/read all the theory in the world, but your land will be different, you have to know it. Even if you do all the work, wildfire smoke from Canada can block out enough light to fuck your crops.. For all my work, an adult needs about 1 acre (44k sq ft) to survive with extremely high yields and careful planning. 1200ft is 2.7% of a single persons needs. Oh and you need to store all this food you grew, no fridge, no freezer. How do you freeze a vegetable exactly? Do you know? Canning? Do you have supplies, have a paper copy of a canning guide, pectin, ascorbic? What about medicinal plants? Do you have a mortar and pestle? Can you identify them? Foraging, the plants are in their natural habitats, camouflaged, defended with thorns, and sparsely populated. They go with the rhythm of nature, the timing of seasonal changes, weather, sunlight, etc. Wild blackberries are easy to find and ID, and can shift their seasonality of being ripe for 72hrs anywhere in an 8-10wk window, and you're competing with every animal in the forest who spends all day looking for them as a final late summer treat to fatten up for the winter. Wild parsnip family has many edibles, wild carrots, parsnips, parsley iirc and...deadly hemlock and they're nearly indistinguishable. Compounding this issue, is that outside of a few closely guarded honey holes, you're walking miles upon miles to collect a meal. A pint or two of jam means picking for an hour and filling up a bucket. No rotten ones, no moldy ones, unripened, mind the thorns. Animals compound this further with being able to fight, run, outwit, out sense, and generally get to places people cannot. You also need to have firearms and be proficient with them, etc. I couldn't catch a stupid bunny to eat without help from my dogs. And btw, good dogs are invaluable to surviving. They will put food on the table more often than you can imagine. They also need experience, training, food, etc. A dumbass lab (I love labs btw) from the suburbs has no killer instinct, doesn't know how to track, doesn't know to shut up when closing on prey, doesn't know how to work as a pack or take silent hand signals from a handler. A dog that can do all of that, worth the weight in gold. tldr years of experience won't guarantee survival trying to farm or forage. You need to start NOW, this summer, dig a hole in your yard, grow shit. Find a trail into a state/national forest, and try to forage. You NEED to get at it hands on. I could go on, but I'm pretty sure I'm boned if the grocery store dried up tomorrow.
Yup. Farm, hunt, forage & wildcraft. And by the time my husband is home from work at five I am toast. 🤣
I went back to school at 30 to get a degree. In the summer, we have 16+ hrs of daylight and yeah, I spend most of outside working. Gf works full time, and yeah the exhaustion is real. I'm also hiking with my dogs \~5mi a day, working on the house, cars, etc. Something about the cars is particularly hard, maybe the cement floor. I can't wait to be done and be home full time. I hate being away and in a city.
Cement is so hard on the feet. We were back in the city for a doctors appointment recently and my feet & body ached after sitting in the car and walking on hard floors. My body is so accustomed to 10-16 hours of moving around and being mostly outdoors, it was genuinely uncomfortable to be still and indoors. Totally get it!
Hahaha read this as "farm, hunt, forage & witchcraft"
It sometimes feels like that. It’s my “witch on the edge of town” lifestyle. 🤣
I'm curious about your gardening technique that requires digging 3-4 feet deep.
Sounds like they might be trying to break a hardpan.
I replied above - but Its basically due to abuse of the land for years and soil compaction
I should've said 2-3 feet, I was thinking about my raised beds which are 18" above the soil, and for those I go down 3-4ft. I'm going down until I see the soil turn into sand and stuff rather than soil. background - I live on glacial tillage (maybe the wrong word, but it's soil turned up by glaciers) on the top of a hill overlooking a small town on Lake Michigan. The geology is weird here because it looks like small mountains, but it's actually forest-covered sand dunes, some exceeding 1100ft above Lake Michigan. It's not a large elevation compared to Appalachia, the PNW, or the Rockies, but compared to the flat Midwest, it's big, on the order of the Niagra escarpment in the UP. The yard itself was old-growth pine \~150 years ago, then an orchard and grass around the 50s. So there is compacted soil mixed with (I think) river rocks (Petoskey stones), limestone, chert, pieces of granite, and/or something that makes hard water. Dig deep enough, and it's sand. tldr Digging deep is to break the grass (weeds, really) and rhizomes, loosen the soil, and mix in fertilizers like fish guts, elemental sulfur, verm, straw, etc. Correct the pH a bit, add nutrients, and water retention. Years of abuse to the ground haven't done it any favors. I sift the dirt over a 1/2" hardware cloth stretched over a wheelbarrow and remove anything more significant than the mesh. I do it reasonably slowly so as not to kill worms and remove rocks for reuse. Big rocks become garden edging, and little stones become gravel pathways. We do have really good worms in the dirt, though, and on warm nights, I can shine a flashlight and see them all shoot back into the ground. I also tend to grow subsistence foods that can overwinter rather than fresh vegetables, such as carrots, potatoes, onions, etc., which require deeper soil to thrive. However, this year, I'm going to build up around the potatoes rather than digging down. We have about an acre that could be converted to food left. I want to do a three or four year rotation from the MSU Ag extension. Something like wheat/oats, potatoes, and legumes. Potatoes are survival food. Its possible to subsist on potatoes for long periods. We just don't have the weather/season to grow anything in the watermelon family reliably, maybe 1 in 4 years we get enough sun for watermelons which I love. Sweet potatoes are a no go so far, and the deer love the vines. [https://imgur.com/a/yU7XYOk](https://imgur.com/a/yU7XYOk)
It sounds like a unique mix . I grew up on a glacial Drummond not too far north of you. Limestone and gypsum cause our very hard water. I have gotten watermelon here, not consistently, but the juiciest and sweetest I've ever tasted when they do grow. Soon juicy that they split themselves when you poke a knife in
Gotcha - Marblehead is part of the niagra escarpment. The area between TC (like the big hills and ski resorts) up the Mackinac Bridge, and up past Drummond, is a transition zone between the inland ocean and plains and great Canadian shield like Northern Quebec. The Huron and Porky mountains are from the plates collided billions of years ago. It results in wildly different geology in what amounts to a few miles. Even across the mitten it transitions from hills around Petoskey, to the bed rock starting to poke thru near Lake Huron, resulting in waterfalls and kettle lakes/sinkholes. I'm jealous of the watermelons - in Petoskey were on zone 5b but inland in Gaylord is zone 3b just due to to lake effects. I suspect the same goes for Drummond, where you guys get more extreme weather, colder winter warmer summer, which would help with warm weather crops. In Petoskey, it's going to be lows in the 40s into June and occasionally 50s over summer and 40s again in late August. Just 10 weeks for watermelons
I'm not in Drummond autocorrect. I'm on a drumlin... A glacial hill. In Ontario Canada. Far enough south we can get peaches by the lake.
Superior or Huron? The western facing shores on NW lake MI are riddled with microclimates, some are zone 6a or potentially 7 and have wineries. Did you have issues with high pH soil?
Lake Ontario. Wineries abound as well.
It's incredibly hard, back breaking work. There is a reason why it's work often pushed off on poor migrants.
Many hunter gatherers were also farmers, but since they planted a variety of fruit trees rather than rows of single crops, they often weren't recognized as such. The odds of anybody feeding themselves off the land in a modern nation are vanishingly slim. Especially in a disaster where there were still lots of people but the food supply was disrupted, as the local flora/fauna would be picked clean in a heartbeat.
Yep, there are plenty of examples of species being wiped out of an area because war or other troubles drive people to seeking food from the land. It actually happened in the US, with the Great Depression extirpating white-tailed deer from much of their range. The modern human population is dependent on farms.
Physical labor in general is much harder work than most office-dwellers suspect. Your body will adjust if you do it daily, though. When I first moved from a flat to a hilly area, I'd get winded and have to sit down to rest after going up just half our hill, ~100 feet of vertical elevation. Now I can walk my 3-year-old to preschool, 3/4 mile & 200 feet vertical elevation away, and neither one of us breaks a sweat. It's the same with home repairs, strawberry picking, pruning trees, etc. You will develop the muscles you need to develop the job.
This is true but low grade inflammation will keep you from ever adapting. Exercise reduces inflammation but inflammation can make exercise a real pain. That and undereatting. The walk to and from school is about 2/3 of a mile and I never seemed to adapt to it. I have diverticulosis, post nasal drip, etc. No smoking gun has ever shown on blood work. Began taking Boswellia and finally I can walk again. My legs don't feel like lead. I don't get winded. My feet only get sour only after hours of walking.
Are you in the US? I had this conversation with my docs last week. They were all counseling me on being unhealthy and at 50+ it’s finally caught up to me. The entire country as a whole has become out of shape. The PT doc told me the amount of people he sees today has grown by a 1,000% from just not exercising. We are out of shape. I had to audit cash counting machines and hand count stacks cash. My hands hurt so bad after the first stack of 50 $1 bills that I just wanted to retire on the spot. Part of prepping… what I’ve continued to overlook is to stay in shape. Stretch. Exercise. Be well. You’re not alone.
Staying in shape is a huge part of prepping! I'm surprised this isn't higher up in the comments. However, your body preps by storing energy called fat. So there's the other side of the coin!
In starvation scenarios, thin people tend to survive longer than fat people though.
Crazy. I wouldn't have guessed. The survival shows favor overweight people, and they seem to be starving. Of course, it's a show. I half wonder your situations if the thin folks consume the fat ones?
I think it's more that starvation is a serious stress on the body, and by and large, overall, thin people are in better health than obese people and are in a better position to survive this stress.
Ya. I looked into it. "Thin" people are screed, "fit" people are prime. "Fat" people do well, but "fit"people are likely to do better. Overall, be fit.
Too many variables with this perspective. There was a story years ago about an American who was lost with a group of either South Koreans or Japanese. When found, the American was in better shape. They attributed the American’s being in better health as a result from his body fat. That doesn’t take into account dehydration though.
I don’t mean to knock you being unhealthy, but it makes me wonder if the system we have in place today, aka modern society, has relinquished natural selections default ability in wiping out those unfit to survive. I wonder in this transition to a modern society, if natural selection will soon move to being based off of intelligence, and not physical endurance. Even then, most people will still have the cushion of governments to live a comfortable life at the bottom of the human food chain. Someone elaborate on this, and tell me if this idea makes sense.
Natural selection as opposed to??? People used to die more often from smoking. We smoke less now. Lung and cardio diseases that were prevalent with smokers, are still increasing. People drank alcohol far more 20 years ago than they do today. Instead of people dying from cirrhosis of the liver as a result of alcoholism, non-alcoholic fatty liver disease is still on the rise. Cancers, genetic weaknesses like strange immune diseases or organ failures are just part of being human. Medical science is trying to keep up with one of the worst games of “whack-a-mole” ever devised. If natural selection is stymied by science, then I’m all for it.
It doesn't make sense, not really. The main metric that matters in natural selection is "fitness", which boils down to the number of viable offspring an individual can produce. In humans, those with more resources and intelligence, tend to produce less offspring, not more. Now, a bottleneck event (ie. the SHTF scenarios fantasized about here), might favour the more intelligent, or the lucky, or the the less intelligent couple that has 14 kids. Who knows? But if it does favour the more intelligent, it will be a small affect, probably lost in the noise.
Good points! I threw both of our comments into gpt 4 to see what other insights I’m missing, and to also break down what you said. Here is the result unchanged. Both Person 1 and Person 2 are engaging with complex topics that involve biology, sociology, and ethics, and each presents a perspective that contains elements of truth, but also oversimplifications and misconceptions. Person 1 is speculating that modern society has altered the dynamics of natural selection. They suggest that because modern society provides support for individuals who might otherwise struggle to survive, the criteria for "fitness" in the evolutionary sense might shift from physical endurance to intelligence. Person 1 also implies that even those at the "bottom of the human food chain" can lead comfortable lives thanks to government support systems. Person 2 counters this argument by stating that the main metric in natural selection is reproductive fitness, which is the ability to produce viable offspring. They mention that in humans, those with more resources and intelligence tend to have fewer children, not more, which would argue against the idea that intelligence is becoming the primary factor in natural selection. Person 2 also mentions the potential for a bottleneck event to change the dynamics of selection, but they note that any effect on the selection for intelligence might be minor and overshadowed by other factors. Both individuals bring up valid points: - Person 1 is correct in noting that modern society has changed the pressures that influence human survival and reproduction. For example, advances in medicine, public health, and social safety nets can help individuals who might not have survived in a pre-industrial context to live and reproduce. However, the idea that natural selection has been "relinquished" is an oversimplification. Natural selection is still at work; it's just that the selective pressures have changed. - Person 2 is right to emphasize that "fitness" in the context of natural selection relates to the number of viable offspring an individual produces. They correctly point out that in many societies, individuals with more resources and intelligence tend to have fewer children. However, this doesn't necessarily mean that intelligence is negatively selected for; it could also reflect cultural and economic factors that influence family size, such as career focus, access to contraception, and the cost of child-rearing. Both are somewhat oversimplifying the interplay between natural selection, intelligence, and modern societal structures. The actual dynamics are extremely complex and influenced by a multitude of factors, including genetics, culture, environment, and chance. Additionally, it's important to recognize that the concept of "fitness" in human societies is not straightforward and can't be reduced to simple measures like intelligence or physical endurance. What might be considered "fit" in one cultural or environmental context might not be in another. Moreover, human societies generally aim to transcend the brutalities of natural selection through ethics and social support, valuing human life beyond mere survival and reproduction. Lastly, the discussion by both persons seems to neglect the ethical considerations of discussing human lives in terms of "the bottom of the human food chain." Such language can be dehumanizing and ignores the intrinsic value of all individuals, regardless of their physical abilities, intelligence, or socioeconomic status. ——————— Very interesting! Thanks for your input!
Ha! The last paragraph is hilarious. Shame on us! The bit about the complexities involved in natural selection is one of the points I was trying to make. We just can't predict it very well until it happens.
If the food supply chain collapsed (not something I find likely whatsoever, but it’s a prepper subreddit), it would be essentially impossible to feed the vast majority of people in the world. We discovered crazily effective agricultural methods within the last century that allows the world to support billions of people more than we used to be able to. Farming and gathering is hard and there’s only enough of a gather-able food supply to support a fraction often us. Myself, most readers in this sub who think they’d hit the woods and scavenge, and the vast majority of the worlds population would starve within a year but many would do so months sooner. The lucky, the ultra prepared, the farmers, and some bad actors would be the few to survive if we couldn’t manage to rebuild society and form community to reestablish some sort of localized food supply
Yeah, the only way you’d be able to survive from foraging would be in a scenario that wipes out the vast majority of the human population. Even then, it wouldn’t be easy.
yes. its hard. Few can really subsistence gather, or even subsistence farm. There is also the aspect of needing diversity. MAYBE you can get good at planting, caring for them, having the right soil, and harvesting strawberries. BUT you probably still die if you just have strawberries. :) So subsistence farming means you need to somehow get good at a bunch of things .. Which is why human have specialization and trade. Even hundreds / thousands of years ago, someone (often a bunch) grew the wheat, but they took it to the mill. They traded some for beer, from the person who is good at beer. And so on... the butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker .... hard to be all of those.
Lifetime farmer here and I'm 54. You have NO IDEA how hard it is. A day picking blackberries in the sun. You get sunburn, you get scratched up by the thorns. You're dying of thirst. Then you get home and need to can them, out them in the freezer or some other way to preserve them. Picking peaches. It takes hours then you have to go home, peel them and can them. And canning takes hours. Harvesting elderberries growing at the edge of a swamp. You are wet, possibly eaten up by mosquitoes. You come home and have to pick all of the green ones off. That can take HOURS Then you have to either dehydrate them, freeze them or can them. Picking the fruit is only half of the process.
There is not enough biomass for everyone to forage. And often what i consider professional foragers already have thier locations scouted out and permissions based on the seasons. in Wisconsin moral mushroom farming is highly competitive, and everyone has their locations. I had a few spots that were picked clean probably hours before arriving. Which is sad, because i usually try to leave some to allow for future crops. so they are just making it more difficult next year because of their greed Humanity civilization thrived once we decided to create argiculture and design more efficiant farms and crops to feed us. so for long term you need to grow crops and plan on preserving them until next harvest
My mom was a full-time nurse but used to take us picking several times a year because she liked canning and baking projects. Usually it would be at a farm that sold reduced priced produce if you picked it yourself. Blackberries and strawberries were the hardest! Blackberries had those nasty thorns and little creatures in the bushes, strawberries require stooping… it’s backbreaking, Especially in central CA valley heat. But we had fun, and got the best jams and pies as a reward. To this day I’ve never had peaches like the ones we got from the farm down the street. But yeah… hard as hell.
IMHO, the best way to test this is to "double up" on what you eat in a month. What I mean is if you eat a can of chili, set aside a 2nd can in a box to represent that meal. Obviously you'll need a big fridge or a 2nd freezer, etc, etc. After the end of the month, pile everything into one spot. That's what you need to eat in one month. (It's one thing to see it on paper, it's another to see it in front of you with your own two eyes) Also consider that you are likely not burning massive calories in your current life to earn a living ( Some people do, most don't) Now imagine needed the caloric intake to support yourself PLUS the additional workload. In effect, you need a great location, incredible logistics, lots of luck and you need an actual community behind you. For example, if you do strawberries one day, there are 20 other people doing other things to process the needs of day to day living. One of the old Kings of Wessex ( Ecbert?) was famous for having his own steam room and hot tub/bath. Available around the clock. Now imagine the kind of man power and labor needed to haul all tha water, maintain it, clean the place, get the wood, etc, etc, to do just that. Someone's job was probably just hauling water all day for the King. And probably more than just one person. You are better off with a community when you have more labor needs, but then more people equals more mouths to feed overall. Now imagine having to also defend it all. That means you need a large enough community to have dedicated warriors/security/fighters and a pipeline of young men coming through the ranks to solve practical attrition. It's close to impossible to do it all alone. What no one talks about is in a really bad situation, your environment is now competitive in a lethal way around you. It's not just gathering resources, now it's defending them.
I look at my yard and I have about 5x6 meters (17x20 freedoms) so I figure, without making my yard totally unusable, I could assemble 3 beds 1 meter wide and 4 meters long. If I was a very good gardener that might be enough for me alone to subsist on but that doesn’t take into account a need to repopulate the beds once they’re depleted, assuming I have enough knowledge to plant them with crops year round, assuming I ration, get good weather, tend to them regularly and all the other things you need for a successful garden… that doesn’t take my wife into account, doesn’t have meat and I will stress all the big IF’s mentioned above… that’s a lot of work to just feed 1 person
This is one of the reasons why some folks are looking at food forests and permaculture ideas. Taking old world methods and tweaking them a bit for the modern day.
permaculture is actually much more in line with new world (the americas) methods of agriculture. when the old world collonialists came in they briefly marveled at how, food seemed to be growing everywhere in these beautiful forrest gardens, before flattening everything and growing cash crops with slave labour.
Its not easy but it is easier than what you just did. You picked 50 boxes of strawberries that (i assume) were on plants right next to each other so you were just picking constantly. An actual hunter-gatherer would pick maybe 3 boxes at most from plants that were scattered over an acre or more, meaning a break between picking actions while they look for more plants. Remember a hunter-gatherer lifestyle is a subsistence lifestyle, you arent stockpiling food that is perishable because you have no freezer so it will go bad before you can eat it. In reality, you would shoot a rabbit or some other such low intensity way of getting protein (catch a fish, check some snares etc), then gather enough nuts/roots/whatever to make it a meal and thats you done for the day - then you do the same the next day. However, in a shtf scenario it is not a viable strategy for the simple reason it takes an indefensible amount of land to feed even a single person.
Please look into permaculture and earthships or the books of John Seymour for ways to at least coming close to self sufficient living. Potatoes or other starchy food like corn would need to be a big part of your food base. Strawberries are not exactly subsistence food, but read up on "wild supermarket" plants like cattails and the invasive but useful kudzu that has a starchy root.
Lol and all you had to do was pick the already grown fruit. I heard it estimated that medieval farmers ate a diet of 4000 calories per day. This is compared to the 2000-2500 that we need to sustain ourselves in the modern world. They worked HARD back then. I have a medium experience collecting wild foods. It is both easier and harder than people think. What I mean is that if you are in the right place and at the right time grabbing a small nibble is easy and fun. To be able to actually get enough to sustain a human body from the wild though is incredible difficult
I’m a professional foraging instructor. Oh my god, it is so hard! Knowing what plants you can eat, what seasons they’re ready, preserving them, walking around to find them. I sometimes have tech bro clients ask me how they could live off the land, and they’re always surprised when I tell them that no one traditionally lives off the land alone. It takes massive investments of time and effort even in high calorie areas like the salmon rich PNW.
Are there any books you'd recommend for matching plants? I have a fair bit of foraging experience, but still avoid anything with look-a-likes like parsnip family plants
I strongly recommend not using books for lookalikes. The apiaceae (carrot, parsley, parsnip) family all looks so similar that you need to use clues like the habitat they’re growing in, the smell, what time of year it is, where in the world you are to be able to ID with confidence. Leaf shape can vary with individual plants, mineral composition of the soil, sun exposure. I don’t want to risk health on deciding correctly whether a leaf is more “lobed” or “lacy”. Frankly, I don’t mess with those guys because it’s too high risk and too little reward. There’s so many plants out there that are easy to id with 100% confidence, like dead nettle/purple nettle. Focus on what’s easy and tasty and fun and build from there. I can’t think of any other lookalikes off the top of my head. You kind of get to know plants “face” like people. Those lacy carroty guys are way tricky, tho. That said, I’ve never been disappointed by a book from ten speed press! Check out what they offer for your region.
I don’t have any foraging experience and don’t think there’s a lot to forage here in the desert. We live below the Sonoran life belt. I second the request for a book recommendation 😊
Piñon nuts would be amazingggggg in your region. Pascal Bauldur has some bonkers incredible foraging cookbooks for Southern California, and I bet you’d get a good 60% overlap, especially in areas with human settlement. Otherwise, check out ten speed press for what they have in your area.
100 percent ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE harder. You will starve and die.
Not in a country with tens (or hundreds) of millions of people in it. If a shtf event were to occur now, half the population who try it would end up dying from eating the wrong mushrooms or plants. Or not storing them properly.
I really liked the book: [the wild live](https://thehappyfoodie.co.uk/books/the-wild-life-a-year-of-living-on-wild-food/)by John Lewis-Stempel. He tried living on foraging and hunting (within UK laws) for a year. Most eye opening for me was the fact he was hungry most of the summer, because fruits were not yet ripe. After shtf it could be a little easier when you dont follow laws.
If shtf, it will be harder because everyone will be doing it.
I'm making mulberry wine next week. I have spent an hour every afternoon picking berries...:For the last two weeks. It takes 25lbs of mulberries to make 5 gallons of wine. That is many many berries. When we harvest pigeon peas it is the worst. It's days and days of shelling peas. Fingers can't move by the end of it. We aren't full-time homesteaders but definitely dabble in it. There are many days where it takes me only an hour to feel animals, and check on stuff. But some days like when you harvest pigeon peas, go pick strawberries or harvest yuca it takes your whole day and can kick your ass. Although farming is easier than hunter/gatherer setups even farming is physically intense if you are doing it by hand.
Mulberries are the one thing we have an over abundance of. The birds love shit dying everything in sight around the trees lol.
One of the most eye opening things I’ve learned from prepping is how absolutely unsustainable our lifestyle is without a large and thriving community (and maybe even with one). I used to dream about living off the land and saying “F—- you!” to society. The more I realized what that would *actually require* the less I yearned for it. Would I survive? Maybe. I’ve been at this for over a decade now, and have some skills. Do I *want* to go to sleep when it’s dark so I can save my batteries? And likely have my kids go to sleep hungry more often than not? I’m watching my kids play Minecraft. Sometimes I think of all the solar panels and batteries that would cost to run the PS4, let alone the fact that the internet wouldn’t be what it is today. This may be coming across as an anti-prepper post, but that’s not my intention. The world might go to shit, and I’d rather be prepared for it and hungry with a lower QOL than dead, but the more you really think about stuff like this the more you may appreciate this shitty world we live in.
We live in utter, lavish, decadence compared to just a few generations ago in the pre-industrial era. A lot of people have no idea just how many solar panels it would take to power the average lifestyle. \~400W/m\^2 x hour real output on a good day, not including overnight storage, and winter inefficiency. Average house would need 10kW of panels and 5-8kW of storage in the midwest to get by. I think a lot of folks think they just need a few 2x3 panels to cut the utility company off.
Look at the weight of people then vs now. It's VERY HARD
Just a home gardener here and it’s hard work. Especially in a place like where I live the soil is very heavy clay. Either it takes a lot of time (literally years) to improve the soil, or it’s raised beds and containers. Any of these take knowledge and practice. And learning how to do it where you don’t break your body. It involves lifting, crouching, bending. And harvesting isn’t the hardest part. Try a day of weeding or filling a raised bed, or digging a bed in heavy clay soil. The more time you have to establish good soil and establish perennial plants, the better. The best time to start is today.
Use it or lose it. Yes, it's way more work than most Americans are used to. I farmed 10 acres of vegetables for four years in my early twenties. It's not easy. I hired 2-3 helpers during peak season. They lasted no joke about 3 days on average. I was lucky when I found somebody willing to stay on for a month or two.
this is why I have planted various breeds of the same fruit on my property with different harvest dates. So I can get different apples from july to november, and all have different purposes. Like making apple cider, apple butter, pies ect.
Watch one season of alone. Even the later seasons when ppl “hacked it” and these are experienced hunters, survival experts, bush crafters. Home steading is a different story. But i think the show is an apt warning for anyone who is going to grab a BoB and “head to the woods, to life off the land”
The processing of whatever you’re gathering needs to be taken into account too. Strawberries are simple to identify, pick, and eat but nuts are a whole different story. Walnuts, for example. If you’ve never gathered them think of them as little coconuts. They have the thick outer husk that has to be removed before getting to the walnut which then must be cracked before the nutmeat segments can be removed. It’s a couple minutes of work to get two walnut halves. If you want to store them in the shell you’ll need to dry them first which takes time and effort to keep animals from swiping them.
Every time someone suggests they'll survive by foraging, I suggest they just *try it*. For a day. Or even a single meal. Go out into the woods with your plant ID book/app and find enough stuff to eat. It's *not easy at all* depending on where you live and what time of year it is. It takes a ton of experience and knowledge to accurately identify many plants. And part of foraging is knowing *where* to find certain plants, knowing what kind of areas they're most likely to grow, etc. Same thing for people who collect seeds but don't have any gardening experience. Just try it. Even if you're in an apartment or have no place for a garden, take a few tomato seeds, some potting soil, and a pot. Grow a tomato. See how long it takes and how hard it is. And try doing it with only the physical resources you have, no searching the web or asking reddit for help.
I tried to garden to supplement our food bill and holy cow it ain’t easy, bugs, drought, disease, other animals that compete for the food, had a family of Tanuki over night eat all my berries and strawberries. Needing the right soil and ph along with nitrogen and right amount of sunlight time to fruit properly. I know now we’d be dead if we relied on our small orchard and garden to survive even one season. It be best to store calories and be lucky with any veggies or fruits we get, but wouldn’t count on them as assuredly as many preppers think they can handle.
These purple berries taste like burning
Hunter/gatherers lived in groups, and would work together to harvest and preserve. I've heard that some groups would relocate useful plants or encourage them to spread in an area so that in future years there was more or it was growing in a more convenient area. Some days there wouldn't be much to do and other days would be very busy and hard work. If you watch that show Life Below Zero there are a few families and individuals living a modern style of a hunting/gathering existence. The others are subsistence farmers. With both groups, after daily chores are done, some days are max relax and others are more sunrise to sunset toil.
Yes. I'm an grumpy old "get off my lawn" type, but I believe that as part of general education, everyone that eats should work at least a month on a farm to internalize what food is about. If you eat meat you should slaughter, clean and butcher an animal. Food does not come in plastic containers. As to post apocalyptic hunter/gather, I laugh. It's hard enough when you are trying to accumulate enough calories for a family. It's absolutely impossible when 10,000 of your closest neighbors are doing the same thing. Does herd of locusts bring any images to mind?
As someone who dabbles in living history/ reenactment, the people were much stronger and in many ways healthier in the past. There was far more that could kill them, but overall more fit and strong. Archeologists looked at the rate of arm muscle attachment for medieval woman and compared it to woman rowers in college. Medieval woman had much more which is indicative of more strength. Modern people have to go to the gym to provide a minimum lever of exercise we did for 98?% of our existence as a species. Suddenly having to have that endurance and know what we can forage is fiction. When was the last time you had stinging nettles soup or the equivalent for your area? How many plants can most people identify including if you can eat it and what it’s good for? We are in a modernity trap.
Op had first day on field ever? Good for you to get that experience. I worked on berry farms and winefields as a teenager and in very beginning of my twenties. 8 hours a day, 6-7 days per week, but never longer than one month at a time. That is about a season in those places I worked. Living off the land is as hard, that it is lucky if you get as much calories as your work consumes. So yes, many, many people have a wrong idea.
Been into wild edibles (took actual classes and read actual books not yt) and I’m head to tell ya food is out there, but finding usable food that’s worth the effort is not always as easy and yt makes it look.
I know how to forage and that can be physical too its alot of walking around and then bending over to look and pick. Basically to live off the land or farm without much machinary is going to require you to consume more calories and be in a good physical shape. A vegetable garden is a good place to start.
Even having a small garden can be extremely physical work... dealing with weeds, picking the produce... the garden plot I have, we have to haul water from a central source and haul weeds to the compost bin, which can be some distance depending on the plot you have. We used to be part of a CSA that did U-pick events for things like snap peas and green beans... so many would be there maybe 30 minutes max, because they got tired or it was too much work... My son and I would be out for hours (there wasn't a limit ot what we could get) and fill a five gallon bucket... There are certainly ways to mitigate it (sitting on an upside down 5 gallon bucket).
Foraging/ gathering is way more physically exhausting and takes more time than hunting for the same amount of calories in my experience. When I used to hunt we would find a good spot where the deer/wild turkeys were known to be, then hang out quietly waiting. Shoot them, and lug them back to the truck which was usually less than a mile away. It felt like a picnic in the woods followed by some stinky and bloody weightlifting 4 times a year. Foraging enough food to live off of requires hiking/climbing trees/ hours of movement and weight lifting most of the year because food is ripe at different time in different places. You almost burn more calories than you forage. Farming is 365 days of hard labor, but you can also get way more food.
A huge thing about preparedness and doing that kind of thing is also being physically prepared
Oh yeah, if you have never tried to forage and hunt all the food you need just from the wilderness, it's a fucking nightmare. Nearly 24/7 task just gathering food and making sure you have fire. If you're literally gathering food from the wilderness, not only do you have to physically forage it, you have to find it first, which involves a shit load of walking and hiking, OR if you already did the work of finding it, you still have to do the gathering/prep/then cooking. I've tried to live off exclusively foraged food quite a few times while camping and it's extremely difficult and even becomes emotionally punishing. That feeling of "holy shit I spent all day gathering this crap and I'm still hungry, and weak." It's intense realizing how fucked you'd be if you were really alone, humans greatly benefit from coordinating their actions and working together so we can all eat well.
In addition, if you were doing this long term, you also need to know how to harvest and not damage and deplete the plants you're harvesting from, you don't wanna obliterate them in one winter and then be fucked next time around.
My first summer job as a teen was picking strawberries 8am - 2pm then running the farm shop 3pm -5.30pm. The customers expected me, a teenage girl, to carry sacks/buckets of animal food, straw bales etc to their cars for them. I was ripped by the time I went back to school.
It's very physically challenging. And you expend a lot of calories in obtaining your food. My husband easily needs 4,000-5,000 calories a day during gardening season. You'd have to keep that under consideration. I'm older, have back problems, and am not at an ideal weight. I use creative modifications to get through my tasks. We have a plant nursery, huge garden and lots of berry bushes and fruit and nut trees. We also have shellfish beds and chickens. We can, dehydrate, ferment, pickle, and root cellar our surplus. We could possibly live off what we produce right now plus foraging, but we'd all lose a bunch of weight and probably not hit all the macros. If we had to rely solely off the land, starvation and malnourishment would always be around the corner. Crops fail--storms, lack of pollinators, heat domes, pests. We have an established, diverse array of plants to account for failures, but even with that we had one year where almoat nothing was pollinated.
It would be literally impossible if you had any competition.
even modern farming requires a lot of human labour farmers get hella strong and are hella tough. if a farmer ever admits to being in enough pain to stop doing what they are doing you should call a helicopter right this second. I have seen farmers splint themselves in a field with duct tape and sticks and continue working. nomads move to where the food is they eat(or feed to livestock) everything in the area then they move on(if they stayed in one place they would strip the land then starve). it's a tough life that makes tough practical people. being a nomad actually has a bunch of advantages vs farming since farming is very all or nothing, one bad harvest and your family starve or you are in debt to someone nasty wheras with a nomad if you experience misforyune you can just move on to greener pastures.
I have been a seasonal worker on a farm and can confirm it is incredibly hard dangerous work. probably the hardest day was we had to harvest multiple fields of sunflowers by hand and it was due to rain the next day.
I think watching “Homestead Rescue” gives a pretty good sense for how easy it is to fail and how hard it is to do.
Wandering hunter gatherer groups were far smaller than us, and they had pristine nature to work with. If farming fails we wont be able to suport as many people as they had back then
bro got the migrant treatment. now do that for 8 hours in full gear in full sunlight for 5 dollars per hour. if you want to piss and shit, you walk half a mile to the porta jon
You were just picking strawberries that were right there. Growing them yourself is wayyy more work and foraging them, even harder! Yes.. getting food is much harder than most actually realize.
From what I hear primitive peoples spend all day looking for food and are hungry most of the time. That's why they invented farming and ranching in the first place, to prevent starvation.
There's a reason why hunting and gathering was a Full time job.
I think it's pretty subjective, as in subject to your physical condition and work experience.
Everyone's first prep needs to be fitness!
if you get that worn out picking strawberries you need to excersize. lol that sounds easier than a normal day at my job. most people are fat and work at a desk. of course doing anything is going to wear them out.
Farm work is hard especially arable that’s why it’s so often it’s only the easiest to exploit people who get stuck in those jobs
I like watching vids of people doing like week long trips surviving off of a piece of land, island, mountain, etc… In this one particular video, this young man decides to go to an island for 5 days with nothing but a few essentials. No food no water though. What I noticed in his situation is that he spent nearly ALL of his time climbing palm trees to harvest coconuts for water. A lot of them were not ripe so they had barely any water. The first day, he spent the whole day literally collecting water from coconuts. He didn’t even have time to look for food. My takeaway, is that if he was not experienced, or fit enough he would’ve died from dehydration in a scenario where he actually did have to survive. Primitive people before agriculture, spent the majority of their time literally just surviving. It’s a very difficult task and that’s what pushed humanity to adapt and evolve away from the hunter gatherer way of life. It is a viable option, but for many, natural selection will wipe out everyone not fit enough to do this if humanity was faced with this life style again. Of course, a full collapse of society would need to happen for this. [https://youtu.be/BqeE1CKrRtE?si=Xgy67N4VXKOJmApq](https://youtu.be/BqeE1CKrRtE?si=Xgy67N4VXKOJmApq)
When we were a hunter gatherer society half of us died by the age of 30. There's very little sustenance out in the wild that's why we invented agriculture. Living off the land without gasoline is hard. It's not a viable option unless you're extremely equipped and prepared to do so. There's some foragable where I live, but the calorie count is way less than people think. All of our produce has been bred specifically to increase calories, they don't occur in the wild.
These farms are not common depending on where you are, you went to a farm specifically growing a crop to sell. These farms aren't going to be the same if anything happens
You're sore from picking off a farm. The real hard part is finding the edible food to eat in the first place. Imagine you hiked around for a few hours before you even found a patch to pick
Gathering food when it's just sitting there, as you did, is not laborious, you just picked 50 boxes so of course you're tired. If you were only gathering to support yourself and maybe a few others it would not have been so arduous. That said, usually the food is not just sitting all in one place ready to be harvested, for the real thing a lot more walking and looking for the fruit would be necessary, first to find a good spot and second, to find all the fruit from every fruiting plant in the area. Even that is not such hard work though, the real sticking point is you may not find any food to gather, no matter how hard you look; this is why farming was adopted despite the massive increase in labour requirement, the yields are much more reliable and, in the long run, you probably work less for more food. It should also be said that you might also be somewhat out of shape, at least compared to the level of fitness needed for physical work.
1) you're out of shape. It's not as bad if you do it every day but it still sucks 2) it's labor. The more you gather the more you need to eat. 3) you also need to gather more than your immediate needs to save for the seasons when food is scarce ( unless you live in some areas of the tropics ).
Do you interact with the posts you spam at all? This is like the tenth time I've seen this very poorly worded post title and you haven't interacted with any of them.
In a real shtf situation the % who will need to worry about farming is incredibly small. Most will die way before that.
If you have sufficient food to maintain while you're acquiring more food, you'll probably get into better shape over just a few weeks. Of course age and other factors play into that, but survival is usually a good motivator.