This weekly Snippets column is a collection of short items: responses to posted articles, practical self-sufficiency items, how-tos, lessons learned, tips and tricks, and news items — both from readers and from SurvivalBlog’s editors. Note that we may select some long e-mails for posting as separate letters.
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For anyone concerned about the negative health effects of Radio Frequency (RF) and other Electromagnetic Fields (EMF) in their homes, I know of a consulting company that specializes in RF/EMF remediation. Keith Cutter, the owner of the company, has about 30 podcasts on the subject now archived and available for free listening. I’ve actually known Keith since 2001. But until just recently, I hadn’t heard that he is now doing this specialized consulting work.
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Reader G.S. sent this, in response to Modern Civil Defense by 3AD Scout:
“First, I need to say I have been an avid reader of the blog for the past 10 years plus and find the information included to be outstanding.
I am an Emergency Management Director for a county in rural Ohio. I moved here almost 9 years ago after having worked in a large eastern city, in the Office of Emergency Management where we responded to both man-made and natural disasters on a fairly regular basis. (I felt the need to move away from the East Coast). I am also an old Navy veteran that served on destroyers in the late 1980s so I was part of the Cold War response and the regular Nuke training based on the risk provided by the Soviets.
In reading the recent article “Modern Civil Defense” by 3AD Scout it brought back memories of the Cold war preparations. The author is pretty close to dead center on his research but did fail to address the varied modern-day preparations that we are currently dealing with in the Emergency Management offices across the country. My agency is fortunate to not only have staff but to be set up and fully funded by our County Commissioners. The grant money I receive each year is not spent on labor costs like so many of my sister agencies, but real gear. My county is over 150,000 people and the issue if the balloon was to ever go up is that it would be virtually impossible to take care of the residents. Large scale shelters do not exist and even with my funding I am unable to store the needed food (MREs) and drinking water for that many people. We have had these discussions with my counterparts and most are in less fortunate circumstances since they do not have any discretionary income since they rely on those grants just for normal operations. Ohio has 88 counties and this is the situation for about 75 of them. The other 13 do have funding and are preparing as they see fit with those priorities varying quite a bit based on location and political leanings of the leadership. (That is just a reality.)
Here in my county, we are in the process of building a robust mass casualty program and are currently working on training both county employees and concerned volunteers to handle “longer-term” shelter operations that would normally be outside the ability and scope of Red Cross to staff. This includes shelter supplies such as cots, comfort kits, food, water, and blankets, this effort is designed for the 99% of events that we would encounter. The migrant crisis or a larger scale incident are the targets we are building this to.
As far as education to the risks that we face currently, it seems that more and more people are waking up to the reality of the situation but the overall percentages is still well into the single percentiles. This is better in counties with conservative leanings and is helped by the rural populations but the closer you are to major metros the attitudes shift from self-reliance to “what can you give me today?” Education will be our best single approach to getting the population prepared for whatever we might face but that will take significant time that we simply do not have. This is currently being done through outreach programs with civic groups and myself and my staff take every opportunity talk with people to be better prepared.
Not all of .gov has their heads in the sand, but this might be too little too late with current events trending the way they are.
Keep doing what you do sir, your efforts are appreciated more than you know.”
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Harvest Guard Reusable Canning Lids (one of our advertisers and a SurvivalBlog writing contest prize donor) is running a 15% off sale from now until July 4th, 2023. There is no coupon code needed to get this special price.
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Reader Tim J. suggested this video: Cracking the AC Code! How She Found the Holy Grail of Van Cooling: The Backpack Mini Split AC System.
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Some interesting food for thought, in this video: Who Is Ray Epps?
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Reader A.R. had these comments to SaraSue’s recent article: An Honest Look at my Farm—Year 2.
“I’d like to add a few things to your list of successes. You bought an existing farm. Even though you had to majorly repair the house, you didn’t have to build a new house. It sounds like you had existing fences, so even though the fence may not hold goats (what fence will?), it will hold cows. And it sounds like there was a barn.
You might want to try a few hair sheep to accompany your milk cows. They eat different weeds than cows and help the health of the pasture. They cannot have copper, however, so you have to keep the cow minerals out of reach. If you bottle feed them (with milk from your cow), they will be the biggest babies. Goats do better in lots of trees. I happen to live in an area with a lot of trees, and so I harvest tree leaves and bring them to them, to supplement the pasture. Cows and sheep also tolerate tree leaves well. I am harvesting lots of tree leaves and making silage to supplement their bought feed. It depends on how you look at it.
I have been where you are, just starting out. I grew up in town, and knew next to nothing about farming. One big advantage I had was that I had very close family members who were very knowledgeable of all aspects of farming. Other new farmers should definitely have several old experienced farmers on speed dial so they can ask questions when needed. I recommend that when people are starting out, do not jump in and buy all the animals and start the garden and start canning and do all the other things the first year. Try to keep the learning to one new thing a year. There are a few shortcuts you can make, such as buying electric netting fencing, so you don’t have to build fences from scratch. But really, there are no shortcuts in farming. You really can’t make up for a lifetime of experience. You have to take the time to make the mistakes and learn from them. Learn how to build a fence that won’t fall down and how to hang a gate. Learn to cut a board straight (and angles). Learn to build up your soil and how to retain top soil. Learn how to recycle junk that other people throw away, to make rabbit cages and raised beds. The learning curve is really high when you start out. You will fail at some things, but I hope you don’t fail at farming.
We also cannot find good help. That is why we seldom hire anyone to do anything. Mostly, it is doing it ourselves. Sometimes we have to depend on friends in the area for help, which is often much better help than hiring someone. It is brutally hard, backbreaking, monotonous work. You will give up if your mission isn’t foremost in your mind. Just make sure that when you build something, you build it strong enough to last many years. That is part of how you get ahead.
Utilize your manure to build up your garden soil. I get old refrigerators, strip them down, paint them to look like white painted wood (shiplap) and use them for raised beds. I use the outer shell of washing machines as rabbit cages. I set them on top of refrigerators to save all the manure for a raised bed. There are many ways to make compost for your raised beds. They all take a lot of time to sit and rot. Wood chips/sawdust/wood logs/twigs/cardboard/paper/leaves/ash will rot down and make wonderful compost. That is where potash comes from. Dead animals also decompose, which is where phosphates come from. Nitrogen comes from manure. Mix it together, along with any food scraps that the chickens don’t eat, and you will have some really rich compost. Put it in raised beds, so you don’t loose it to erosion, and you will have wonderfully rich garden soil that will grow about any kind of garden vegetable you can think of. Personally, I am focusing on growing as much animal feed as I can. I am growing lots of squash, okra and beans, which is carbs and protein. I am lactic fermenting (silage) a lot, as well as lots of wild harvested plants such as vetch, clover, elm leaves, sweet gum leaves, oak leaves, mimosa leaves, privet leaves, chamber bitter, etc. I am also lactic fermenting burmuda grass in plastic feed sacks lined with trash bags, since that’s the high protein grass we grow. We do cut and bale our own hay, but I am wanting to do small scale silage, since it’s better for the digestive track of cows, goats and sheep. I also fresh feed a lot of stuff to my geese. They will eat a lot of greens such as banana leaves and stalks, canna leaves and stalks, dock leaves, general yard weeds, etc. The chickens also like canna and banana stalks, but I feed them a lot of meat.
Building fences is critical. Repairing fences is even more critical. I am constantly repairing fences, even though we have great fences. I utilize a lot of oven racks and refrigerator racks in making the bottom of fences geese or goat proof. Paint them if you need to, to make them blend in. I don’t care anymore how it looks, as long it will hold them. I have gotten pretty good at tying up whatever my repair medium is. Our big pasture for cows, goats and sheep, we fenced with electric fence, and a really hot fence charger. This is stationary electric fences, not the moveable electric netting. It is much cheaper than goat netting per square foot, which enabled us to fence in more area. We have to keep the fences weedeated, or the grass will short out the fence. The smaller paddocks are fenced with netting of various kinds. One spot was fenced with barbed wire, which I came over with chicken wire, then reinforced the bottom with oven racks, etc. Another spot was fenced with woven net wire (not electric). It is very strong field fence, but it isn’t strong enough to withstand goats. I have had to come over it with much stronger reinforcement of various kinds. The fences for our beef cows and donkeys are mostly barbed wire or high tensil electric fencing. We constantly have to repair them as well.
In the old days, before modern fencing laws, people planned on goats and cows roaming free, and they would fence in whatever they didn’t want eaten, including their crops and gardens. I have kept that in mind as a method to keep deer out. In some ways, it is easier to work with the animals than work against them. As farmers it is our job to manage them. But you also have to figure out what the problem is that they are having and solve it for them. Very often, people overgraze their land, and so the animals are having problems from that. But if you can give them enough room, the animals will do a wonderful job of managing the land for you if you get the right mix of animals. Do not free-range pigs. They will not stay in fences of any kind. You need a concrete fortress to keep them from getting out.
Farming is a whole lot of other titles rolled into one. It is like running a small country, with all the aspects of maintaining the infrastructure, only on a very small scale. You have to know carpentry, plumbing, gas lines, welding, metalworking, motor repair, soil health, animal health, weather patterns, erosion control, legal matters, fencing, food preservation, etc. And you never learn it all. You have to become a lifelong learner. You have to learn to ask questions of other people. And you have to be humble enough to admit you were wrong and it didn’t work. If you are humble in being able to learn, people will be willing to help you. If you are hard-working, people will respect you. I promise you, it gets easier. Ask the Lord for wisdom, and he will give it to you. One day you will wake up and take a deep breath and realize that you did it. It is super satisfying.
One of the strong mentors in my life, that taught me a whole lot of what I know about farming, just passed away. She was my mother-in-law. She was 92. I miss her terribly. Thankfully, we didn’t have to deal with some problems a lot of people face at end of life. We took care of her totally at home, with no sitters. Some of that was because of her grit. She wanted to die at home. Some of it is because I am a homebody, that stays here on the farm and takes care of animals. She grew up in a farming family, back before modern mechanization and electricity. They were totally self-sufficient. Her whole extended family lived within a mile of them, and she married a man that grew up within 5 miles of them. The community was very tight and close-knit, and they would go help each other whenever there was something they needed help with. It is how they survived. They were dirt poor, but they made it. The grit and determination of those old folks cannot be matched today. I am so thankful for the wisdom I was able to glean from them. Her husband, my father-in-law, was a veterinarian. I never knew him, but the wisdom he passed on to my husband has saved us so much money. Sometimes we still have to hire a veterinarian, and there are several good ones in the area, but it is far, far less than other farmers in the area. The knowledge base is often passed down through many generations, not just one. That is the advantage to being in a farming family. You can think back and remember what momma or daddy did, to see what to try. Sometimes people ask us for help, which we willingly give them. This life is really hard, but living it makes you much better off at surviving. I wouldn’t want to live any other way. Whenever you get discouraged, get through whatever the problem is, then go rest. Ask the Lord to give you wisdom in learning a better way. He will show you. He has been my best teacher, by far. He has shown me things that I didn’t know the words to type into Google. Read your Bible every day, partly for the strength to go on, partly for wisdom in knowing how to farm, partly for glorifying God with your life. Ask him to shield your farm from the coming wrath. God will bless you if you ask him and seek to glorify him.”
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This video (in German with English subtitles) has some good lessons in frugal living: For 10 years the wife of a Maasai – Stephanie’s life under the simplest of circumstances. (A hat tip to Fred The Valmetmeister for the link.)
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