Category: Livestock, Feed, & Fencing

Letter Re: Quality Deer Management

I just found your blog and want to thank you and all the like minded individuals who post to it. I have never thought of myself as a “survivor” or as most on here seem to prefer, “prepper”. I just always thought of myself as a collector of knowledge much to my wife’s annoyance. I can’t help it, I just like to learn different things. For one of the most recent “hobbies” I’ve been researching and learning about Quality Deer Management (QDM). I don’t know if this has been brought up before now, I’m still going through the archives, but …


Three Letters Re: Some Tips and Tricks on Raising Meat Rabbits

Christine W. wrote a very nice article about raising rabbits for meat. As a rabbit raiser myself, I’d like to add a few suggestions: I have never had problems using straw in nest boxes, but prefer to use hay, or better yet, long dry grass. The does like to arrange their nests, and they get a good snack as well. You can add more bedding material if a doe gets piggy and eats all the bedding. I used to raise fryers commercially, and rigged up a great way to stack cages but eliminate the expensive trays that are time consuming …


Some Tips and Tricks on Raising Meat Rabbits, by Christine W.

Food production is the most important skill in survival. Without sufficient food you’re sunk. You won’t have the energy to protect yourself or your supplies, you won’t be able to get firewood to keep warm, or water to stay hydrated. So yes, you can live for weeks without food, but only if other people are there to take care of you and they have enough food! And meat is one of the best energy foods. Unfortunately most meat production is a high feed/time endeavor. It takes a lot of feed and time to get that cow to butcher size. Two …


Six Letters Re: Gardening Lessons Learned

James, I just read [Chet’s article in] the blog on urban and suburban gardening. I wanted to suggest something because I’ve been seeing people want to be more self sufficient by growing their own gardens. I don’t want to come off as a salesman for these two products made by the same person. I’m not someone that sells these items. But to give credit where credit is due, I’m impressed with buying both of these items. I picked up a DVD from Linda Runyon about a year ago, and bought her “Wild Cards” card set for identifying wild plants. The …


Turning the Corner, by F.J.B.

Today there seems to be any number of reasons for the average American to turn the corner towards preparedness and being self-reliant.  Back in 1993, I would have been able to give you just as many reasons based on my observations through the 1980s.  Not surprisingly there are twice as many reasons for the average man to not start around that corner.  The reasons I have heard the most include the cost factor and objections to living so primitively.  Simply put: today’s average American is too poor and soft to endure hardships like camping, physical labor, and no TV.  These …


A Southwesterner’s Experience in Family Preparedness, by C.F.

I always assumed that I would relax when I retired from my life’s vocation. I have now retired from working; however, there is no relaxation. As I absorb the news of the day my other life long avocation, family survival preparedness, continues to plague my mind. The current probability of a societal collapse looms ever closer. I am sure everyone concerned about their family’s safety understands the problems in America . I have been preparing for over 50 years to self sufficient that my family, including children and grand children, would have the ability to survive hard time and hunger. …


A Personal Journey in Preparedness, by Mountain Man

I’m fairly new to SurvivalBlog but now it’s an every day read. I wanted to write and share my own journey of preparedness with you and your readers. After living with three and a half million people for about 22 years, a move to the country was long over due. I made the decision to get out of the city back in 1999, when I starting to take things a bit more seriously with all of the talk about Y2K. I was really hoping that something would have happened back then so I could test my skills at being prepared …


Five Letters Re: Garden Defense — Repelling Four-Legged (and Two-Winged) Pests

Sir: Deer, rabbits, and squirrels are a real problem where we live in western Canada. The deer and rabbits love our fruit trees and the squirrels have a penchant for strawberries. (Yes, up here we can grow many varieties of apples, plums, cherries, pears and even certain varieties of kiwi, peach, grape, etc.) When we first moved to our farm we had several of our trees seriously damaged by deer and rabbits–not just fruit trees but trees in our shelter belt as well. The rabbits were the worst because they stripped the bark (several inches high) all the way around …


Garden Defense — Repelling Four-Legged (and Two-Winged) Pests, by Jason

Finally building a cabin in the woods close to nature can be a dream come true.  But if you are a gardener like me, the morning after the first midnight garden raid by pests unknown can be a real nightmare.  Garden pests never attack the day after harvest or when the plants are young.  They always seem to attack my garden the day before the big haul.  A garden full of just ripened fruit and veggies must look like a neon all-you-can-eat sign to a hungry deer, or rabbit.  There are ways to effectively turn that sign off but it …


It is All About the Means of Production, by Mark. B.

From the beginning of time, ownership and control of quality farm land and raw materials have been closely associated with wealth creation and prosperity. What can you grow or raise? What resources and commodities do you own and control? How much metal, stone, glass, and wood do you own? Do you have the means, knowledge, tools and skills to produce valuable items from this land and these raw materials? As America was settled, the pioneers knew very well the fundamentals of non-electric, independence away from the city and just how critical natural resources were to survival. If a parcel did …


Letter Re: Confronting Kleptocracy–Identifying the Looter Mentality

Dear Mr. Rawles, I would like to make a few comments on your post titled “Confronting Kleptocracy – Identifying the Looter Mentality”. Although my education and profession are in medicine, I have been long interested in social anthropology particularly as it applies to the average “citizen” confronted with a breakdown in modern society. As you are well aware, our society exists by means of a fragile web of precisely balanced interconnected dependencies. This web was not created overnight but has developed over several generations. At present we enjoy life at a time where the poorest people in our modern culture …


Finding Community, by Jim Fry

Here at the farm we had the first of a series of free and open classes on disaster preparedness on February 1st. One of the things I intend to talk about at the upcoming meetings are various options for joining a community. When discussing disaster preparations, the first thing to decide is what you think is most likely to happen. If you think the world is a friendly place where snow means skiing and flowers always bloom, then a disaster is the electricity going out for a couple days if a tree happens to fall. You’ll need a case of …


Preparing Your Church Congregation, by JSX in Virginia

My preparedness background started as a youth.  My father took us camping often and had an amazing gun collection; I’ve been able to teach my kids what he taught me – great memories both then and now!  In the 1970s, my mom and step-dad bought a little 2-acre farm in the middle of nowhere.  We kept a dozen or so chickens, had a few garden spots (that seemed to grow and multiply with each new season), homemade soap, homemade root beer (an acquired taste!) a “sewing room”, a small orchard, solar heating, our own 250-gallon fuel tank, and a year …


Barriers – Berries – and Bounty All Hidden in Plain Sight, by The Prudent Gardener

It seems a part of preparing for extremely hard times is acquiring knowledge and honing skills to maximize resources. SurvivalBlog has been tremendously helpful in developing exhaustive lists of needs, supplies, strategies and defenses. In addition, provision is made for faith, charity and quality of life to improve a healthy mental state. As a landscape contractor for 32 years, I am now seeing more potential for self-reliance that most property owners could develop with some planning and a better awareness of the resources they may already possess. This form of preparation could substantially improve our situation both short and long …


Letter Re: Clothing and Shoes, Post-TEOTWAWKI

James, Okay, a year or three goes by, [after TEOTWAWKI]. My wife can sew, but where do you get cloth and thread? I love Goretex (since I live in Western Oregon), but where do I replace those great Hi-Tec boots? No one seems to be discussing what happens when a shoelace brakes after Schumer is in session. You can hardly find them now. Cloth – one will make a spinning wheel and loom after “the fan” has become clogged! All that I can recall is an anecdote about the early Oregon Trail, when the newly arrived – skinny and starving …