Sir,
Regarding your Retreat Areas recommendations: I grew up on a small multi-crop and livestock farm in north western Iowa, with 24 inches of precipitation and 180 frost free days.
I have been living in California Eastern Sierra since 1982 , but soon will be leaving.
I respectfully submit that your assessment of the agricultural capability of many of the low precipitation/low humidity areas of the western US is vastly overestimated. Western states such as Nevada, Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico are not farmable by amateurs using conventional means available during any TEOTWAWKI scenario. Obtaining water rights and controlling large scale irrigation is not some thing you can learn after a crash. Northeastern Oregon, Southeastern Washington, and the Snake River plain of Idaho are exceptions.
Your frost free growing season data [at state level over-generalizes] for many states. For example, eastern Oklahoma has 200 – 220 [frost-free] days.
For the vast majority of readers, Interstate 90 should be their northern limit if they wish to grow any more than a small garden and areas south of Interstate 80 would be preferred.
If you plan to grow enough row crops to feed yourself, or if you want to trade with the local farmers, you will need an absolute minimum of 18 inches [of] precipitation (preferably during mid spring and summer) and 140 frost free days.
JWR Replies: I have always recommended that readers do detailed study of micro-climates before relocation. Start with the Gale Publishing Company book “The Climates of the States” (in the reference section of many libraries), and then do detailed climate and soil studies using data from the NWS, NRCS, and various online resources.
My general guidance is to avoid areas that require irrigation, with the exception of the very few locales that have an end-to-end gravity fed irrigation infrastructure in place. As I’ve mentioned many times, if and when the power grids go down, many parts of the western US will quickly revert to desert. Hence, my preference is for “reliable rain” or “dryland farming” regions–that is, areas where crops can be reliably grown with regular spring and summer rains. But here is the rub: Many of those regions are heavily populated and might might not be safe in the event of a major societal disruption. So your choices will be narrowed to “”a subset of a subset”, if you are looking for an ideal retreat local. There are just a handful of places that I consider ideal lightly-populated locales for retreat self sufficiency. Two notable ones are the Palouse Hills region (straddling the border of eastern Washington and north-central Idaho), and the Montpelier, Idaho region. So, taken together with other important criteria like crime, taxes, gun laws, and so forth, it is no wonder that Idaho is at the very top of my list for retreat locales.
With the exception of the immediate riparian tracts, I do not recommend Idaho’s Snake River Plain, because the majority of the region depends on electrically-pumped irrigation water, much of it from deep wells. When the grid goes down, that area will revert to sagebrush. That, by the way is a clue to remember: When you are traveling in search of potential retreat properties, observe the native vegetation on the non-irrigated hillsides. What you see is what you’ll get, when the grid goes down. Again, in much of the West, the only exceptions will the few and far-between places with end-to-end gravity fed irrigation. And BTW, if you plan to live “in town” the same logic applies to municipal water supplies. Very few of these are gravity fed from end-to-end. (Ironically, the City and County of San Francisco is one such locale. (Its water comes from the Hetch Hetchy reservoir, high in the Sierra Nevada mountains. But given its population density, San Francisco can hardly be recommended!)