tribeless 3 of 3

TRIBELESS 3

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note: warning, the Wal-Mart storage tote option for grain stockpiling seems to have ingloriously ended.  Some months ago, the gray Sterilite brand 18 gallon tote was $5.  One hundred pounds of wheat fit in nicely, two unopened fifty pound bags ( your mileage may vary-you might need to treat yours with diatamatious earth-I just expose mine to the winter temps ).  I went yesterday to spend my Christmas gift "apocalypse money", 300 pounds of wheat and the totes for them.  The old gray totes are now over $7 each.  I can get three Home Despot buckets for twice that price ( when the tote was one third the price, its limitations were acceptable.  Not at only half price for far inferior containers ).  The ones that remained $5 were clear plastic and only 14.5 gallons-the wheat did NOT fit in.  At least not in the bag.  But the totes are flimsy enough with a really crappy lid I didn't want to try it out with loose grain anyway.  At this point, you need to give up portability and go with bulk storage price discount for as much as possible not needing to be moved ( metal trash can, cola bottling plant syrup drum, the square totes on a pallet [ IBC units ] ).
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A post-carbon fuel tribe would work the land sustainably, maximizing human labor with minimal tools.  Before goats and pigs keep clear an area your group chops down trees, remove stumps and get a horse to break up the soil with a plow.  A intermediate step there would be using a chainsaw, hiring a guy to brushhog, and renting a rototiller.  You’ve eliminated needing a group in the first place.  Because a lot of the need to even clear more farmland is due to feeding horses or feeding more farmhands, you don’t even need nearly as much cleared land by avoiding having the group.

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You won’t need as many bushels of wheat or corn to feed a dog rather than several men to help guard.  Butchering waste ( yes, I know all waste can go into soups and stews and sausage otherwise ) mixed with flour will make your own dog food, so for far less calories you get a much more effective watchman ( one bred for the task rather than one who learns it ).  And to supplement the dogs there is incredibly cheap alarms and surveillance systems.

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Sure, it would be great if a doctor joined your group, but because of their insanely overpriced education and monopoly protected profession, you would do better with a lay person self-trained.  All the knowledge is out there, and both your amateur and the professional are equally dependent on stockpiled tools to get anything done anyway ( in other words, a doctor is close to useless when the supplies run out ).  Not only that, but the smaller your group, in theory the less conspicuous they are and would in all probability avoid many conflicts and hence decrease the need for trauma treatment anyway ( disease prevention and the like are far less likely to have alternate home crafted tools available than the surgeons ).

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Military experts will be experts in conventional wasteful tactics.  They should be avoided at all costs.  There entire profession is predicated on factories churning out equipment to be thrown at the enemy, along with the manpower.  If you want to be cannon fodder, have a professional military man in your group.  If you are smarter, rather than study military manuals or feeding someone who studied them to regurgitate them, read up on guerrilla warfare.  As a bonus, you’ll need LESS equipment and not more.  Any base fortification can be done prior to the collapse with rented backhoes.

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Grains are the best calorie dense foods.  No one expects you to eat ALL grains.  Some northern Africans eat up to 90% of their diet in wheat, but most other impoverished nations are down around 60-70%.  Even affluent nations still get 50% of their calories from grains ( even though most of that is grain-to-meat ).  But the point is, grain takes a lot of space to grow.  You’ll need a lot of land to do so ( either to feed laborers or to feed bio-diesel to a tractor ).  The more grain you store NOW, at super depressed subsidized prices ( the subsidized part is you the taxpayer to the corporate entities.  It is incidental that you buy artificially lowered cost grain.  The recipient is the corporations that require a close to free commodity ), the less you need to grow later.

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Again, this is NOT long term.  I am NOT being a Yuppie Scum trying to sell you a lifestyle of Oil Age luxury items like semi-auto’s and propane heaters.  I’m pointing out a short term lifestyle those of us advanced in age and unwilling to support a group can live with minimal costs or effort.  It is how to live during the die-off and before tribes take over.  If you worry about your children, they will NOT be able to duplicate this reliance on Oil Age stockpiles.  This is just a five to ten year lifeboat.

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Feeding a family on stored grain is feasible, even if a sizeable investment.  Storage containers are much cheaper with larger amounts of grain anyway.  Right now, the cheapest buckets are 50% as much as the grain inside ( $25 for a hundred pounds of wheat, $13 for their buckets ).  If you buy the industrial size tote on a pallet, food grade, used ( IPC tote-330 gallon size, equals 66 buckets ), your container cost goes from 13 cents a pound to as low as 5 cents.  That is only $100 per ton container cost , and a ton of wheat feeds you for five years.  Even if you were too far away to buy jobber or wholesale, retail feed store wheat AND the container is a mere $600 per person per five years.

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It is a LOT cheaper to buy and store wheat than to buy the land or equipment for it or pay people to help grow it manually.  It is also cheaper to buy a good battle rifle with decent scope ( not sniper grade, marksmen grade with back-ups, so “middlin cost” ) and practice with it, and stockpile ammo, than feed a bunch of yahoos who will in the end just bang away without aiming, wasting ammunition on poodle shooting plastic carbines, confusing noise with skill.  One practiced guy is better than a group of posers ( unless you paid by the scalp, and then they would be worth it since they were fed to kill, not fed to pretend to protect ).

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Like cement and a backhoe to build a dugout now being  cheaper than quality tree cutting equipment and its labor ( eliminate the need for heating with trees ), a lot of tools now are cheaper than manual labor later.  In time, manual labor will be the only game in town, but that comes later.  In the future, a candle will require a beekeeper or a butcher, and a candle maker, necessitating a LOT of land feeding all those inputs.  Right now, it takes ten pounds of wheat equivalent ( $3 ) that will buy an LED light and its rechargeable batteries that will last TEN YEARS at a minimum ( low lumen output, just like but still better than a candle, lasting at least a week on one batt charge, with at least a thousand charges out of a set of batteries on a solar trickle charge ). 

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How many candles would it take for that?  At far more than ten pounds of wheat.  Low tool, high labor food is the only sustainable way once we are in a Dark Age with little ore or energy, but right now we can stockpile incredibly cheap labor substitutes.  Just don’t confuse cheap tools or energy for surplus.  Everything is cheap right now because we are in a economic depression, not because we are in a surplus.  Get it now while the getting is good, and enjoy the seclusion.

END ( today's related link http://amzn.to/2FuYqzm )

 

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