Could we SURVIVE without...

Hello everyone and welcome back to Living Traditions Homestead. Well, today we're in the hay barn because it's an unusually warm but also unusually windy day here in the Ozarks, so we decided to move to the hay barn because it's really nice. I don't want to be inside, but we needed to get out of the wind for a while, so we wanted to take some time to talk to you today about a topic that's been coming up recently in our personal lives and we've realized that we've never really talked much about it. that here on YouTube so we wanted to take some time to talk to you today and that's the question what would you do if a question comes up about farming? and we will be talking. today, well, a little bit about the things that most people would think about, like what we would do without water or, you know, what we would do without electricity, you know, those kinds of things that are on a lot of people's minds, but there are also some things that the average person probably wouldn't think about well, as we're going to talk properly, like what we would do if we knew we

could

n't get hay for our cows anymore or what we would do if the feed you know the store no longer had.

I had food and what would we do if we didn't have adequate fuel? So the first thing we're going to talk about today is the topic of feed and hay because that's the topic I think is coming up. is what concerns us most when we talk to people in our everyday lives and even the questions we get here online, so the real truth is that the solution to the feed and hay problem would ultimately be about the same and we need many fewer animals here on the farm. We would need to get to a number where we can effectively produce all the food we would need for all the animals we currently have.

We have more animals on our farm than we need. To feed our family well, we have a lot more cows than we need, a lot more chickens, pigs, all that kind of stuff and we have them on our farm right now because we use them to sell their babies well and that's part of our business plan. of how we generate income for our family, but in a situation where there is a lot going on we can't get food for them, we can't cut the hay at that time, we have to scale down so that we are just growing. and raise enough food to support our family, and that's a situation.

I think you know there are a lot of things that

could

make that scenario happen, so we're not going to go into detail about what we think could happen because none of us actually know absolutely, let's just agree that there are things that could happen. happen in the world that would make it difficult to get food, to get fuel, to get food, all of those things are a possibility and it's something that you should always at least keep in mind, so let's first talk about the topic of hay itself, so Suppose we can no longer cut and bail the hay we need here on our farm, now all or most of you know that.

We probably know that although we grow our own hay here on the farm, we actually have a neighbor who comes and cuts and bales that hay for us, so let's assume that for some reason he can no longer come and cut that hay for us and we can't. We are left with a field of hay but there is no way to cut it and rescue it. The first thing we would have to do is reduce the number of livestock we have here on the farm. Right now we have around 20 head of cattle. between our beef cows, their calves, our bull, our dairy cows, all of that is about 20 head of cattle that we have here on the farm, so we would need to reduce that number considerably in order to continue to

survive

and be able to have those cattle graze for a long time. all year round and we think we would end up keeping our beef plate with two cows, two beef cows and two dairy cows right now, the reason we would keep two dairy cows is, first of all, we would want one. in milk all the time if we could do it at the right time and because those dairy cows would need to go to 100% grass fed, their production will be much lower than it is now because we supplement with grain correctly, so we would end up having five head of cattle total on our property versus 20.

Okay, and really our property could probably handle about 30 head of cattle, maybe even a few more if we really wanted to push it, but um 30 head of cattle if we could bale the hay properly and fertilize. and all of that because you know we fertilize our hay field every year because it doubles the amount of hay we can get, so we also assume that if we can't cut and bail, we can't fertilize properly either. then we would get a lot less hay than we normally would, so our plan would be to reduce the size of the cattle and then leave the hay in our hay field as what is called standing hay, which basically means that the hay is left to die. grass while it is long and put the cattle are there in the winter and they can eat the hay left in the hayfield all winter so we would still have our pastures that we could rotate the cows through during the warm parts of the year, we would leave the hay in the hay field as standing hay and move those cows to the hay field during the winter and that's how they would feed during the winter.

Now the good news for us in Missouri, especially in southern Missouri, we don't get a lot of snow, so you don't need to worry as much about a heavy load of snow, whether it's trampling or covering the hay, the cows will be able to continue eating. most of the time, so that would be our plan for hay if we couldn't get it anymore. cut and rescue now feed again the solution is very similar to the same we would get rid of many of our animals and this is something that may surprise many of you there are some animals on the farm that we actually eliminate 100 percent and honestly , the first to go would be our pigs, as much as I love pigs and as much as I enjoy raising them, they are our number one consumer of commercial feed here on the farm, even though we farm in Idaho.

The grass-fed pigs that many people think they know consume much less feed. The truth is that if you are raising them for meat and want to raise them to a decent size, they still need to eat plenty of food every day. Yes, now. Birds during the warm times of the year can look for food, they can eat insects and worms and that kind of thing. Rabbits consume so little that during the warm time of the year we can have them in the grass moving them every day and during the winter part , I think that actually through our greenhouse we could keep a breeding pair alive and healthy with what we could grow for them during the winter.

There would be certain things that we would grow in the greenhouse, like kale, chard and things like that we could feed them all winter in the greenhouse to keep them alive, they probably wouldn't thrive like they do now none of the animals probably would, but we could keep them alive and really that would be the whole purpose of what we were doing at the time was right and if we reduced our bird flocks enough so that we only had what we needed for our family, it would be a small enough number that we could also farm the corn that they would need to get through the winter to sustain them enough until summer came and they could go out and look for food.

Another animal that we would really have to consider whether or not to keep here on the farm would be the quail which I raised. I am experimenting and will continue to experiment with different ways of feeding them without commercial feed. I'm not really ready to share all that with you, but I have some plans that I'm going to try. and if all is successful, I will be happy to share with you how I am going to try to raise quail without commercial feed, so stay tuned, so in a nutshell, this is how we will get our farm forward with our animals. without having bales of hay and without having commercial feed in bags, since we are on the subject of food or feed for animals, let's change a little to talk about food for us, people feed themselves, yes, although we store some food and some non-perishable products, as many of you do, at some point they are going to run out and we need a plan for what we are going to do, what we are going to do with the food that we cannot grow here specifically wheat, berries, flour, rice, um, what are we talking about, sugar, oh yeah, sugar, and we're talking about salt, right?

And the main solution to that in our minds is really, number one, live without those things and number two, rely on substitutes that we can grow well here. so that we don't have to depend on wheat, rice and purified sugar, so you know it's nice to think that you can grow all these things correctly. Could we grow wheat here in southern Missouri? Could we participate? from our hay field and grow wheat instead, that's probably true, it's really doable for the two of us, you know, with one daughter who's in college and our other daughter is getting really close, so right now it's us two here. on our farm.

Is it feasible for the two of us to actually do that? It's probably not right. Know? Could we grow sugar cane and do all the sugar processing? Probably. Is it feasible? Probably not. So we're just going to assume that we don't have those things anymore and like Sarah said, the real solution is to find alternatives to those things that you can produce or what a lot of people just don't want to hear is that you're going to have to live without them. it's true, you know regarding sugar, the easiest replacement for sugar is honey, but you guys, we don't have bee hives, we don't have them yet, we tried them once it didn't work, we would like to.

We'll do it again in the future, but we're not there yet, so if we wanted honey, we'd have to partner with someone in the community and maybe do some transactions right or whatever grows well here. We have not done it in its entirety. a lot in the recent past, but Stevia grows very well here, so we can trust Stevia, it's not exactly the same, but hey, if you need something sweet, Stevia is definitely sweet, right? As far as you know, breads and that kind of stuff if we don't have wheat, we're just going to have to rely more on corn bread and things like that that we can grow and we're going to have to do the best we can and really that's what all of you are going to have to do. . what to do if a situation arises where you know it's harder to get the things you need right now, another big situation that comes up often is salt, a lot of people are worried about what are you going to do without salt and I agree which is something you should do.

I'm thinking and it's something that there's really no way to produce, you can't grow it in the greenhouse, you can't grow it in the garden, I mean, you can't over here, you can't go extract it in your own backyard. I mean, salt is something that we would have to think about and the truth is that you guys, even though preparation or preparation has gotten a bad rap, you're going to have to be prepared for some things and salt. It's one of those, but let's face it if you only use it to season your food and things like that, if you could have 50 pounds of salt stored away, that's a lot of salt and it'll get you through a lot of things.

Many times that would even get me through an entire season of tomatoes, but you guys are going to have to have some things on hand, things that you can't produce at all and you're going to have to determine that now. I know some people. you want to preserve all your meat by salting it and things like that, well, you have to think about that in advance and you have to have all that on hand, or you're not going to do it right or you're going to prepare it. ahead of time so you have enough on hand to do those things right.

You know that's not something we want to do. We would can all our meat if we needed to preserve all our meat that way, so we would only need enough salt on hand. have to eat and cook, so the next topic is water, what would we do if we couldn't get well water? The first thing is really here in Missouri, especially in southern Missouri, there are a lot of natural ponds, streams, streams, that type of thing and on our property we have access to fresh water, which is fantastic. Some other alternatives that are available to us.

Most wells can be converted for use with solar energy. We have solar options. We also have a kind of shallow well that is still there. If we plan to put in a manual pump, I think the most important thing will be, at least for us, not so much the availability of water, because we have a lot of water available, but whether or not it is contaminated and if we have a way to purify it, obviously the most The easiest way to purify water is to simply boil it, but keeping in mind the preparation mentality, we also have ways to filter water.

There are many options available that you can. use it to filter water as aAlexa Pier filter or a Berkey filter, so if you know, look at some of them and see what they think is right for you and you'll know to have something on hand, even if it's just to make sure I always have a way to be able to boil water if you need it now. Sarah had mentioned just a minute ago the ability to change a well from electric operation to solar operation and that's something that also comes up a lot because a lot of people say, well, I know you have a well, but you know that if the power goes out, you well is no good, there are ways around it and Sarah mentioned converting the well from electric to solar, so I wanted to take a second. to talk to you a little bit about the electrical aspect of what our plan would be if we no longer had electricity here on the farm.

I showed you in the past that we have a solar generator that we use here at The Homestead. It's one that I've used to power my store in the past and it's come in handy a few times for power outages and things like that, but we also recently got another solar generator and this is one that I'm very happy with and I want to show it to you and talk to you about it some time. bit. A little bit about why I think it's a really good solution, so this is the last solar generator that we have, basically what a solar generator is is a battery bank and what this battery bank can do is power a lot of different things in the farm.

We have several different sizes of solar generators here on the farm but like I said this is the newest one we have it's made by a company called ebl we've used it a couple of times already we recently had a brief power outage and were We can use this to continue running lights and things like that inside the house. This is a thousand watt generator that is solar powered, so it has a battery inside. It comes with two solar panels, so we can charge it during the day. stored inside here and then during the night or whenever we need, we can use this to plug in lights.

This one actually has a built-in light right in the front, which is pretty cool, but I can use this to run AC and DC things. your house, so it has a wireless charger on top for your cell phone, it has regular outlets here in the front, it has USB ports and what I've really been using this one for, because it's so portable, it's very lightweight, is that I can throw this on the front of the ATV or on the UTV between this and a solar panel that I can run, you know, I can charge batteries for tools and things like that all day long while I'm working remotely and it's really been helpful to have this solar generator that is so portable, one of the really useful things about this is that it has these really portable solar panels, you can see that they just pop out and then there's a stand on the back that pops out so you can put them on the ground where be. they're working and charging the power station so I'll leave a link to it in the video description but there are a lot of them out there I can tell you it's worked perfectly so it's something I would recommend you know I wouldn't recommend something if We wouldn't have tried it already for you, but depending on what you need to do, a small one like this that is portable is really useful to have the final result. for us electricity is that we understand that life is not going to be the same without electricity, even if we have solar energy to improve our life, it will not completely replace everything that we currently use electricity for and that is something that we understand that we know that Is it going to be a more difficult life?

We are very happy to have some alternatives to make things a little easier and more comfortable for us by using these solar generators and that is what it will be for us. If the power goes out and there's no electricity, and really the way I think about solar generators is that they're kind of a bridge, you know, they give us some time between when we lose power, you know, with luckily we never will. We're going to have a time where the power won't come back on, so let's say we're going to be without power for a week, we can

survive

, we can even run our freezers with some of the bigger solar generators we have to get it done. at a time like that, but let's say for some reason there's a time where you know we know we're not going to have power again for 10 years, well these solar generators, even though they're going to last 10 years, you know we're not going to We live our daily lives for 10 years with just these generators, but what they do is they give us a bridge, they give us time to can all the meat we have in our freezers, they give us time to figure out how to live.

There are more and more people without electricity and they are a kind of bridge for lack of a better term to help us overcome it, so the last topic we want to talk about is fuel, specifically we are talking about gasoline and diesel because those are the two fuels that we use here on the farm, so what would we do if the day comes that we can't, you know, fill up the gas cans that we normally fill, go into town and fill up the things that we use? around the farm, this is something we have also thought well about, you may be noticing a common theme.

Here, uh, if we don't have a way to get more fuel, then we'll use what we have sparingly and reduce the activities that we normally do that use fuel, so we have to use them less or not at all, so, you know, we were talking about this before we start recording and it's like, well, what would we do to go to the city if there is a fuel shortage to go to the city is probably the least of our worries, so I would have all the fuel there is in my truck so I can use it on the farm.

Instead, I could divert it and I could use it on the farm, but no. There are also things that I think about in my daily life, like now, if it rains a lot and it's cold a lot of times, I get on the UTV or ATV to go feed the animals in the morning because I can do them faster. but that uses fuel well and if I had to I would just walk every day like I do on warm sunny days to go feed the animals, so there are little things we would do that would definitely reduce our need for fuel a lot. right, and then there are things that you know we use sensitivity now because it's very useful, like I love my tractor.

You know that I use my tractor for many things, but you know if we couldn't use the tractor for even the garden, what would we do right? We would just have to find alternative ways to till our garden, like using the wide fork, or we would find ways to grow that don't require tilling the garden, we have plenty of large tubs and we can still grow inside or outside the greenhouse in those tubs, so like Like all the other topics we've discussed, fuel is one of those where you know we might have to change the way we think about it.

We would have to use it. what we have on hand in moderation, so we could go for a while and then get used to not having it at all. We would have to go back to the old ways just before the cultivators before the tractors just before you know it. lawnmowers and herbicides we have to see the old way, and you again. I know being prepared sometimes gets a bad rap, but there are things you need to think about properly and take the time. while you can, to get things that you know will help make your life easier if some of the really nice things in life start to disappear, so we hope that this topic, our explanations and some of our plans have been useful to you.

We hope you enjoyed hearing what we would do and maybe it gives you some ideas to prepare, even just thinking about, not necessarily always beans and rice, beans and rice, but starting to have that. that planning thought process about you know what we would do well if this happens well and you know we really hope that the day never comes when you know any of these things happen we hope that the grocery store will always be there we hope that the gas station will always be there there and you know we're not the kind of people that sit back and think, you know how these things could play out, we live our life and we like to always have a plan behind us.

Our minds to know what would happen if you were so happy to have you join us today for this sit-down discussion. If you are enjoying our videos and topics like this, be sure to hit the Subscribe button below if you aren't. You are already a subscriber and remember that the best way you can help us here at Homestead is simply by sharing our videos and your social networks until next time thank you very much for stopping by our Homestead take care and God bless you God bless you.