SUBHEAD: The Prepper community is doing more than hording freeze dried food and ammo. They are avoiding GMOs and Roundup.
By Juan Wilson on 24 November 2014 for Island Breath -
(http://islandbreath.blogspot.com/2014/11/word-out-on-roundup-soaked-wheat.html)
Image above: No GMO wheat has been FDA approved, but that doesn't mean Monsanto has to stay out of the wheat business. They demonstrated to farmers that harvesting non-GMO wheat was easier by spraying it first with RoundUp. From (http://www.earthyreport.com/site/class-action-suit-hits-monsanto-over-wheat-gmo/).
Below are two articles on disaster/collapse preparedness that I read the day before yesterday. They seemed specifically about different subjects. One was a recipe for making hard tack biscuits and the other was an overview of selecting a survival retreat before a major crisis begins.
As different as the specific subjects were, they shared a common bit of advise - Stay away from GMO food and the pesticides that surround them!
The hard tack biscuit recipe included this:
. The strategic retreat article included this: By Juan Wilson on 24 November 2014 for Island Breath -
(http://islandbreath.blogspot.com/2014/11/word-out-on-roundup-soaked-wheat.html)
Image above: No GMO wheat has been FDA approved, but that doesn't mean Monsanto has to stay out of the wheat business. They demonstrated to farmers that harvesting non-GMO wheat was easier by spraying it first with RoundUp. From (http://www.earthyreport.com/site/class-action-suit-hits-monsanto-over-wheat-gmo/).
Below are two articles on disaster/collapse preparedness that I read the day before yesterday. They seemed specifically about different subjects. One was a recipe for making hard tack biscuits and the other was an overview of selecting a survival retreat before a major crisis begins.
As different as the specific subjects were, they shared a common bit of advise - Stay away from GMO food and the pesticides that surround them!
The hard tack biscuit recipe included this:
Just make sure that you use a good quality flour for your hard tack. Bleached flour has been stripped of many of its nutrients, and modern day wheat is often genetically modified and soaked in pesticides.
And, avoid land that has GMO crops planted on it—especially the “Round-up Ready” variety. Round-up pollutes the soil and some of its chemicals permanently bind to soil minerals. Remediation is costly.I found it fascinating that two articles published on the same day on such diverse aspects surviving the future would advise avoiding the technology of the big agro-chemical food industry.
These pieces follow this article on November 125th from a site called the Organic Prepper:
Maybe you aren't actually Gluten intolerant - Maybe your'e just Poison intolerant
(http://www.theorganicprepper.ca/maybe-you-arent-actually-gluten-intolerant-maybe-youre-just-poison-intolerant-11152014) or (http://islandbreath.blogspot.com/2014/11/gluten-or-glyphosate-intolerance.html). The gist of the article is that even non-GMO wheat is soaked with RoundUp (glyphosate) before harvest to shrivel the plants and make them easier for machines to thresh.
My wife, Linda, and I tested sensitive to wheat gluten in 2006 and have avoided wheat food products since. We have been buying rice based breads or other substitutes for wheat ever since. We have been buying some of our gluten free bread from Hanapepe Town baker, Midnight Bear. They also sell organic wheat loafs.
After reading the Organic Prepper article last week we queried Midnight Bear about their bread and were assured it was glyphosate and GMO free. Last Fridsay night we bought an organic wheat loaf and ate most of it over the weekend with no gluten sensitivity reaction.
This of course is incidental evidence, but we intend to continue experimenting with organic RoundUp free wheat and see if Monsanto is the problem and not the grain.
[Author's note on 11/28/14:It appears that the organic wheat may be RoundUp free, but Linda and I had a distinct reaction that appeared to be caused by gluten reaction to the Midnight Bear bread loaf we consumed.]
What is likely not incidental is the rise in sensitivity to wheat products in the last several years after the practice of spraying RoundUp on wheat before harvest exploded.
Making Hard Tack Biscuits
SUBHEAD: How to make hard tack biscuits that have a 50 year shelf life.
By Joshua Krause on 22 November 2014 for ready Nutrician -
(http://readynutrition.com/resources/how-to-make-hard-tack-with-a-50-year-shelf-life_22112014/)
Until the 18th century, there weren’t very many ways to store food for long periods of time. You could dehydrate produce and beef, and turn dairy into cheese, but beyond that your options were limited. And even then, the amount of time you could preserve that food was limited.
Nowadays we have canning, freeze drying, food additives, vacuum sealing, and even irradiation. Obviously, many of these methods aren’t very healthy, but they have given us the ability to preserve our food for many years, and even decades.
There is only one ancient food that can stack up against modern methods of preservation, and it was known as hard tack. If you’ve ever been to a civil war reenactment, you may have seen the actors munching on this hard biscuit. However, hard tack predates the American Civil War by several thousand years. Records show that ancient Egyptian and Roman sailors had their own version of hard tack.
But the Civil War is what most people remember it from, and it was that war that proved the extreme longevity of this hardy biscuit. Much of the initial supplies fed to Union and Confederate troops were leftovers from the Mexican-American War, and so much hard tack was made during the Civil War, that it wouldn’t be completely eaten until the Spanish American War; a whole 50 years later.
So how do you go about making this long lasting biscuit? Well there are several different recipes, but the most common one contains 4 cups of flour, 2 cups of water, and 3 teaspoons of salt. Mix it all together until you have a consistent dough, and roll it out into a square sheet. Typically the dough is about a 1/2″ thick, and is cut into 3×3 inch squares.
From here you want to use a fork or a chopstick to press 12 to 16 dimples into each square. Make them fairly deep, but not so deep that they puncture the biscuit. Afterwards you should flip the dough over and press more dimples into the back. These perforations will allow the heat to dehydrate the inner layers of the dough.
Now preheat the oven for 350-375 degrees, and place your squares on an ungreased cookie sheet. Once the oven is ready, you’ll want to cook them for 30 minutes, then flip them over and bake them for another 30 minutes.
Once they’re ready, check their consistency. If they’re soft and crumbly, then they may need to go back into the oven. They’re still edible, but they need to be really dry if you want them to last a long time. Once you’re satisfied with the results, you can let them rest and harden for a few days. You’ll know that you did a good job if the biscuits are hard enough to give you a concussion.
Fortunately you won’t be eating them in that state. Simply soak them in milk, water, or coffee for 10 or 15 minutes, and they should be sufficiently soft for eating. Or if you’d like to will the biscuits to your grandchildren, keep them in an airtight container, and they’ll stay fresh well into your twilight years.
Just make sure that you use a good quality flour for your hard tack. Bleached flour has been stripped of many of its nutrients, and modern day wheat is often genetically modified and soaked in pesticides.
Find yourself some flour that is made from a higher quality wheat such as einkorn, spelt, or emmer.
[IB Publisher's note: Any certified organic wheat available should be free of GMO and RoundUp.]
And even if you prefer canned or freeze dried food for your prepping supplies, you should still try making hard tack sometime. It’s a simple but useful skill that you can use to make your flour supplies last forever.
• Joshua Krause was born and raised in the Bay Area. He is a writer and researcher focused on principles of self-sufficiency and liberty at Ready Nutrition. Joshua’s website is Strange Danger
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Overview of Survival Retreat Strategies
SUBHEAD: The need for a retreat strategy and a safe physical place to go in a crisis is a core concept of preparedness.
By Joel Skousen on 22 November 2014 for SHTF Plan -
(http://www.shtfplan.com/emergency-preparedness/strategic-relocation-survival-retreat-strategies-for-when-something-big-goes-down_11222014)
The need for a retreat strategy and a physical place to go in a crisis is a core concept of preparedness, and the reason is simple: Most people live in unsafe major metropolitan areas and can’t relocate because they are tied to a job, and the jobs are tied to the city. Sadly, all metro areas are unsafe simply because hundreds of thousands of people are concentrated in one area and completely dependent on a fragile set supply infrastructure that will someday fail in a major way.
Even people with a lot of money who still work often can’t afford to live in rural safety full time because of the time, expense and impracticality of commuting long distance to work. Even if they did choose to do that, the breadwinner(s) is at risk of being trapped in the city at the workplace (or in transit) when something big goes down.
A popular phrase among preppers is to prepare to “bug-out” (bug-out bag, bug-out vehicle, bug-out location, etc.). It’s not my favorite concept because it implies having to get out of town in a hurry because you got surprised like everyone else by the sudden crisis. And, that puts you at risk of being caught in the inevitable Katrina-like traffic jams—and you know how that turned out.
Preparing to bug-out, of course, is better than nothing (and usually the cheapest part of preparing), but you really need someplace to go that is prepared as a retreat, complete with shelter and long-term food and water supplies. That can be as simple as a camp you’ve prepared in advance with buried supplies (a tough go in the winter) or a cabin in the mountains you’ve prepared perhaps together with relatives or like-minded friends, which is a whole different level of expenditure.
The rural mountain retreat in a forested area is the first thing people think about in a retreat strategy, and it does provide safety from the masses when you select a location not visible from any paved roads and concealed among trees. But there are two major risks in choosing a remote mountainous location:
- You have to be able to get there, and distance and terrain can present a problem.
- ou must have concealed, hardened basement space for your storage and significant security features on windows, walls and doors to ensure your stockpiles will still be there when you arrive.
Lonely cabins in the mountains are often targets for theft and break-ins from hunters or others simply taking advantage of the isolated situation where detection of crime is improbable.
The main disadvantage of the mountain cabin retreat is that such properties are rarely suitable for growing, either because of altitude or rocky, sloped soil. This is especially true in the West. In the East most of the mountains are low in enough that altitude is not a problem, but tree shading and sloping rocky soil is.
So, while the mountain retreat offers great short term retreat safety, it may be a problem during a long-term famine that is very likely during a major social breakdown caused by the grid going down or a nuclear war. Don’t disregard the war scenario out of hand.
Anyone who is watching the growing aggression of Russia and China can see that this coming threat as a grim future reality, despite the continual denial by government and the establishment media. But, it is telling that our government (and retired insiders) are making major preparations for nuclear war, so they know something they aren’t telling the rest of us about.
Stored food supplies are limited depending on how much you can afford and how much secure storage space you have, in a secure location. The longer the period of social unrest lasts—and it will get worse the longer public services are out of commission—the increased likelihood that your stored supplies will run out and you’ll have to revert to growing food. Those who are relying upon a suburban garden plot for food during a widespread famine and social unrest will find their efforts overrun with hungry, desperate people stealing food even before it is ripe.
All of this points to the need for a rural farm retreat is to be able to grow food during the first or second growing season during war or as the result of long term social unrest when urban infrastructure and supplies are halted. A farm retreat can serve the same purpose as a mountain retreat if it is far enough away from major refugee flows and hidden from view. That’s harder to do with a farm because farmland requires large sunny open areas and relatively flat land, as well as access to irrigation or well water. But it can be done.
One of the most important features to look for in a survival farm is privacy. Good farm land is usually in the proximity of other farms. Try to find land that has fairly dense forested areas between the fields and any passing roads. Southern Missouri and Southeastern Oklahoma are a couple of the best states for finding prime farmland interspersed with hills and trees. Parts of eastern Kansas also are good.
In those states the tree cover is mostly deciduous, meaning they lose their leaves in winter, diminishing your privacy. So, you may have to augment the tree cover with dense bushes or conifer trees that provide cover even in winter. Fencing and gates are also important to deter entrance, and to give you one more important confirmation that any intruder found on your property just didn’t wander across unimpeded.
Farms out in the Far West don’t have a lot of tree cover, except in northern Idaho and Montana, where fir and pine trees abound at lower altitudes. And, make sure the farmland comes with irrigation water rights.
In some of the desert states you even have to have a water right to give up in order to obtain a permit to drill a well for a home and garden. Have the soil tested for fertility and mineral composition.
And, avoid land that has GMO crops planted on it—especially the “Round-up Ready” variety. Round-up pollutes the soil and some of its chemicals permanently bind to soil minerals. Remediation is costly.
Remember to keep the defensive criteria in mind as you shop around for your property. Sometimes it can be easy to get enchanted with a spectacular stream or beautiful meadow and building spot and not realize that the property may have defensive issues. After you have found that perfect retreat be sure and check out these two informational articles on OPSEC and Retreat Defense.
Check out Strategic Relocation for the latest private listing on farm and mountain retreat land where many new Colorado properties have come on the site and contact Todd Savage to get confidential referrals to Survival Realtors.
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