This is my current thinking on the subject.
It is not perfect. It is likely to change over time. Some parts of it will be very specific to my "Place": 900 feet elevation, 30' above property to the east, wet and south, exposed to the prevailing wind, Eaton County, Michigan, 15 miles from the Lansing thermal-bubble, 90 miles from Lake Michigan.
Starting with the goal in mind
It is OK to be off-course as long as you have a crisp sight-picture of the goal and a means of moving in that direction.
The primary goal is to be able to supply 2000 Calories every day of the year to each person to whom you have extended an offer of hospitality.
Secondary goals are to provide enough protein and vitamins and minerals to keep each person healthy.
Realistically, due to storage losses, that means you need to harvest 3000-to-4000 Calories per person. The additional calories will be useful in working. 2000 Calories a day might keep you alive but you will need substantially more than that to cut and haul firewood, for instance.
***"small-c" calories" and "Large-C Calories"***
The small-c calorie is a metric unit of work or energy. Work and energy are interchangeable terms. Work and power are not. Power is a rate, that is, how much work-or-energy can be done in a specific amount of time. A trickle of water can level a mountain given enough time.
The Large-C Calorie is a dietary unit and is 1000 times more energy than the small-c calorie which is a thermo-dynamic term.
This distinction occasionally messes people up. Vegetable oil in the context of a food has 9000 Calories per kilogram but has 9,000,000 calories used in a lamp as a heat source. It is the same amount of energy but you might be deluded into thinking it is more efficient to burn the oil in a lamp than to consume it as food.
***End aside on Calories vs calories***
Foods that are resistant to spoiling
One of the excellent things about carrying a few pounds of body-fat is that it does not spoil. You can carry it from year-to-year and it will not "go bad".
Potatoes and apples spoil.
Grain is vulnerable to bugs and rodents and mold.
The fat you carry on your body is not subject to those loses. It has other issues, but storage losses are not one of those problems.
Bottom line, in a situation where famine is likely, eat it if you have it!
(Another rambling aside is that people from famine-prone regions seem to lack impulse control. There might be some sound, Darwinian reasons for that. It is probably a good thing under some contexts. Just don't eat the seed-corn)
What to plant?
Plant what is easy to store.
Plant what is easy to harvest.
Plant what has a very long harvest window.
Plant what produces the maximum number of calories per area unit of land in your area WITHOUT exotic inputs.
That formula is a big reason corn has become such a staple. Versatile, storable, growable.
ReplyDeleteCorn is excellent but a heavy feeder requiring large inputs. Cabbage, potatoes, root crops can feed you and more importantly help feed your critters. At least in New England.
ReplyDeleteBTW Thanks for starting this thread :-)
ReplyDeleteObviously, storage losses of 50 - 100% is not sustainable. But if this happens more often than, say once per 5 or ten years, you should reconsider your ability and means of storing food.
ReplyDeleteKeeping inventory requires you anticipate extreme events and provide means and methods for the duration.
Inventory of hay bales or dimensional lumber (examples of raw materials) may experience such losses but the same is not acceptable for processed food items.
My Calorie growing experiments from last year extrapolating to growing in 100 square foot beds:
ReplyDeletePotatoes —80 lbs = 28000 Cal.
Dry corn — 10.3 lbs = 19570 Cal.
Dry pole beans — 12.5 lbs = 19600 Cal.
These were my first trials for dry corn and dry beans.
Pacific Northwest. Didn't you have a wet spring this year?
DeleteYes, very wet June. That happens at times. But bone dry from July to Oct 15th. That was very weird for so late, but it stretched my growing season. Very few choices of corn in BC and no foreign importing allowed — some kind of disease protection.
DeleteCanadians don’t know much about using dry corn so I tried using a coffee grinder and zinged up some breakfast grits (?) in five seconds and cooked 50/50 with my seven grain cereal for 25 min. Tasted fine.
Sadly, I don't have room to grow anything, so I purchase the dry versions... And rice!
ReplyDeleteI’m stuck with potatoes and root crops for my primary calorie source in Alaska. I have tried dry beans in the hoop houses but have concluded that the space is better devoted to increasing the length of the growing season for brassicas for fresh eating. Tomatoes and cucumbers are the primaries in the green house for canning, pickling and fresh eating and small amounts of even earlier fresh greens. Don’t forget sauerkraut for canning to store cabbage and some other things like turnips. Kraut can be crock stored in the right conditions. Have lids or reusable lids to can up things like beets and carrots before they can spoil. And as you said, if the will spoil eat as much as you can before it does!
ReplyDeleteDon't forged barley and peas! I'm trying to develop a sunflower that'll set seed in the Interior,.
DeleteAt my location in the Copper Basin I have found that the Lincoln pea variety gets a good crop about five years in ten. Spring variety is pretty well guaranteed. Frost sometimes gets the late variety. Haven’t tried dry peas and I don’t really have a way to harvest barley or oats and not enough clear land on my thirteen acres. My laying chickens are supplemented with cooked potatoes and cooked kitchen waste. The sunflowers sound interesting!
DeleteI’ve had been given my initial check widespread of $15,550, pretty cool. i’m therefore excited, this can be the quantity only once i truly attained something. zx04) i’m progressing to art work even additional robust new and that i can’t look ahead to next week payment. move to home tab for more detail…….
ReplyDeleteI principally recommend to everybody to apply…
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