Low visibility agriculture (livestock)

Peter over at Bayou Renaissance Man points out that bad people will demand your preps and any food you have grown if things go pear-shaped. It is not enough to be able to grow your food. You have to be able to protect it as well.

That triggered a few thoughts on my part. Successful organisms rely on multiple, overlapping (like shingles on a roof) defensive strategies. The benefit of overlapping shingles is that the roof still sheds water even if one shingle is breached.

I also place a very high value passive measures. They work even when you are otherwise occupied. Active defenses are needed, but they will eventually fail if challenged enough times. That is the way luck works. Given enough chances, even the blind marksman hits the lucky spot. 

The best passive measures are the art of silence and invisibility.

Livestock

Livestock will be a magnet for raiders. Few forms of wealth provide its own transportation when stolen by pirates, brigands and looters to steal it.

Meat is nutritionally dense and a luxury item, just the thing to "pay" your henchmen if money loses its value.

If you haven't given it any thought, livestock is impossible to hide.

If you have given it some thought, you have a nucleus you can build on even if they find some of them.

God (or Mother Nature) gives us a template

The Rouen duck is a breed of mallard that is virtually identical in coloration to the wild mallard but twice its size. They are almost invisible in cattails or tall grass and you can maintain plausible deniability regarding not "declaring" your wealth. Rouen ducks are the ultimate stealth livestock

Hungarian Partridge

Female Ringneck Pheasant

Ruffed Grouse

Note the muted colors and the coarse, speckled pattern.

There are many chicken breeds that approximate the patterns seen on upland birds. In most cases these birds were bred for the show-ring and the colors are more vivid than those seen on female, wild birds. A few of them are:

Speckled Sussex

Buttercup

Gold-laced Wyandotte

Barred Rock

The cloak of invisibility will not do you much good if you have a rooster crowing. And if you don't have a rooster you will be out of the egg business as your hens age out.

The No Crow collar muffles the roosters crow because he cannot swell up the resonance chambers at the base of his neck (think Bag-pipes)

Cattle and goats

Whitetail deer are notorious for being able to disappear into small patches of cover.

You would be hard pressed to find an animal with coloration more like a Whitetail deer than a Jersey heifer.

Supplying neighbors with milk is a calculated risk. Dead cows don't give milk so your neighbors might be more motivated to keep their mouths shut. And while they might like beef, there just isn't very much meat on a pure-dairy cow.

Animals that forage are often quieter than animals that are fed. Cows make a terrible racket when they see somebody carrying that bucket that brings them their corn.

Rabbits

Rabbits were probably the Number-One source of meat in much of NAZI occupied Europe.

They were quiet. They reproduced quickly. The could be raised as semi-feral animals and snared as needed. They did not require exotic feed.

Pigeons

Meat and communication. Plus, they can forage for food long distances from their home roosts. The downside is that there is not much meat on a squab.

Aquaculture

There is nothing wrong with a pond with a few catfish or a mess of panfish in it.

Ponds also attract muskrats and migrating waterfowl. Clams, frogs, turtles and crayfish can also be harvested.

Intensive aquaculture will be a struggle as fish-food will either be non-existent or you will be announcing your wealth (food) when you go to buy it.