Pickling and brining are old traditional methods, utilizing vinegar or salt to achieve storage of some firm vegetables, and some varieties of ocean fish. Pickling can be done in a “quick” form, and in a longer process that involves an initial brining followed by a vinegar treatment. Quick pickling uses canning jars, but brining is usually done in a larger plastic or heavy ceramic vessel that can be tightly covered to keep out gnats. Brined foods may be left in their jug in a cool covered area, like a cool storage, for months. Startup costs are small and include the brining vessel, canning jars, vinegar and flavoring ingredients such as mixed pickling spices.
Smoking can be done on a large outdoor dedicated building or small portable smoker scale. It’s generally used for meats of all kinds, and can result in meat that is fairly dry and can be stored for months, or in meats that are moist and must be frozen but taste delightful and smoky. Dry smoked meats must be soaked to rehydrate and remove some salt from them before use. Like fermenting, this is an art and takes time to get good at. Some meats require soaking or injection of flavorings or spices that help with the preservation. You’ll need the smoking chamber, and firewood coals - apple, hickory, maple, mesquite are all good.
Cold storage is similar to keeping fruits and vegetables in a refrigerator. It used to be that people had a special “fruit cellar” – a simple basement, sometimes just a dug pit basement under the house where firm fruits and vegetables of all kinds were stored for winter use. Something as simple as a large plastic barrel set in the ground with the lip well above any risk of water infiltration, filled with your foods, and covered with dirt and hay to retain the cold and, hopefully, prevent freezing. Different foods have their own requirements. Carrots, for example, do best if stored in slightly damp clean sand, whereas tomatoes store for a while if wrapped in newspaper and placed side-by-side. The cold space needs good air circulation, but must be protected from freezing. Freezing will ruin many of your stored goods. Try not to store apples with other foods; apples release ethylene gas, which stimulates “ripening” in many other types of foods.
Freeze Drying is a relatively new method of food preservation. It preserves the quality, flavor, color, and nutrition of multiple types of foods for decades, if stored in cool, dry, dark conditions. Most long term canned storage food is either dehydrated or freeze dried. There’s varieties of freeze dried meats that look precisely like fresh steak, chops, or codfish, but they’re rock hard and room temperature. There’s even freeze dried ice cream bars, that look just like they came out of the freezer, except they’re not cold.
Freeze dried foods are a little more costly than dehydrated. Like dehydrated foods, they need to be rehydrated before cooking; meats are cooked after rehydrating, just as if they were raw. Color and flavor retention are very good.
Freeze drying is much more expensive to use as a method of home-preserving. The freeze drying machine costs around $3000. Then, you’ll need air-tight vacuum sealable jars to store your supplies in. The machine requires electricity to run, and interruption of the freezing or drying cycle means the loss of the food that is being treated.
If you’re able to freeze dry your current garden’s produce, that might be a viable option for generating a large supply of long term storage. However, the ability to use a freeze drier after Zen-slap is questionable unless you have a consistent supply of electricity. Remember that we are focusing on methods that can be carried on even without most modern amenities.
Niceties
It’s extremely difficult to run a rural home without good tools. Hoes, shovels, rakes, pruners, axes, picks, pry bars, and weed trimmers all come in manual versions. New ones are generally pretty poorly made, so look for “antiques” that are in good condition or that you can replace handles on. Country auctions are good places to find these, often just for a few dollars each.
Keeping the garden free of weeds requires either a lot of diligence and many hands, or a tiller of some kind. Modern gas-powered trimmers and tillers are a real work-saver, but you’ll need more than the machine itself. Cord, motor oil, gasoline, replacement parts, and know-how are the basic add-on items you’ll have to keep in storage.
A small lawnmower, the basic old-timey push type, will cut a maintained lawn just as good as a gas-powered one, and will keep running as long as you do. For larger areas, a garden tractor/mower combination does the job easier, with the need for belts, replacement parts, oil and gasoline storage. Alternatively, “lawns” can become pasture for small livestock; sheep are particularly good at keeping a lawn short and attractive and eating flowers, fruit trees, and shrubs, if they’re not protected.
Finally, the major expense: a tractor with bucket and tiller. If you’re doing serious farm work, you can’t function without it unless you are Amish and have big horses and willing neighbors. Old tractors require constant repairs, but cost less upfront and generally don’t have the kind of electronics onboard that could fail during a CME or EMP event. Plenty of spare parts, plus a couple hundred gallons of diesel – and a good repair manual for your make and model – and you’ll have years of service.
Horse-drawn equipment can fit the needs well, but this isn’t something a person can do as easily as hopping on a tractor. Horses must be maintained, which calls for food, medications, fences, corrals, and pasture, as well as the harnesses appropriate to the equipment.
Once again, “many hands make lighter work.” Everyone contributes and the job, whatever it is, gets done faster.
7 FOOD: Small Scale livestock
Meat and animal fat are critical to survival in cold climates. The Inuit lived primarily on fats, fish, and mammal meat, and were strong healthy people until the introduction of modern diets. The ability to produce your own meats may be one of the most valuable skills you will have in the times to come. Livestock not only provide meat and fat, but also milk, eggs, valuable skins, fibers such as wool, down and feathers, bones for soups, and manure for the garden.
If you have never raised livestock, you must start small with the intention of growing your flock or herd. Routine animal care really requires “the eye of the farmer” to see early health problems, whether the animals are getting enough to eat or not, when they need trace minerals or other supplements, and so on. You won’t learn any of that from a book – only by doing and observing.
Here’s an early and serious word of warning: The animals you raise are not pets. They are food. Do not give them “names,” except maybe “Fried” or “Hamburger”. They will live pleasant happy lives, and then they will die quickly and efficiently and feed you and your family. Hens that don’t lay, goats that don’t milk, calves that limp, old friendly sheep, and doe-eyed cows are all meat. This is the nature of the real world.
For those of us raised in cities who have formed bonds with animals like dogs and cats at some point in our lives, this is a psychologically difficult transition. Baby goats are unbelievably cute and fun and inquisitive. Even so, you MUST remind yourself that they exist for only one reason: to eat. No normal person enjoys butchering day, but that’s how those animals become meals. You can console yourself that the animals had a good life and didn’t suffer at the end, and that makes it a little easier. This is one of the features of the post-warmth world that we all have to face and deal with.
Best Starter Animals
The two easiest animals to raise in a small setting are chickens and rabbits. Chickens can produce both eggs and meat; rabbits produce a nice mild white meat and a soft furry skin that is excellent for retaining heat. They don’t take much space, and are fairly tolerant of cold weather. Both can live on homegrown grains and grasses and garden waste. Comfrey can feed them both, another plus for comfrey. Rabbit manure doesn’t have much odor, comes as pellets, and can go right into the garden. Chicken manure is good compost starter.
I’ve written several books on raising small stock over the years under my previous name, Anita Evangelista. One is out of print: Backyard Meat Production: How To Grow All The Meat You Need I
n Your Own Backyard (1997); the other one is available on Kindle for $4.99: Your Meat, Egg, and Milk Garden: How to Raise Small Livestock in Your Own Backyard
Chickens
For the cold times ahead, chickens will need an insulated shed for housing, one that will shed snow as well as possible sin you don’t want them crushed by a collapsing shelter. An “A” framed structure is suitable. The edges should have a poultry wire mesh buried around the immediate perimeter so that predators like skunks and raccoons can’t dig in. They will try, because inside the chicken house is a smorgasbord for hungry animals. Make your defenses stronger than you think you’ll need.
The shed will need mesh-screened windows that can be closed and covered by shutters so that they keep in warmth in winter, and be opened in summer and for fresh air and light. Try to have at least one glass insulated window that you can use for daylight year around. Ideally, the shed floor itself is dirt. A wood-floored shed has the benefit of repelling predators if it is solid, but needs to be thoroughly cleaned out twice a year; dirt floor doesn’t need cleaning as often or at all, plus gives the chickens access to dirt to eat. They need it.
Inside the shed, a thick flooring of hay a foot or more thick to start the winter, with more added through the season. All that bedding helps keep the birds warm and clean and busy. They will spend a lot of their time scratching the flooring around and breaking it up. A feeder may be used or their grain and greens can just be strewn around the floor. They will find it. If you feed grain, try to get a feeder that hangs above the floor to reduce easy access for the resident mice. The chickens will also need a waterer.
Inside, you’ll need one 12”x12”x12” nesting box for each 3 birds so that their eggs will be easy to find. Make it from cast-off lumber, plywood, or even old buckets laid on their sides. Put some hay or wood chips inside for them to make into a little nest. Hens will appreciate a ladder-like set of perches away from the nest boxes, because hens like to sleep above the floor.
That’s what they’ll need for the cold months. For the warm months, they will additionally need some outside space they can go into safely, which means a heavy wire-surrounded yard. They’ll return to their home when twilight approaches. I prefer to have “free range” chickens, letting the birds go where ever they want and collect their own food. But, during the coming Mini Ice Age, their freedom will convert them into a meal for hawks, coyote, neighbor dogs, owls, and anything else that can grab them. Getting replacements may be problematic and costly.
Getting Started
During the Awakening stage, the easiest way to start with chicks is to buy “day old” birds. You can find these in the spring at farm and feed stores, typically costing about $3-4 each. Our local farm store ran out after a week in February 2017, which makes me think people are already awakening and trying to get ahead of the curve. There’s also sites online that sell chicks, including Murray McMurray and Estes Hatchery.
If the chicks are fluffy and have no true feathers, you’ll need to keep them warm until they have feathered out. You can invest in a “brooder box”, which is a metal-sided cage with a small heater in it, about $150. You just set the temperature, load the feeder and waterer, and put in the chicks. Alternatively, you can use a heat lamp and set it over a low cage lined with cardboard to keep the warmth in. Make sure the lamp can’t fall into the box because it can start a fire. The old granny method of keeping chicks warm was to place them in a covered box beneath the warm wood cook stove, one with legs, and that method works, too. The flooring will need to have some loose clean sand and/or garden dirt scattered around, because the chicks will need grit in order to digest their feed.
Use a small outdoor thermometer in the brooder; start the temperature at about 97oF, lowering it gradually over the next two or three weeks to outdoor temperatures. You can tell if the chicks are too cold: they’ll pile together and make loud cheeping sounds. The chicks are too warm if they scatter away from the heat lamp and hang around the edges of the box. Raise or lower the heat accordingly.
Once the chicks have feathered out, they can be moved to a warm shed with a grassy run area outdoors. Make sure it is fully protected against predators including snakes, because the chicks are at their most vulnerable right now. Put in a heat lamp that cannot be easily dislodged and drop on them or into the bedding due to fire risk. Use the heat lamp at night or any time the temperatures get down below 60oF. By the time the chickens are 4 months old, they should be able to tolerate all but the coldest temperatures, particularly if they have an insulated area to get into.
What Breeds?
This is a surprisingly important question. The chickens you start with will form the foundation of the flock you may have for decades. In the coming Cold Times, you may not be able to acquire replacements as easily as today. Furthermore, the tools to raise them may be unavailable as well including chick starter grains, heat lamps, and continuous electricity.
Given that, I’m going to discuss what I believe is a good option. If you’ve raised chickens before, you may have a different approach. To my mind, the ideal chicken is one that can lay a good quantity of eggs, that has a meaty build, and that is willing and able to set eggs and hatch more chicks. You’ll also need one rooster for every 10 hens.
Typical breeds which fit that description are the Barred Rock, Buff Orpington, Cochins, and old style Rhode Island Red (not the Production Red, which doesn’t set). There’s also minor breeds, such as the Turken AKA Naked Neck, and the Arucana or Amerucana version. These are called large-bodied or dual purpose chickens, since they both lay eggs and produce meat.
Some breeds have feathers on their lower legs and feet, and some have “clean” featherless legs. There may be some real benefits during cold weather to birds with feathered legs. However, in muddy circumstances, or if the birds get into the snow, those feathers may gum up or freeze and cause further problems. I have opted for “clean” leg varieties.
The ability and willingness to “set” or hatch eggs has almost been bred out of chickens today. If you want assured setting ability to breed into your line, consider keeping a few Bantam hens. They are superior setters. They are also much smaller birds, but will interbreed with bigger roosters and hopefully produce larger offspring that are able to set eggs, too. A hen that is willing to set eggs is called “broody”. She will stop laying eggs and want to stay setting on eggs most of the time, and protect them by pecking at anything that bothers her, including you.
It takes 21 days for the eggs to hatch. The hen will watch over the chicks and keep them warm until they can make it on their own. That’s a lot easier than trying to hatch eggs yourself. You may need to keep hens with chicks away from the other birds because chicks look like food to some of them.
The reason for keeping crossbred chickens has to do with the genetic depression that occurs in purebred livestock, especially when you are breeding from a very small starting population. The reason we have “breeds” is because people have selected for certain traits and characteristics such as egg laying ability and color and feathering. What we call a “breed” is actually a closely related family. That’s why they all look the same.
The only real benefit to a purebred anything is that the offspring will be relatively predictable. Not perfectly predictable, but in a general way. We can predict that a purebred bloodhound dog, for example, is going to have a great sense of smell and enjoy sniffing and tracking scents – much more so than, say, a purebred Chihuahua which has been bred to predictably sit on the owner’s lap and be cuddly.
Predictability in livestock is important when an agriculture corporation needs to make every animal into a dollar sign and get all the return possible from them; they can’t afford the cost of raising a chicken that doesn’t lay at a high rate for its short life. So egg producers “sacrifice” the large body for lots of eggs. Commercial layers can produce 300-320 or more eggs yearly, but the hens are small at 3 to 4 pounds and nervous.
In a home setting, that predictabilit
y is handy but not vital. I am suggesting you start with dual-purpose birds because we can predict that they will grow slowly, develop a large meaty body, and produce more eggs than an average family can use – over 200 eggs per hen per year for several years. If you have 12 hens, that’s 2400 eggs a year, over 200 dozen, four dozen per week. That’s plenty to eat fresh, pickle and can, make rich cakes and cookies using extra eggs, hatch out an annual replacement and meat supply, and still have some to sell or give away.
Your second generation crossbreds and beyond will still be predictable large meaty birds since all their ancestors were, and still lay plenty of eggs like their ancestors, but other features will vary – color, feather type, ability to set eggs, and so forth. Disease resistance should be pretty good, since you have increased genetic variability by cross breeding. Your third and fourth generations should be even more cross bred. They will be even healthier in the long run if you are able to trade a few hens or a rooster with a neighbor who has another breed entirely. That will prevent in-breeding depression in your little flock.
All “pitiful” chickens should be removed and eaten or destroyed. These will be the limpers, the ones that become pets because they need extra attention, the ones that are scrawny or sickly. The pitiful ones will pluck your heartstrings and be the hardest to get rid of, but if you keep them, you’ll be breeding weakness into your flock. Remove any birds that don’t do well or that appear sickly. Cull them out of your gene pool and into your stew pot.
Cold Times — How to Prepare for the Mini Ice Age Page 18