Gunner Quinn
Editor’s Introductory Note: This is part of a multi-part article series on retreats written by a Christian farmer who is praying and searching for a wife. Please prayerfully consider all of the topics that he discusses.
—
The Land: Your Base of Operations
Our farm can support the core food needs of hundreds of people. Farm productivity has been increasing much faster than the population. Over the space of two centuries, the number of people who are living on farms has decreased from almost universal to around two percent. Since the number of people who now live on farms is so relatively few as a percentage of the population, this has decreased the survival prospects of the rest of the population in the event of large-scale and persistent shortages. In each successive generation, self-sufficiency has declined overall and now almost everyone depends on a complex series of events to get almost everything that you need.
By 1920, the majority of the population lived in cities rather than rural areas and this change has had major effects on families. Our country is a net exporter of food, so the figure of how many people the average United States farmer feeds is nearly 170 people. Back in 1960, it was about one farmer feeding 25 people. The vast majority (95 percent) of all farms are owned by families. Whenever you go to the grocery store, you most likely are supporting a family farm. A lot of these amazing productivity numbers are achieved by specialization, inputs, and technology that would not be available in the event of a long-term emergency.
In the event of a long-term event, productivity will decline to the level of the 1800s because most agricultural yields today depend on fertilizers produced through the Haber process. This needs to be taken into account when making calculations. The biggest reason why we regard having sufficient land is because it is a buffer to problems. Our neighbors are great, but too many people can be a problem if there is not enough food and other resources in storage to smooth out the time between being replenished in production. In part one, the concept of “sufficient productive land” was discussed for retreat purposes.
In most instances, you are trying to have land to be able to grow food and to have a large enough woodlot. Remember this is a long-term event where you would not have any additional inputs such as being able to go to the store or have items delivered. Currently, we maintain our family home at standard temperatures using regular central air conditioning and heating. For instance, our fireplace is more used as ambiance rather than a heating source. In a long-term emergency, we would rely more on wood and less on fuels such as natural gas, propane, or kerosene as these would have limited availability with the last two choices depending largely on our own storage. For retreat purposes, the importance of a deep larder of supplies is extremely important as resupply would be very difficult and costly.
By owning at least 100 acres of land, you likely will be living in an area with fewer people meaning a lower population density which is the amount of people divided by the amount of land usually in square miles (640 acres). The smaller the number of people per square mile, the more likely that you will survive long term. There are a couple of exceptions to the idea of having at least three figures or more of land. If you live in an area where development is currently not likely or limited (such as a National Forest or other land that is under a variety of development restrictions) or your county has relatively few people with wide areas being devoted to pasture, crops, or trees owned by individuals who are not currently residing on the land then you could potentially do well with fewer acres.
The number of acres you need for retreat purposes are a function of both productivity and rainfall and to a lesser degree, snowfall. Certain areas like ours are considered a “breadbasket” and “heartland” of the country and the soil is very fertile with long growing seasons with the ability to usually harvest a double crop. In other areas, the soil may be less productive with shorter growing seasons and significantly less rainfall, so the carrying capacity will be reduced and you would need more land in those areas if you had the same amount of people.
In order to survive a long-term crisis, you will need to have massive amounts of storage food. People in our country have starved to death waiting for harvests. You may remember reading something about a “starving time” at Jamestown in the winter of 1609-1610 where about 80 percent of the inhabitants perished. Your average person in this country has never been truly hungry and they do not have any connection to the difficult choice that past generations had to make of eating the seed corn or planting it (having a meal now or starving later). A retreat owner who has studied these historical patterns and taken the necessary steps to mitigate these common mistakes will be very far ahead.
Finding land is not usually the first problem which is how to afford it. For those who are not familiar with the maxim often attributed to either Mark Twain or Will Rogers: “Buy land they aren’t making any more of it.” The idea of owning land still holds a lot of relevancy today: to get a piece of Earth to call yours and to be able to pass it down to your kids. There is something primal about that. You can look at it and develop with how you wish. The land in our area and many rural areas in conservative states are places where you will not be constrained by the artificial dictates of modern society. Out in our area, we have no Homeowners Associations (HOAs) with covenants, conditions, and restrictions (CCRs).
You can do almost anything agriculturally-related in our area. It is very important to check for anything that will restrict you from using and enjoying the property whenever considering properties because I have friends who were considering a property until they read the fine print of the deed restrictions which would have prevented them from raising the animals they wanted. Everyone around here who we know is conservative, but if you wanted to paint your house any color you could.
I know a family in a HOA neighborhood that accidentally painted their house an “unapproved” color and had to spend thousands of dollars repainting it. I have known people who want to live in these neighborhoods and actively seek to find the most restrictive areas where everything is controlled: In many of these areas, you can be “fined” for having your lawn a fraction of an inch too high, leaving your garage door up for an unapproved length of time, or a thousand other bureaucratic infractions. I have never lived in one of these places and find it oppressive even thinking about it. For every person who seeks repression and conformity, there are many more who seek freedom and individuality.
Whenever I talk to people about living out on a farm, I gain many people who like the idea of freedom and security, but the biggest problem is affording the dream. Farmland was almost free starting in the 1860s with the Homestead Act provided an adult over 21 (there are a lot of anecdotal stories of people finding creative ways to be over 21) lived on it and made certain improvements. Some of the acres on our farm were part of an even earlier government program to encourage the settlers to the frontier. We no longer live in that world of cheap and abundant land. Gone are the days when a sharp mind, strong back, and some initiative would allow you to claim a piece of the frontier and be an owner controlling your own destiny. More than 10 percent of the land area of the United States was given away during the main Homestead Act years between the 1860s and the 1930s.
The pioneer experience has been greatly romanticized in popular entertainment options since the closing of the frontier. When people think they have it bad nowadays when their boss asks them to work overtime to fill out a silly report, the car does not start, or they have a toothache, I think about how much worse it was in the past. Instead of sitting in an air-conditioned office in a comfortable chair exerting very little effort, think of miners who worked in dangerous conditions with no safety equipment facing the risk of cave-ins. And even if you survived you could look forward to chronic lung diseases.
On average, frontier settlers in emigrant wagon trains traveled around 20 miles per day on the trail and crossing rivers and mountains slowed things down considerably if you could successfully traverse those obstacles. Most people nowadays routinely cover three times that distance in an hour. Frontier dentistry was nothing to be desired. One of my lineal ancestors was a dentist like Doc Holliday and also a “gunfighter” like him. Strong men were often called by their community to wear a badge.
Back then, the hardships were enormous for people who lived on our property. Every time you read about an economic depression it was not just some theoretical concept. Real people are affected. Families are destroyed. As preppers, we are always trying to put insulation between ourselves and problems. Even if the economy would crash into a depression, we would still likely be fine.
Many people who work for others would have great difficulty because most people are dependent on paychecks to maintain their lifestyle. People often think of the Great Depression from 1929 to 1941 as the only economic depression, but on farms there were also many economic contractions, ‘panics”, and depressions that also destroyed the economic health of families. The Great Depression was the largest, but on the land where I am currently writing over a hundred years ago, the economic headwinds were fierce.
A few years ago, I negotiated an expansion of our farm as we added more parcels to our farm and in doing so there are a couple of very important lessons that I learned and could be useful for SurvivalBlog readers. Upon reading through the history of these parcels, I learned that they were once part of a homestead that was lost in a depression back in the 1890s.
During an economic depression, a family does not suddenly lose their farm overnight. Usually, it is a three-act play: First, a family either has a mortgage or takes on more debt (often called a second mortgage) to maintain living standards. The family is treading water at this stage. Second, something changes in the ability of the family to be able to “service” their debt. This was often an illness, accident, or even a small drop in income. It could be localized such as a hailstorm affecting the crop or something national like a depression causing a run on the banks. When margins are thin it does not take much to go from being able to afford everything with not a penny to spare to not being able to pay the mortgage. Then, in the third act, a family usually has more debt than assets and they are unable to take on more debt to pay old debt, and selling their remaining assets is not enough to raise sufficient cash to resume the treading water stage. This particular family had mortgages and eventually lost their farm when they could not make loan payments. They had very bad economic headwinds because the late 1880s and early 1890s were some of the toughest years in Amercian farming. It also bears mention that this particular property was never lost during the Great Depression.
—
Message from Single Farmer:
My family and I are long-term preppers who currently live on a large farm that produces enough food for hundreds of people. Our farm will be our retreat. It has taken more than three generations of people to achieve this level of preparedness. This article was not sent for the blog’s writing contest. I am trying to provide you with what could be useful information and hopefully to find some family reading these blog articles who would be a good potential candidate for our retreat. Or perhaps a father reading this with a single daughter who is seeking to be a traditional wife. This article series will be useful for those who currently live at their country properties which can be activated into retreats or for those who would like to increase their level of preparedness. Please read my letter that was posted in SurvivalBlog in August with more details about me and what I am praying to find in a wife.
(To be continued tomorrow in Part 3.)
Read the full article here