IS A GARDEN ENOUGH?
One of the earliest goals you should set as a prepper is to have a year’s worth of food stored up, but what happens after you make it through the first year? Will your garden be able to sustain your group’s food needs?
Let’s look at how whether a garden can produce enough calories to fully sustain a moderately sized prepper group without additional livestock.
HOW MUCH FOOD DO YOU NEED?
In theory, a garden can produce as little or as much food as you need it to. In reality, you have constraints, such as how much room your retreat has for a garden, how many man hours your group can spend gardening, how long your gardening season lasts, etc.
The best place to start is to figure out how much food you actually need to survive.
The average family of 4 consumers 4,000,000 calories a year, but that’s just 1 family. If you want a good shot at doing well in SHTF, you need to group up, and our previous analysis showed that a 26 member group is the ideal prepper group size.
To make the math easy, we’ll assume the group consists of 6 families of 4 and 1 family of 2, which would come in at a whopping 26,000,000 calories a year.
THE AVERAGE AMERICAN FAMILY
The average American household size is 2.6 individuals, and the average American family is 3.19. Source.The average American adult male is 5’9 and 1/2 and weighs 191 lbs. He consumes just over a million calories a year. The average American adult female is 5’4″ and weighs 140.2lbs. She consumes around 800,000 calories a year. With a teenage son and daughter, the average family needs just shy of 4,000,000 calories a year.
HOW MANY VEGETABLES DO YOU NEED TO GROW 26,0000,000 CALORIES?
Our analysis of 22 of the most popular garden vegetables shows that each person in the group will need to consume 105 lbs of each vegetable to meet their daily calorie requirements. That’s 2,625 lbs of vegetables a year, or 7.1 lbs of vegetables a day. Have you ever tried eating 2 and 1/2 pounds of vegetables for breakfast? Me neither. It sounds like torture.
BREAKFAST FOR 1
But that’s not the only bad news. A garden that can produce 76,000 lbs of food, which is how much you’ll need to hit your 26 million target for the group, needs to be 11.27 acres large. That’s larger than some prepper’s entire retreat!
BOTTOM LINE
A garden is a critical part of your food production come SHTF, but it can’t be your only source of food. You need a large portion of food to come from sustainable means: an orchard, vineyard, livestock, foraging, trapping, fishing, hunting and of course gardening.
If you haven’t planted any fruit or nut trees, now is the time to start. Most take 3-5 years to fruit. If you don’t fencing or cages in place for livestock, now is the time to start. Livestock takes a few years to figure out how to manage properly. If you haven’t planted berry bushes, set up tree stands or learned to identify wild editable, now is the time.
Forget it. You’re not living off this thing alone.
Sustainable food production doesn’t come in a $50 Survival Seed lot from Amazon. It takes a lot of years of planning and doing. If you haven’t started that process, now is the time.
Vey Prpeprlytics
The article above was kindly contributed by Vey from Prepperlytics, and the original title, “Can a garden produce enough food to live off of post-shtf” can be found on the Prepperlytics.com blog.
Prepperlytics is an online website that helps preppers calculate the amount of calories that would be needed in a SHTF scenario. Vey’s site also has a number of other really useful tools that help preppers prepare. You can check out our Prepperlytics Review Here.
Vey is also a Homesteader, Programmer and a Prepper.
Thanks again for the article Vey.
https://prepperbits.com/garden-produce-enough-shtf-calories/