Fortitude Ranch Long-Term Food Survival Plans
Preppers who just stockpile canned food to survive are unlikely to survive a long collapse. If the grid goes down from an EMP attack or solar flare, or a real pandemic hits, it could be several years before food production and distribution gets established again. If a worldwide collapse, no foreign nations will be sending us food. You need to be in a survivable location, with great defenses, and be able to garden/hunt/forage and produce your own food locally, not just stockpile food. Chickens and sustainable gardening of high calorie crops are the real key to surviving a long collapse with good food. This is the Fortitude Ranch plan for food and long-term survival.
Fortitude Ranch’s food survival plan includes every possible source of calories and nutrition. Beyond stockpiled rice, beans, flour, sugar and shelf stable foods, we have high calorie/energy “SOS” survival bars, farm animals, gardening, fruit trees, and will hunt and forage for additional food. Not the normal sportsman like hunting, but exploiting our large numbers of members and staff to do sweep hunting, herding all varieties of wildlife towards stationary shooters. Our rural locations have a wide variety of wildlife, FR WI has lakefront fishing, and many other FR locations have ponds or streams to raise or catch wild fish. Fruit trees on our property, plus wild, foraged nuts and berries are great not just for calories, but a more varied diet and nutrients. Even acorns and prickly pear cactus are edible with calories, if you know how to safely prepare them. Every place has edible bugs that cooked, ground up, and added to stew or soup (i.e. not noticeable or offensive to eat) provides not just more calories for survival, but health benefits from their high levels of vitamin B12, iron, zinc, fiber, essential amino acids, omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids, and antioxidants.
Chickens at FR NY. Every FR location maintains chickens—and flock size will surge in a collapse
Long term survival requires gardening—and not typical salad items. The key crops to grow are high calories per acre crops shown below.
Lettuce, tomato, carrots are nice supplements, but Jerusalem artichoke, corn and potato are the vital survival crops to plant
Government regulations and hybrid corn seed manufacturer restrictions make planting the best prepper crops difficult, and normal garden planting practices often won’t work. Potatoes and Jerusalem Artichoke are normally raised from tubers—which you can’t store long. “True seeds” for these vital survival crops are very impossible to find in bulk sizes, but we have negotiated access to them. Hybrid field corn (not sweet corn normally planted by gardeners) delivers the best calories/acre, but you must jump through regulatory hurdles to buy them.
Most American gardeners plant potatoes from tubers, but “true seed” can be stored long term
While sheep yield far fewer calories per acre, they can forage over far more acres (and beyond the area that you can cover/protect with guards at night). A few rabbits ready at the start of a collapse can quickly expand to a large fluffle providing meat, feeding on grass you’re not farming or grazing. Fortitude Ranch will greatly increase our chicken and domestic farm animal population and crop production in a collapse. A job for kids will be tending the flock, cutting grass to bring back for rabbits, helping chickens find bugs by digging up unplanted soil.
Meat sheep and fruit trees at Fortitude Ranch Nevada
Gardening alone is not enough—if the collapse starts in the late Summer, you may have to go a year before big garden yields are available. In addition to stockpiling shelf stable food and wheat berries, we also have “SOS Emergency Food bars” that are very high calorie, long shelf life food. We stockpile vitamins as well, in case a sustained collapse leads to less variety in food consumption and some nutritional shortage.
The famous “1918 Spanish Flu Pandemic” that killed 100 million people worldwide (with just a 1 ½% lethal virus—far worse than Covid 19, but nothing compared to H5N1 lethality) was not just 1918. It lasted from 1918-1920. For long term survival, you need to have a wide variety of food sources and the ability to gather and produce food, not just hope the collapse is over before your stockpiled food runs out.
Stockpiled food, “SOS emergency food bars” in underground facility at FR TX
And of course, no food stockpiles and survival preparations are worthwhile unless you can defend them. That is the real key to Fortitude’s Ranch success. We have large survival communities, with guard posts always manned, and, when an alarm is sounded (or gun fired), everyone grabs their weapons and runs to their assigned position along our defensive walls. With simple survival measures and facilities, ability to produce food, and the power of numbers, we offer the best collapse survival protection possible at an affordable cost.
