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March 24, 2018 - Health Ranger - Mike Adams
17:30
The Missing Piece of the Food Storage Puzzle (Health Ranger)
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Hi, this is Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, the creator of foodrising.org with information about the missing piece of the puzzle in your food storage strategy.
Now, I know almost everyone who is informed and intelligent these days is into some level of food preparedness, food self-reliance.
Maybe you're growing some of your own food, but you're also probably storing some of your own food.
And there are numerous reasons why this is important.
Some of those reasons would be food disruptions, preparing against natural disasters, preparing against economic collapse, avoiding GMOs, avoiding the toxic pesticides that are in store-bought foods, just having more nutritious food and also saving money on food.
It's actually cheaper to grow your own food than it is to purchase it these days because of food inflation.
But whatever reason makes the most sense to you for food preparedness or food self-reliance, I'm willing to bet that most people listening to this are missing one hugely important chapter or piece of the puzzle in their food storage strategy.
That's what I'm going to share with you.
And just as background, I'm the developer of the Food Rising mini farm grow box system, which was based on the Kratky I've also done aquaponics, lots of soil gardening, lots of conventional hydroponics with circulation pumps.
And now, of course, this system, which is a non-electric, non-circulating hydroponics, which I believe is the simplest and easiest system of all.
And if you'd like to learn how to make your own, I've posted do-it-yourself videos on foodrising.org.
So check those out.
I've also invented A 3D printable float valve that achieves the self-watering function for these grow boxes and that you can download the parts for free also the 3D printable parts if you have a 3D printer So
let's talk about the pieces of the puzzle for food storage, and that usually begins with meals that are ready to eat.
And we all have some of these probably in our refrigerator or our cupboard, cabinets, whatever.
We've got some things that are ready to eat.
It can be as simple as a bag of snack chips, although that wouldn't be my first recommendation for storable food.
But anything that you can open and eat is considered really the level one storable food, the instant food.
And this instant food has a very short shelf life, typically, meaning you can't use it for long-term survival, but it's great for short-term preparedness.
And it's interesting that every time there's a natural disaster like Hurricane Katrina, when people rush out and they raid the local Quickie Marts and 7-Elevens, they're searching for food, They're always getting this level of food, which is usually the process factory made toxic food because it's loaded with synthetic chemical preservatives and flavor enhancers such as MSG. And it's genetically modified usually.
And it's just toxic food all around.
And this is what most people think of as survival food when they're in a crisis.
So, wow, we have a lot to learn in this country about real survival, don't we?
Now the second level of preparedness food covers foods that need some type of preparation in the kitchen.
This would include things like, let's say, a bag of dry noodles that you need to boil in order to make noodles that you can eat.
This includes a lot of canned foods.
So maybe you boil the noodles and you mix it with a jar or a can of pasta sauce, and now you have spaghetti, for example.
All of these things that require minimal preparation, these are considered really level two preparedness foods.
And most of us have these things as well in our kitchens, in our cupboards, in our homes.
And these also have a limited shelf life, typically only a few months.
Sometimes the canned foods can last a year or maybe even a couple of years.
But they don't really have a long shelf life, not multiple years typically.
But these have a very important role in food preparedness because you can store these where you can't store as much ready-to-eat food because it'll go bad before you can consume it all.
So you can store canned foods, you can store pasta, you can store these things for some extended period of time.
Now the third level of storable food is what I call the long-term storable foods.
These are typically considered survival foods or sometimes camping foods or preparedness foods.
Typically you purchase these in a format that has long shelf life, meaning freeze-dried is the best, sometimes just dried depending on the food, and they're typically packed in cans.
The number 10 can is the most popular format.
So if you have, let's say, dried potato slices in a number 10 can, that could have a shelf life of a decade.
Or suppose you have freeze-dried organic blueberries.
Well, that could have a shelf life of many years.
Probably not a decade, but five, six, seven, eight years is very reasonable for something that's freeze-dried like that.
Now, these foods have a very important role in your food preparedness strategy because, of course, these can keep you well-nourished and well-fed for many, many years.
But, like all foods that you store, they eventually run out.
No matter how much you have, they eventually run out.
And by the way, if your family and friends and neighbors know that you are the preparedness family, guess what?
You're going to have a lot of guests showing up and asking for food in a crisis.
So your food supplies may not stretch as far as you had hoped.
You may end up feeding a lot of people that you hadn't planned on feeding.
And so those supplies could run out.
Now, intelligent people who have thought through all of this, then typically they have garden seeds, and this is the next level of storable food.
Now we're getting into the realm that we call food production potential.
And people store seeds, and this is where things start to go wrong.
They have a yard.
They look outside and say, I've got dirt.
And they store their seeds, and they know they've got access to water and sunlight, and they think, you know, boom, magic!
I'm going to be able to produce food when I need to.
I have my short-term and my long-term storable foods to get me by until my garden produces, right?
You've heard this logic.
Maybe you've used this logic yourself.
But what happens here is that people vastly underestimate The difficulty, the complexity, the knowledge, skill set necessary to produce food in an open soil garden.
Primarily it just takes a lot of physical work.
And if you don't have calluses on your hands right now from working a hoe and a rake and all these other weeding devices, then you're going to be all blistered up just trying to grow your own food, and it's going to be very frustrating.
You may not be able to do it.
You have to build up the physical strength and endurance just to be able to engage in that kind of gardening, and that's not something that you can get to overnight, especially Given that most of us have at least predominantly sedentary lifestyles, you might work out in a gym, you might go walking in nature, but most of us are not professional outdoors ranchers or farmers.
And so we just don't have that kind of stamina that used to be commonplace 100 years ago.
So this idea, which we might even call a delusion, that we're just going to convert seeds into food using our yard...
It's really a pipe dream for most people.
It is achievable, but it takes a lot more effort and time and know-how than you think.
For example, suppose you start growing lots of beautiful lettuce in your soil garden and you think you're doing great.
You're going to be able to feed yourself on that lettuce or strawberries or whatever it is.
One day you wake up, you go out to the garden, all your lettuce is gone.
Well, you've got a giant field rat or rabbits or an armadillo or whatever that's running around eating all your garden food and you didn't plan for that.
Well, now that food is gone and you have to come up with some kind of an animal defense system to protect your garden.
Well, how are you going to do that?
Do you have fencing?
Now you have to build a fence.
So there are a lot of difficulties that many people haven't really considered.
Which brings in the whole point here, the missing piece of the puzzle.
And I'd like you to think about food potential as not just seeds and soil, but more importantly, food nutrients, plant nutrients.
It is in fact the plant nutrients, the hydroponic fertilizers if you will, that really do the job of nourishing your plants so that they can become food.
And if you're storing seeds, But you're not storing plant nutrients, then it's kind of like having a backup truck, but you forgot to store diesel fuel for that truck.
The truck's not going to run without the diesel in the same way that the plants aren't going to grow without the plant nutrients.
Plant nutrients are like food batteries.
They're food potential in a very compact form.
And here's a number that I'd love you to remember.
Every one pound of food nutrients that you store can produce about a hundred pounds of food.
So if you think about all the food storage that you've done so far, whether it's fresh food or short-term storage or long-term storage, you have probably you've had to use a lot of space and you have a lot of mass of food there and you can go through it pretty quickly.
But imagine being able to store all that food in one one-hundredth the space That's what you can do when you're storing plant nutrients plus seeds.
And by the way, I'm the developer of the Ultra Clean Super Plant Food, which is laboratory validated.
You can find those hydroponic plant foods at suppliesource.com.
And their laboratory validated to be very low in lead, cadmium, mercury, and arsenic, but extra high in zinc and selenium because I know that your immune system needs those minerals in higher quantities when you're under a lot of stress.
So I've actually designed what I think is the world's first plant nutrients that are specifically formulated at the elemental level for survival situations.
But in any case...
Any hydroponic plant nutrients will grow plants for you.
So even if you just find a local hydroponic store and get them there, that's the right decision as well.
Because you see, these plant nutrients have an unlimited shelf life.
They are made primarily of certain types of rocks and minerals that really don't decompose.
Some of them existed for millions and millions of years before they were mined out and refined into the plant nutrients.
So, believe me, these nutrients are going to outlast you and I in terms of our lifetimes.
This is food potential that you can store for literally over a million years if you could live that long.
Now, converting this food potential into real food is a simple matter if you understand the power of non-circulating hydroponics.
And I encourage you to go to foodrising.org, learn how to build these systems yourself, or you can purchase these systems from suppliesource.com if you want, but it's better to learn how to build them.
Which is why I posted the do-it-yourself videos.
Using these systems you can convert plant nutrients into fresh produce using just water and sunlight and seeds.
You don't even need electricity.
You don't need pumps.
You don't need oxygen diffusers.
You don't need a lot of complex parts.
You can grow food simply and readily using this system, and as a result, this can allow you to store food potential for a much larger set of people, family, friends, neighbors, an entire church if you wanted to, in a very limited space.
Knowing that you've got your short-term food to get you by, in the short term you've got your long-term food storage that can last many, many months, and in that time you could have grow systems up and running that are producing mountains of lettuce and strawberries and tomatoes and zucchini and cucumbers, even melons.
You can produce all these things, and medicinal herbs, too, for your home medicine chest.
Things that are anti-cancer, like oregano, for example.
It's amazing what you can produce in these systems using just plant nutrients plus water, sunlight, and seeds.
You don't even need soil.
You can do this on a rooftop in an urban environment on top of a building.
You can do this on a balcony.
You can do this in a small yard.
And if a freeze is coming and it's getting too cold one night, you just pick up these bins and you bring them inside and you can move them.
They're portable.
So now you've got modular, mobile, low-cost food production based on food nutrients that are storable for a million years or more.
This is the missing piece of the food storage puzzle.
So I really want to encourage you to think about this piece.
Do you really have the food nutrients, the plant nutrients to grow the foods that you want to grow in a crisis?
Let's say it's a long crisis.
Not just three days of losing power.
Not just a week from a super storm that hits your area.
But let's say that there is a two year long economic collapse.
And people are desperate and people can't get food at the grocery stores.
And it's a situation almost like Venezuela where the government brings out armed soldiers at the grocery stores to limit how much food you can buy.
Basically they have the whole country on a starvation diet.
And if you don't want to be stuck in a government line controlled by armed government soldiers limiting your food purchase, you need to have some food self-reliance and you can achieve that with something like the Food Rising Mini Farm Grow Box or other similar systems that you can build yourself.
You can achieve it as long as you can store the nutrients That you need to feed those plants so that they can produce the food that keeps you alive.
And this is the piece of the puzzle that most people are missing.
This is the piece of the puzzle that can make you a king in essence in your community because you'll be able to produce food that not just feeds yourself and your family but also that you can barter with others.
I'm fond of asking people what's the value of a bucket of tomatoes in a society that's suffering a collapse and mass starvation?
What's the value of a bucket of tomatoes?
Is it worth the price of a car?
The answer inevitably is yes.
Is it worth the price of a house?
I don't know.
That seems kind of steep.
But people will trade you all kinds of things for food when they're starving.
They'll trade you gold, silver, ammunition, medicine, prescription drugs, communications devices, tools, anything that you can name.
Could you trade a bucket of tomatoes for a functioning home defense shotgun if you wanted to?
Absolutely.
In the right circumstances, that bucket of tomatoes would be far more valuable than a firearm.
So the ability to grow your own food and produce your own food not only keeps you alive, it puts you in an economic advantage.
In any kind of a barter situation or collapse situation, it also allows you to do the humanitarian thing of helping others more than you could if you weren't growing your own food.
So you may have a local church or a community center, or you may set up a food bank yourself and try to help as many people as you can in a difficult circumstance.
Being able to easily and efficiently grow your own food allows you to help more and more people survive whatever crisis that you all find yourselves in.
So, it's the ultimate solution for being humanitarian, for saving lives, for nourishing yourself, protecting your family, and even surviving a real catastrophe such as war breaking out in your area, which, of course, has happened over and over again.
Look at the history of the world.
So learn how to do this and fill in that missing piece of your food storage puzzle.
Go to foodrising.org, watch the free videos, download the free parts, or go to suppliesource.com if you want to purchase these systems already made or if you'd like to purchase Our plant nutrients and they get more and more affordable the larger volumes that you buy.
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