While stockpiling food is definitely important, not knowing how to grow or find your own food is a huge mistake for anyone interested in long-term “off-grid” survival.
Sooner or later even a stockpile designed for a year or more will run out. The only way you can truly ensure your future survival is to know how to grow, hunt, and preserve your own food.
There is another benefit to knowing how to grow your own food in a Shit Hits The Fan scenario. It can make you a very valuable commodity. Should things go really bad, knowing how to grow your own food means being able to basically grow your own currency. Others less prepared than yourself will likely be willing to trade just about anything for your extra provisions.
In addition to helping you through a survival situation, there are many other good reasons to know how to “Grow Your Own.”
- To keep chemicals out of our diets – Modern agriculture uses an array of chemicals to produce our fruit and vegetables. Fertilizers, herbicides, pesticides, and fungicides can all be used in the growing of the plants. By growing your own food, you can be absolutely sure what is used to fertilize it, what is sprayed onto it, and how long it takes between harvesting and eating.
- To eat a greater variety of foods – Supermarkets are geared to supply what modern agriculture produces. Fruit and vegetable varieties are chosen for their shelf life, appearance & ease of transport. Most conventional farms will grow exactly the same varieties to ensure their product is readily saleable to the big buyers. Often, seed will be genetically modified to ensure the product looks the same every time and can be mass harvested at the same time each year. In the home garden, you have a huge variety of seeds to choose from handed down through the generations. You can experiment with different varieties to find what you like and what grows well in your soil and climate. And most importantly, you can eat a huge variety of foods without paying a single cent extra for it.
- To do your bit for the environment and sustainability – Humans have cut down a lot of our forests for modern agriculture – it took minutes to cut down what took thousands of years to create! Now, some of this land created for agriculture is so degraded we can’t use it anymore.
- For self-healing – Our bodies have an innate ability to heal themselves. We see evidence of that regularly – like with minor cuts and bruising. The body just goes about the job of healing without any conscious effort or help. Hippocrates, the Father of medicine, once said, “Let food be your medicine, and let medicine be your food”. It’s also been said that we can make the equivalent of any drug or medicine within our bodies. To do that though, surely we need quality raw materials to go in via our diet. Plants picked fresh from the garden are packed full of chlorophyll, proteins, vitamins, minerals, herbal constituents, antioxidants, amino acids and all sorts of other things that can and do boost your immune system.
- To save money – A disproportionate amount of our food these days is grown on large farms, run or controlled by large, often multinational companies. Ultimately these companies are concerned with one thing – making money. They need to answer to shareholders who demand the highest returns possible on their investments. Add to this the rising costs of fuel, water and environmental impacts, and the most likely scenario is that food costs will keep rising and in some cases and for some foods the rises could be dramatic. Compare this to the costs of growing your own food. Maybe the costs of seed and fertilizer will increase, but apart from that, growing your own food is free. You can protect yourself from spiraling costs by growing some of your food in your own backyard.
- To teach your kids – Many kids (and some adults) in our modern society have very little idea where their food comes from. Ask them and they might tell you it comes from a supermarket or factory! By growing and eating some of your own food, you’ll raise their awareness and change their whole perception about food. By actually teaching them how to grow food, you’ll be imparting a valuable life skill to them and perhaps spawn a new generation of home gardeners who take care of themselves and their families!
- For your overall wellbeing – Growing your own food is a terrific form of exercise. It is also a known form of stress reduction – your problems literally seem to melt away while when you are in the garden – even if it’s only for a little while. You can also expect a feeling of closeness to nature while you’re in the garden – the same feeling humans have had for many, many generations.
Learning to grow your own food is one more way to literally reconnect to your more primitive ancestral “roots.”
