Preparing for Uncertainty and Self Reliance

[Speaker to Animals]

I asked her if she mowing drunk...……………….. she didn't think that was funny.

I can't imagine a worse yard job than mowing totally sober. I mean, really -- what else are we fighting the good fight for?

So that people use their recycling containers appropriately.

[Fife]

True, drunk mowing leads directly to missorted cans.

[TheReal_ND]

I asked her if she mowing drunk...……………….. she didn't think that was funny.

I can't imagine a worse yard job than mowing totally sober. I mean, really -- what else are we fighting the good fight for?

Freedom

[Fife]

He gazed up at the enormous face. Forty years it had taken him to learn what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark moustache. O cruel, needless misunderstanding! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast! Two natty-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He dumped his empty beer cans in the proper receptacle.

[Speaker to Animals]

Holy shit. Listen to how fucked up it is just to get permission to start a meadery.



Fuck that idea, I guess.

Unless you use your land to produce a lot of honey, and then transport it to some place you rent that is your meadery, where the licensing actually is located, and then sell your meadery business the honey from your apiary business.

[Speaker to Animals]

Anywho..

Some spitballing..


At an average of about 15 pounds of honey to produce 5 gallons of mead, and an average of about 30 pounds of honey per hive per year, each hive that survives the year could yield an average amount of 10 gallons of mead per year.

A 750 ml bottle of mead starts at around $15 and goes up pretty high, depending upon quality and age. Let's just go with the lowest number of $15 per bottle. 10 gallons of mead will fill 50 wine bottles with 75 ml of mead.

Your gross revenue per hive, if you can find buyers for your mead, is about $750. With about twenty hives, which is fairly doable amount of work without having to hire people, you are looking at $15,000.

You still need to pay for bottles, distribution, labels, licensing (i.e. bribery and state corruption), as well as the costs to maintain the hives (which are small, but not inconsequential). You also have a lot of risk in losing hives to mites and other problems.

But as a side project, assuming you can get the license and you can build a new, clean structure to serve as a meadery on your property, it might be an interesting revenue source. If you did it this way, your margins would be far higher than guys who just purchase their honey wholesale and produce nothing but mead in larger quantities. Your mead would be a lot better, since your inputs are pure, raw honey with a very high sugar content, and not adulterated with water and corn syrup like virtually all non-local commercial honey is.

You'd have to be able to sell a 1,000 bottles of mead, though, but the good news is that you'd need to wait a few years for it to age, and you can sit on mead for quite a long time until you do find distributors and buyers. Because your input costs are just wine bottles, yeast, electricity to pump and filter water, and the various mite treatments to keep your bees healthy, your only real upfront costs are the hive boxes, the actual building you are doing this in, and the equipment to make the mead. At that point, you can just keep chugging away at mead production year after year and you have a good three years before you need to figure out how to sell it anyway.

And that is fairly scalable if that's all you wanted to do. If you just made it a full-time job, you could probably go close to a hundred hives if you are very efficient. After that, you'd need employees for sure, but it would still be doable as a full-time gig. You'd still need somebody to do all the marketing and mead business side of things, so maybe you'd need a wife who is business and marketing savvy to handle those things (or the other way around).

[Speaker to Animals]

It would almost be interesting to start a farm in the spirit of medieval Appalachia that does nothing but produce medieval drinks like mead and medieval stouts, etc. Just grow everything you need on site and open an area up for people to drink there like breweries do, but it's on a farm and people can see where it all comes from.

[Speaker to Animals]

Interesting description about what it is going to be like not far into our own futures.

For a long time now I have been worried about whether I should write this letter or not. Should I or shouldn’t I? Am I going to get bad feedback, public criticism, or persecuted? I’d think. But I need to write this letter, because I am not the only woman in South Africa that feels like this. When I watch documentaries and videos, I burst into tears, because, like many of the women I see in these movies, I too understand what it’s like to have to live every day as though it were my last.

Here is my situation, and why I am writing this letter. I am married to a chicken farmer. I am the mother of an 8-month-old boy and we live on a farm in South Africa.

That’s right, a farm. Growing up on a farm was what we have always wanted. It is what we have always dreamed of, to raise our family on our own farm. It gives an opportunity for kids to play outside for hours on end, only to come back inside when they are hungry. This is what we wanted our lives to be like. But today, in this day and age, it is not all sun and roses. We have all heard the perspective told by people with an agenda, people who are bias, but today, you will hear it from a farmer’s mouth, of what it is like currently living on a farm in South Africa.

First, I will say I do not consider myself a female farmer (“boervrou” in Afrikaans). I do not know what it takes to work on the farm from morning until night, and I feel as though I do not deserve to call myself that. But what I can say is that I am a proud farmer’s wife.

All of the women I know, that are in a similar position as me, have their own fears, but one fear we do share is the fear for our own lives and those of our husbands and children. As a farmer’s wife, you know what it is like to wake up in the morning thankful that eight armed men did not rape your little girl at night, or burn your little boy with boiling water. You know how it feels to wake up and see your husband’s face, and to be reassured you have survived another night.

It is at this point, when I wake up in the morning, as every other farmer’s wife does, and you remove the pistol from under your pillow, and holster it alongside a two-way radio on your belt for the day. Then you walk to the bedroom door, switch off the alarms, unlock the door, unlock the security gate, check if all of the doors and windows leading to the outside are locked and check on the guard dogs to see if they too, have survived the night.

Then, and only then, can I put on the kettle and start my morning.

For many of us, the whole day is spent locked up inside of our homes. It is consistently in your mind that “they come to get you when you least expect”. This is why we never venture outside. And if you have to go outside, you first make sure that the children are in the house and that you have your weapon and radio on you. When you are watering the garden, you are always facing out, towards any entry points to the gated property.

When it comes close to five o’clock, you start to shut the windows and pull the curtains. You do this to prevent people seeing inside, observing how many people there are, and seeing what you are doing. At eigh o’clock, you do a radio check with all of your neighbors, to see if everyone is safe. These are the times when we learn another family’s life has been taken.

At night, we have a standard practice of turning on different lights in the house. This is so that anyone looking in cannot see which rooms we are in, or guess as to how many of us there are. We do not sit in the TV room anymore and watch TV. Instead, at night, we put as many doors and bars between us and the outside so that if they do enter the house, we have more of a warning.

Sometimes, at night, when our husbands are called out because chickens or maize are reported stolen, we spend those hours praying they are alive until they return. We do this, without trying to show any fear to our children. We are trying to raise them in a normal world. When my child asks what is wrong, I tell my boy “Oh no, there is nothing to worry about, everything’s okay, do not be afraid”. I would rather fear the worst-case scenario than for my child to understand what is really going on.

My little boy has a beautiful room that I made for him when I was pregnant with him. He doesn’t sleep there now. He sleeps with us because if they were to get in, they would kill him, or use him to lure my husband and I out to kill us. Where do I hide my son? In what closet do I push my boy and how do I make sure he stays quiet? How do I plead with them do with me what they please so long as they leave my boy alone?

We are not discussing the expropriation of land. Sure, this might be an unpopular thing to say, but I love my husband and my son too much to give them up for a piece of land. What is that land worth for you if there is nobody else to make a success of it together? I would rather emigrate to Australia (as a refugee) and adjust to another country’s customs than to attend the funeral of my loved ones (should I be the survivor).

My husband’s brother has said many a time that he would rather visit his brother in another country, than to visit his grave. I am not going to try and convince anyone here, as these are individual choices we must make. But I will not think twice to leave my country, my family, and my friends, but I must do what I think is the best and what my heart says.

There are just some of the fears I hold as a farmer’s wife in South Africa. I am certain I am not the only one feeling this way, and I know so many other women that have experienced this, and worse.

Today, I say this to you, as the wife of a farmer, I salute you. I take my hat off to every single woman who has had to endure this just because she is living on a farm in South Africa.

My thoughts are with you: the women and families living on the other farms. My prayers are that your husbands and children will be spared for yet another day.

Love, a farmer’s wife.

https://thepreppingguide.com/south-african-farmer-wife/


The blog post leading image says it all.



Any plan to survive what is coming has to account for this. This is our future too.

The part about her wanting to escape to Australia as a refugee should also raise one's concern. Australia is going to be in the same boat. There is nowhere you can escape to that this won't follow you.

So how do we prepare for this shit??

[Ex-California]

This is happening in South Africa right now, and will happen here if we let it

The last time we discussed this picture it really hit me about how much dogs love us. That Ridgeback, which is a badass dog, is scared to death yet is still standing guard

[Speaker to Animals]

It is happening here regardless. We need to plan for it.