fundamentals- buying wheat

FUNDAMENTALS- BUYING WHEAT


Fundamentals Friday starts in just a second. Just a short note to tell you that on Friday’s I’m going to move my regular useless blather about whatever odds and ends excite or annoy me from in front of the regular article to the end. This way you jump right into the main topic, become a-tingle from joy and then slowly ease into withdrawal as I wind up on another topic.

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You must have wheat for your survival stockpile. You can’t affordably buy enough calories in regular grocery food form. Wheat must be the bulk of your post-apocalypse ( American Apocalypse: The Beginning (Volume 1) ) menu. Even the professionally packaged emergency food-for-a-year has a large number of its calories from wheat. You pay over a grand to have two hundred pounds of wheat with the remainder a few cans of freeze dried veggies and meat. A very expensive way to feed the family. First, there is no need to store vegetables. Just sprout some of the wheat. Sprouts ( Sprouting Strainer Lid - Fits Most Wide-mouth Mason, Kerr & Ball Canning / Pickling Jars - Perfect to Use for Sprouts & Sprouting in Salads. Convert Any Standard Jar Into a Sprouter. Growing Sprouts Is Healthy & Fun. ) are some of the most nutritious vegetables there are. Second, while convenient and possibly delicious, if you want to buy a frugal food storage you are going to have to get your protein through legumes ( beans ) rather than animal flesh. I love meat and believe that societies forced to subsist on crops alone are poor societies indeed. They are malnourished and impoverished peons. American vegetarians are ignorant and ill informed ( a small percentage may do well without meat but the average human needs it ). But you will have to be content with plant protein for the immediate future after the collapse. By combining a bean and a grain your body gets a complete protein. Either one alone is insufficient.

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Having said that, you must concentrate on storing just wheat at first. Eating only wheat your body will have a less than ideal protein but at least it will have calories. But if you cut your wheat stocks 25% ( the price difference between wheat and beans is fifty percent, substituting one for another gives you a 25% cut in calories ) to have a complete protein you will face starvation from zero calories that much sooner. Buy your wheat first and then buy your beans. Whatever your goal is ( I would say three years per person at 400 pounds of wheat a year, but just 12 months is far better than most folks have ) ( Passport to Survival: Four Foods and More to Use and Store ) get it all in wheat, then start in buying the beans. And every pound of beans you buy stretches out the wheat a bit further. You need a minimum of 365 pounds of wheat per person per year for calories, with the remaining 35 pounds for sprouts. A pound of wheat kernels a day is 1500 calories. Less than a minimum but enough to keep you alive if you don’t engage in heavy labor. It is far from ideal, but better than nothing. Anything under 1200 calories and your body cannibalizes itself just to stay alive.

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You want hard red winter wheat if you can get it. White spring wheat is okay, it just has a slightly lower protein content ( 13% instead if 15% ). Wheat has the highest protein content of all the readily available inexpensive grains. Corn has only half the protein which is fine in combination with beans but fatal if used alone exclusively. Rice is nice but the brown whole grain spoils quickly ( wheat kernels last forever by contrast ) and the white is a nutritionless food good only for empty calories ( kind of like white flour ). There are three good sources for wheat kernels. For buying bulk amounts quickly, go to a feed and grain ( After the Harvest, Indiana's historic grain elevators and feed mills ) store. Buy fifty pound sacks of wheat kernels. Not cracked wheat, not wheat with vet medicine added, not wheat with molasses. Just plain wheat kernels. I’m paying $15 per bag and that is expensive. You should be able to find them for 20-30% less in your area. If that fails, and you are really lucky, your local Wal-Mart MIGHT carry buckets of wheat. It is up to the individual store ( our area has a large Mormon population and sales justify the stocking ). I’ve heard horror stories from minions having no luck getting their store to order for them. Your luck may vary, but expect a hassle. Last, go shopping at

http://www.emergencyessentials.com/

I don’t make money referring those folks, but I’ve bought from them in the past and they are exceptional. Besides being a great company with Mom and Pop ( The Mom & Pop Store: True Stories from the Heart of America ) old fashion service, they have the best shipping policy. You pay a flat rate for your order, the shipping costs are build into the prices ( the highest rate, $12, covers any amount of buckets of wheat ). I can’t say they are the cheapest, but I’ve never wanted to buy freight collect. You can get an estimate but you can still be faced with sticker shock at delivery. All other companies want you to wait for delivery to see how much shipping is, these folks take the guess work out of it. For that alone they have my vote.

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When shopping at Wal-Mart or the feed store or EE, factor in all your costs, especially the buckets. Which are a far cry from cheap anymore. And factor in the type of bucket. I can buy food grade wheat at Wal-Mart for the same price as packing it myself in non-food grade buckets ( 14 Food Grade White 5 gal. plastic pails without lids ). But, we’ll cover storage and grain grinders another time.

End of this Friday Fundamental. More drivel below.

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I want to thank everyone for the discussion on chamber inserts. I hadn’t wanted to go with a pistol round in my rifle. I had preferred carbine as it sacrificed far less range and power. But since I could no longer buy the commie carbine insert the choice was the removable pistol adapter. I had doubts on its range, but one minion helpfully pointed out you had a ten inch drop at one hundred yards. More info is over at

http://newdawnsurvival.com/blog5/2010/10/20/rifle-chamber-insert/

as far as information from Mel Tappan’s survival gun book ( Survival Guns ) and pistol rounds. If I’m looking at a almost foot drop at a hundred yards, that’s aiming for the head for a chest hit. I think that is a decent and easy way to utilize a cheap pistol round and it seems to be much better than a rimfire. I’m still not 100% sold on the idea but will more than likely take the plunge and invest soon in this back-up to my back-up’s back-up arsenal ( surplus ammo, then commercial, then reloads, then rimfire and/or pistol rounds ).
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Both days this weekend have guest articles.
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