Self sufficiency and solidarity

Self-sufficiency is the best and most effective form of rebellion (as the more self-sufficient someone is, the less they give to greedy scumbags, aka big corporations/industries, government, etc.). If you want to change soykaf in your community, self-sufficiency and solidarity are your building blocks. In this post I'll make a short and (hopefully comprehensible) guide on how to accomplish this.  In order to be self-sufficient, there are four main things that you will have to deal with: food, health, energy, and water. (i'll be diving into food and energy) [FOOD] I'll start with what I consider the second most important, food. In order to be self-sufficient, knowing how to grow, hunt, and preserve your own food is essential. The best (and in my opinion, absolutely necessary) crops are any form of grain, wheat, corn, rice, beans, among others. The easiest to grow in that list being wheat, corn, and beans. Grains are an amazing food source not just because they grow relatively easily but because you can preserve them for months when they are fully dried. The three sisters: This is one of the best ways to grow crops; it consists of corn, squash, and beans. Corn serves as a support for the bean vines to grow into, while the bean plant helps to fix nitrogen into the soil, and the squash helps keep the soil moist with the shade of its leaves. (research polycultures for more info) [Food, preservation] Crops like grains will preserve by themselves; if left to dry up, they'll last for months if kept in a dry environment.  Preserving fresh crops is a little trickier, though not hard at all; there's a vast array of techniques to do this, such as pickling, canning, fermenting, and drying.  the easiest being canning and drying; if done correctly, your produce will be shelf-stable for months. [FOOD, CANNING] The key to canning is having a sterile environment and sealed vessels (hence the name canning). The best place to can produce is jars; to can stuff, you must boil/sterilize all of your equipment. Once done, you need to boil whatever you want to can; once you finish boiling the produce, you pour it into your jar and make sure it is 100% sealed, as if it isn't, your preserve will go bad really easily. [FOOD, DRYING] The most straightforward of all of these methods (though the most time-consuming) Drying makes most foods shelf-stable for months. There are a myriad of ways to dry foods: there's sun drying, heat drying (with an oven or an open fire), smoking (generally only for meats), among others.  The ones I mentioned here are the main ones you can focus on, and some of the best things to dry are red meats, corn, green beans, carrots, tomatoes, and most vegetables (to be 100% sure, trial and error is a must).  [FOOD, CANNING, !!IMPORTANT INFO!!] In order to make your dried food last, keeping it in a cool, dry, and dark place is essential; moisture is your biggest enemy. ------------------------------------- [HEALTH] This is by far the most complicated of these four essential things. In this post I attached a pdf that has a lot of useful info. ------------------------------------- [Energy] If self-sufficiency is your goal, being able to have a self-sufficient source of energy is necessary. In my opinion, the most reliable source of energy is solar energy. You WILL need energy to cook, so assuring you have a way of getting energy is essential. Some other energy sources are heat, wind, water, and the sun. --------------------------------------- [SOLIDARITY] This is an essential thing; self-sufficiency works best as a form of protest and rebellion if it's done in a group. Gather as many people as you are able to, and ORGANIZE. The more hands you have, the better. Share as many things as you can (especially food, water, energy, knowledge, etc.).  If you can't accomplish solidarity and teamwork, nothing will work. Again, HELP others, and do it without expecting anything in return, as it will be for a greater good; all of the people who are with you in this act of protest need to contribute in some way. If you have any elders, children, or people with disabilities among your group, you must care for them and try to find something that they can do for the benefit of all. ------------------------------ Sorry if this is messy or convoluted; I'm not the best writer. With that said, I hope this helps someone, and if you have any other form of knowledge, please share it in here. (be it PDFs or simply a post). This was a really basic DIY on how to be self-sufficient.

>>12465 This sounds appealing but how realistic is it to rely on substinence agriculture? Also really interesting handbook, thanks for sharing

If you have ever been homeless, you know that there are a handul of things necessary to keep you alive and out of danger. - water - food - shelter from the elements (including clothing) - heat if it's cold - some means of self-defense if attacked - a place to pee, crap, and shower The last one is the thing everyone forgets, or minimizes. But lack of sanitation will kill people as fast as anything else. In natural disasters, once the initial deaths and casualties are over, the thing that kills most people is disease from poor sanitation. When the American pioneers travelled westward, many of them died from diseases caused by the careless sanitation of the people who had preceded them. If you want to have a self-sufficient homestead, you need a place with water for drinking, bathing and fishing, or at least a well. You need a wooded area for wood fuel, wood building materials, foraging, and game. You need an outhouse or at least a latrine well-separated from your water source. You need fertile gound and good climate if you're going to grow crops. Then you can build a structure and have enough to live on before your first crops come in. Your hunting will be limited to the weapons and traps you know how to build. If you know how to make a bow and arrows, you're way ahead of the game. Then you need to know how to make stone tools. If you know how to collect bog-iron and make a suitable natural bloomery furnace, you can even have iron tools. Once you have such a suitable place and have a wood or stone cabin built and soil improved enough to grow food, and a stone fireplace, and maybe some chickens and sheep, and a way to defend all of it, you can live pretty comfortably though not effortlessly. For clothing, oil, rope, and food, hemp is good and it will grow anywhere in bad soil with not a lot of water. Stinging nettle fibers are also useful for clothing, and it grows like a weed anywhere. And of course your sheep's wool is another source of fiber for clothing. If you have access to coal, you can bake it to make coke. Then you can build a furnace that burns hot enough to make your own steel, but you need to know how to control the carbon content and blow air through it with a bellows or wjatever. If you learn blacksmiting skills you could conceivably make a crude gun. You would also need to know how to make gunpowder, but that's doable too. If you know how to make magents by pounding, rubbing, or other natural means, and have access to copper ore, which is much easier to smelt and deal with than iron, and figure out how to make copper wire, you can even build a generator powered by water or wind and have some electricity. Glass isn't hard to make, and home-made light bulbs are doable. Yiy can make a cat;s whisker radio reciever that doesn't even require electricity. GIs would make them in foxholes out of pencil lead, razor blades, and wire. If you eventually work up to a good enough magnet, you can dredge river beds for raw iron without even mining it, Natural deposits of clay are good enough for pottery making and furnace building.

>>12521 Not at all, there is a reason why subsitance agriculture have died. If you want to know which one, go ahead, go be self sufficient. It's not illegal.

>>12522 regarding sanitization, its also essential to know how to propperly dispose of wastes, (excrement and urine), both of these can be used as manure to improve the quality of the soil. in order to do this, you have to compost it (for excrements). you can do this by layering the excrements with dry stuff (such as dried plants, straw, grass, etc.) after that you need to moisten the pile and preety much just let it do its thing. for urine, you can also use it as a fertilizer as it contains ammonia which is a great source for nitrogen. (also i really do not know if urine has to be processed before it can be used as fertilizer). Using human waste as manure/ fertilizer works 100 time better once you scale things up, the more people the more fertilizer.

>>12465 it plays a major role, wether you want to be self-sufficient in the city or in rural areas or in nature. use high-tech military equipment, outdoor extreme sports utensils and gear, in terms of food, these packages are great, as they are made for the entire caloric intake. if they are not available, i would take care of proteins first. sun dry and the use of brimes and salt. learn to make your own dough and sourbread. with an egg and flour you can already make tons of delicious recipes. find friends. good people, that have your heart in their mind, not just their own benefit, rare as hell. help others out but also teaching them how to do it and guiding them to others who might be able to help. i think one has not to learn how to survive in the wild, but to read and understand, how those war times societies evolved. what were their currency? how did they betray each other? what kind of groups were there and split up? if you are trying to understand people, you will have it ten times easier, than when you try to survive self-sufficiently. cause you will need a doctor. or someone to exhange goods and information with.

>(also i really do not know if urine has to be processed before it can be used as fertilizer). It doesn't. More accurately, it needs to be degraded by bacteria that are found in the ground (so it won't work in hydroponics).

>>12526 >( find friends. good people, that have your heart in their mind, not just their own benefit, rare as hell.) I strongly agree with this, if the final goal is to change society/humanity for the better then this is the way to go. Though it doesnt end here, to better the future you must asure that this selflessness, empathy/compassion, and understanding pass down through generations. Always remember this, no human is born cruel, violent, selfish, kind, or empathetic; humans are born with physical traits, not with social/psychological ones. those are made and shaped by the circumstances said human grows in.

>>12528 >humans are born with physical traits, not with social/psychological ones Untrue. People are born with distinct differences in physical brain structure and hormonal balances that give them widely different personality types from the beginning. For instance, people with "dark triad" personalities consisting of lack of empathy/conscience, manipulativeness, and narcissism, have been found to have certain similarities in brain structure from the beginning. This is why personailty disorders are almost impossible to treat. The same is true of people who are altruistic, compassionate, and social by nature. They tend to have certain similarities in brain structure right from the start, before any effects of experience or learning. On an informal note, ask any mother if her children were born with distinct personalities from birth and they will usually say yes.

>>12523 only subsistence feeders I've met in modern times are fishermen.

>>12530 that does not mean that it isn't possible, you obviously would need a lot more of organisation in order to have food all of the year but living a self sustaining life is pretty possible (specialy if you are a considerable amount of people)

>>12532 In the right place with a thousand dollars of equipment you can be a fisherman and live by that trade year round. It will not be a terribly wealthy life, and you will have to work long hours spring and summer, fall and winter, through weather pleasant and otherwise, but it can be done. I say this because I have met such people. of course perhaps they're not quite subsisting by themselves, they do commerce with society so they don't have to wear fish scale jackets and fish scale underpants. I think this may be less common in farming because the expenses are higher and it is typically more difficult. In fishing, you can do it with a small amount of equipment, on public land, even in cities where customers are practical to find. As a farmer of let us say some grain or something, you need quite a bit of land to make a profit and land is rather expensive, and in order to harvest it economically you need quite a bit of other equipment which will cost even more, so just to pay off your small farm which might just be to cover personal food and income tax and a mortgage you will be in a bit of a more difficult position.

For nearly all of our ~300,000 year history, humankind has lived primarily by hunting and foraging, by pastoralism, and by subsistence agriculture. Subsistence agriculture was still dominant everywhere up until the industrial revolution was well underway. Today, sbout 2 billion people worldwide still live as subsistence farmers. That's 1/4 of the people on Earth. In light of this, it's amazing that anyone can believe it's impossible to live by subsistence farming. "Preindustrial agricultural peoples throughout the world have traditionally practiced subsistence farming." "Subsistence farming persists today on a relatively wide scale in various areas of the world," https://www.britannica.com/topic/subsistence-farming "Subsistence agriculture was the dominant mode of production in the world until recently, when market-based capitalism became widespread...Subsistence agriculture largely disappeared in Europe by the beginning of the twentieth century." "In 2015, about 2 billion people (slightly more than 25% of the world's population) in 500 million households living in rural areas of developing nations survive as "smallholder" farmers, working less than 2 hectares (5 acres) of land. Around 98% of China's farmers work on small farms, and China accounts for around half of the total world farms. In India, 80% of the total farmers are smallholder farmers; Ethiopia and Asia have almost 90% being small; while Mexico and Brazil recorded 50% and 20% being small." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsistence_agriculture