Self Sustaining Families, Planning For A Barter Future

This post was inspired by a thread on the SurvivalistBoards.com forum with regard to what items should be prepped for bartering in a SHTF or EOTWAWKI (End Of The World As We Know It) situation. There were some excellent posts about what to plan to barter, and more importantly what not to barter and whether or not you would want anyone to know that you did have stuff to barter.

No matter what the 'survivalist catalyist' is, skills would be first and foremost on the list of things you should have.  If you have skills, you'll always be needed, and if you have the skills which are always in need in order to produce things that are always in need, your safety is almost guaranteed.

What Skills Would Be Useful For Bartering?

1. First Aid/CPR and other medical skills- these are basic, easy to learn skills.
2. Ability to make medicines like penicillin- all drugs are derived from living organisms. Do some research on them and learn some basic chemistry.
3. Ability to desalinate and distill water
4. Ability to create fire
5. Ability to make weapons
6. Ability to mine for ore to make weapons
7. Ability to build shelter
8. Ability to build boats
9. Ability to harness, transfer and store solar power, and wind power.
10. Ability to grow food
11. Ability to hunt and trap animals, including fishing.   

Obviously if we faced an 'end of the world as we know it' global crisis that wipes out 2/3 of the human race, leaving us in a Mad Max or Waterworld situation, safety will be a main concern and having any kind of food, water or other perishables could make you a target for those who never bothered to prepare for such a day.  If we still have farmable land, becoming a squatting farmer will most likely be what we turn to for our survival.  In a Waterworld situation, boat building and fishing will become the ways of the world.

I got to thinking that if all I had was a few skills and water and food, I could be self-sustaining, and I could most likely protect myself, but I've always been the type who wants to have an 'edge' so I started to think about what isn't 'necessary' but what people would want and miss should 'the end of the world as we know it' come to pass. The first thing I thought of was what I could grow that people wouldn't necessarily 'need' but would want.

Tobacco
Cocoa beans
Cotton
Coffee Beans
Peanut seeds

Plus, the ability to make homemade wines, beers, and other liquors.

Assuming that the EOTWAWKI event leaves us all with an abundance of land that we can farm, I'm going to order tobacco seeds, cocoa beans and cotton seeds from Amazon and store them in my provisions. I was told it's illegal to grow cotton here in Florida, but if it's not or if I can get around the law somehow with a greenhouse, I may grow it just to keep producing seed.  I don't know about laws regarding tobacco or  cocoa either, but if the end of the world comes, I won't need to worry about the idiotic laws that protect businesses.

I'm already planning the distillery supplies for wine, beer and booze, and I collected the 'how to' books on these subjects a long time ago.

I found the video below on the SurvivalBoards.com forum, and now plan on building one of these man made floating islands.  The one in the video is the size of a tennis court, but just as Richie plans to make his bigger, I plan to start out with a 10 x 20 pontoon built much the same way, and then expand it until it is 5 acres in size, and I can put my solar powered green houses on it to grow food, stock it with animal life and float away.

Self Sustaining Families- Learning about water desalination

Since we live so close to the Gulf (it's only 1 block from our house and we walk over to it all the time) I thought it would be a good idea to start teaching the boys about desalination.  I looked up some DIY water desalination plans online, and found that's pretty easy to do on a small scale.

It's actually very easy, even on a large scale if you're right on the water, which, once we build our boat bikes and sailboat will be useful for visiting our barrier islands for weekend survival lessons and exercises, or if we ever find ourselves living right on the water again.

The process is very simple reqiuring only two containers, a piece of plastic or other waterproof material, and  small rock or marble, and a rubber band.  The saltwater is placed in the larger of the two containers.  The smaller container is then placed in that larger container. Make sure to only put enough water in the larger bowl so that the smaller one will not float.  Cover the larger bowl, with the plastic and secure the rubber band around the outer edge of the bowl.  Place your rock, or marble, on top of the plastic above the smaller bowl so that make a 'slope' so that as the water evaporates and condensation collects on the plactic, it will 'flow down' into the smaller bowl.  Place the bowl in direct sunlight for several hours and you will have desalinated water.

Here's a video that shows the same process being used to distill water...



Depending on condensation for desalinated water won't produce large amounts of water.  We can elect to collect as much as we can carry from the river to home (possibly with some kind of wagon pulled by a bicycle) and doing this process at home on as large a scale as we can manage, maybe even using solar power to speed up the evaporation process to collect more condensation, but two things come to mind.  The purpose of this is to teach our children how to do this should the day ever come that they must do it.  The other is the idea of also using cisterns to collect and store rainwater for irrigating our crop.

If a cataclysmic event ever forced us to take to the sea, or squat along a shoreline, we would be able to create drinkable water from the sea.

Mission accomplished.