Today's American households are non-producing households.
The idea of a contained family economy is long forgotten as well as the skills to sustain that family economy. The average American household is now a consumer based closed economic system. This consumer-based system is not sustainable and is doomed to fail at any given time. It is desirable for the modern homesteading family to maintain the family-based economy in such a way, that when the consumer-based economy does fail we won't be crippled and just lay down and die because of a failure.
I know many folks that prep and set themselves up to survive for several years should the system fail. But many of those folks are preparing themselves to tough it out and survive until the system can return and right itself. My question many times to those folks is: Are you prepared to survive if the system never returns? I don't ask that in arrogance, but instead I ask out of concern for their wellbeing and that of their families.
For our family the idea of prepping is to be in constant production of a bulk of our food supply, that it may carry from one harvest to the next and have some left over from the previous year maybe to make up any short fall. (We know there will be in something each season.)
Having fresh meat in the field on the hoof will no doubt be the norm in an economic failure, as the power will have failed as well. No, we don't keep tons of candles or drums of lamp fuel around, (Though we do keep some.) those will eventually run out too. Instead, our plan is to go to bed when it gets dark like our forefathers did.
What I do keep around is enough Fuel and Bar and chain oil around to get us by for a couple years of wood cutting while we get ourselves in shape to run the old cross cut saw. By then I'll have taken my grandfather’s old haying equipment out and cleaned up so we can hook them up to that team I always wanted and get our hay in the old way. We did it before but the old equipment was pulled with our old Farm-all tractor.
I guess all in all we don't need to call our life any new fancy modern word, I guess what we are really living as a normal old fashion traditional life. A life we should strive for whether the present system fails or not, it is a life we have loved for many years now and plan to continue to the end.
Let’s not live out our lives worrying about what will come or what might come and continue an strive to do it a little better this year or maybe next year so we are another step closer to our personal goal of living a normal traditional life.
Please Everyone have a blessed week.
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