A while back, someone posted a poll on Survivalist Boards asking members how long they were prepping for. The options ranged from 72 hours all the way up to “indeterminate.” What struck me wasn’t the poll itself, but how fast the so-called serious preppers dismissed the shorter timeframes entirely.
Nobody with “real preps” was checking the 72-hour box. Most landed somewhere between six months and two years of stored food. Some had pushed well beyond that. One member calculated over 4.5 million calories stored, which works out to roughly six years of food for one person, or about a year if all his adult kids came home. Another was sitting at close to four years for two people, though he admitted ten visitors and a couple of dogs would change that math fast. A third figures he has three years before he’d need to grow all his own calories, and he openly admits his gardening skills aren’t there yet.
Reading through that thread got me thinking about my own situation. And when I’m really honest about it, factoring in food, water, alternative cooking solutions, and everything else together, I’m probably sitting at around six months of survival. Not six years. Given my current budget, location, inflation, and living situation, pushing much beyond that isn’t realistic right now and probably won’t be for the foreseeable future.
That’s not a comfortable thing to admit, but I think it’s worth saying out loud because I suspect a lot of people reading this are in the same boat and just haven’t done the math yet. Add in the extra mouths that I’m likely to be feeding, and that six months could dwindle rather quickly. So, honestly, I’m a bit dismayed at my situation.
The Gap Almost Nobody Has Closed
Here’s what the thread made clear: stored supplies and actual self-sufficiency are two very different things. Almost everyone in that discussion had the short-term stuff handled. The gap showing up over and over again was the transition from “I have food in buckets” to “I can feed myself without a supply chain for X number of months.” Those are not the same thing, and the gap between them is bigger than most people want to admit, me included.
Water was the most common weak spot. One member has his water source 400 feet down with no clean solution and lives ten miles from the nearest lake. Another had empty barrels sitting in his garage for two years, unfilled, out of sheer laziness (his words, not mine). A third called water his single biggest weakness outright. If you’ve looked at your own water situation, you know this one is easy to push off and hard to solve cheaply.
Personally, I’ve got stored water, the ability to collect more rainwater, filters to make most water safe to drink (including our pond water), but I don’t have a sustainable source, like a well, and I wouldn’t fully trust any filter medium to make all water truly safe to drink, including our pond water. Truth is, if we lost our public water, we don’t have a reliable water source, which means we’d have to instantly conserve, adapt in ways we wouldn’t want to (like not bathing regularly), and probably risk serious illness if things got desperate enough.
Heat was the next gap people owned up to. One person only had a couple weeks of propane for a buddy heater and couldn’t install a wood stove due to his living situation. Budget was the reason for most of the others. That’s a real constraint that doesn’t have an easy answer, and I respect that people were honest about it rather than pretending they had it figured out.
Then there’s medications. For some preppers, a 90-day prescription supply is a hard ceiling. When that runs out, all bets are off regardless of how many calories are on the shelf. This is one of the trickier gaps because there’s no simple stockpiling solution for most prescription medications, and it tends to get glossed over in preparedness discussions. And if you don’t have a sympathetic doctor or deep pockets to stockpile crucial medications, you could be in real trouble. Honestly, my mother-in-law would be in “real trouble” regarding her medications, and I don’t have a great answer for her because they change regularly.
Farming skills were a fourth gap, and probably the most quietly uncomfortable one. Several people with two, three, even four years of stored food openly admitted their gardening skills weren’t keeping pace with their supplies. They know what the problem is and they’re working on it slowly. But slowly may not be good enough with the clock ticking on whatever is coming our way, be that economic collapse, societal strife, or even war. I’m in the same boat to a degree. We have a small “farm” but it not anything to get excited about. And if we ever had to truly grow our own food, it would be a real mess around here.
To be clear, I’m in a similar spot on most of these. Like I said, my garden and chickens are works in progress, not finished systems. The flock does well through the warm months, producing more eggs than we can use, which is nice. And I suspect that we’ll use all of them if harder times come. But winter feeding is a genuine unsolved problem without stockpiling dozens of bags of bird feed, which is unrealistic.
On the preservation side, I’m mostly working with keeping the refrigerators going with small solar and then there’s freeze drying, but I’ve largely lost interest in freeze drying when I found out I couldn’t sell any of it at our local Farmer’s Market. But even if you’re into canning or pickling or whatever, salt and vinegar run out, glass jars break, and you can only do so much of food storage until you run out of space. And that’s to say nothing of a catastrophe happening which ruins all of your hard work. I once wanted to build another root cellar but a lack of funds has put that project on hold indefinitey.
I know where the gaps are, but closing them is a slower, more expensive process than I’d like.
The People Who Think About This Differently
Some members in that thread had moved past the question entirely. They weren’t prepping for a specific scenario or counting months of food. One put it plainly: he’s prepping to stay free from a system that keeps asking people to trade freedom for comfort. Others said they prep for the rest of their lives, full stop. That’s a different mindset than most of us operate with, and it’s worth considering for a minute.
The homesteaders in the thread were the ones with the closest thing to a real long-term answer. One had an 80×120 garden, 47 fruit trees, and over 20 nut trees. Another was building systems designed to produce indefinitely rather than stockpiling a fixed supply. These folks aren’t doing the “months of food” calculation because they’ve moved past it. They’re not prepping for an event. They’re building a way of living that doesn’t depend on the same fragile systems the rest of us rely on.
Most of us aren’t there, and honestly, most of us probably won’t get there given our locations, budgets, and life situations. But understanding the differences between having supplies, like I currently do, and having a system, like I’m working toward, is still worth something.
If this topic has you thinking about your longer-term picture, two books worth your time are Sold Out Forever: 101 Items to Grab Before the U.S. Dollar Vanishes and the Crisis Preparedness Guide: How to Survive the Coming Collapse. Sold Out Forever is about the stockpiling part of the equation; Crisis Preparedness Guide is about pushing past the basics and into the harder questions most preppers are still working toward.
So what’s your actual number? Not the optimistic version. The real one, when you add up food, water, heat, medications, skills, and whatever else it is you truly need to survive. The weakest link in the chain, the smallest number, is the one worth focusing on. Know it, own it, and start closing the gaps in order of priority. That’s really all any of us can do at this point.
