jpeaceokc

jpeaceokc

1p

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14 years ago @ The Survival Mom - More resources for you... · 3 replies · +1 points

I'd like to address a couple of the concerns expressed about the Oklahoma City Mutual Aid contingency plan.

First, the farmers would have no reason to undertake cattle drives to the city if there was no prospect of payment. If currency has lost its value, cities are full of resources that would be useful in rural areas, so I don't expect it would take long to reinvent the barter system, and then there's always gold and silver. I am the president of the Oklahoma Food Cooperative, an organization that makes it easy for people to buy food directly from farmers, which is how my household gets 80% of its groceries from farmers within 120 miles of Oklahoma City.

Second, the OKMA plan is not a government plan. The government doesn't put food on my table right now, and I am not going to wait around after a "teotwaki" event for FEMA or somebody else to show up with a plan. I practice food storage (one of these days I hope to get good at it), but food storage has its own built in limitations. If the old just-in-time globalized economy has collapsed, the first job it seems to me is to reinvent a new "more-local" economy.

Third, in the Oklahoma Food Coop, we've been confronting the "lack of skills" problem from day one. On one hand, we had all this great locally-produced food, on the other hand, we had all these customers who were used to packaged and prepared foods. So we do a lot of teaching, and the same would be true in an emergency situation like this. Hunger is very great motivator, and I don't doubt its ability to encourage people to learn how to make a grain grinder out of three steel pipes, some duc tape and a can, grind some grain, and bake it into bread in an outdoor wood-fired oven that they and their neighbors had built in less than a day.

As to why we figured "12 people and 12 chickens", one of my thoughts is that under the pressure of these kinds of circumstances, people will move in with each other and combine households, since most households of 2 adults and 1 or 2 kids would have a hard time doing everything that needs to be done in a civil emergency like this. The numbers we picked were arbitrary, 3 or 4 nuclear households combined into an extended family would be "about a dozen" people, and a dozen chickens is a nice sized back-yard flock that would produce enough eggs and the occasional stewing hen r cockerel to provide a bit of variety in the family stewpot.

I would be happy to answer any other questions people might have.