FoodWaterStorage.com

When the food supply chain is functioning correctly, it acts as an invisible force.  It begins with farms planting crops and rearing livestock, and ends with food on your table.

Loosely defined, the food supply chain is the collection of public and private organizations that plant crops and raise live stocks, package and produce, distribute and market, study and regulate all aspects of food.

For most people whose only involvement in the food supply chain is buying food at the local 24/7 supermarket, it’s easy to take for granted just how all that food ends up on the shelves of your favorite grocery store. The food industry is massive – in the U.S. alone, an estimated $1,000,000,000,000 is spent annually on food. There are many different components in the food supply chain, for clarity, we’ll break these phases down into primary and secondary stages.

• Primary stages include four parts – agriculture, processing, distribution, and retail.
• Secondary stages also include four parts – finance, research & development, regulation, and marketing.

Primary Stages

Agriculture – includes the planting, caring, and harvesting of crops and/or livestock.  This is the first phase and perhaps the most labor intensive phase of the food supply chain. Farms of all sizes must prepare the land, plant seeds, hope/pray for favorable growing weather, and finally harvest the crop for food to advance to the next stage.

Processing - in this stage, plants and factories package and process raw food crops (or livestock) into the foods that are sold in grocery stores and wholesale brokerage channels. Examples of this stage include commercial slaughterhouses, makers of frozen and canned foods, and other firms that provide food components to fast food establishments and restaurants.

Distribution - Once food has been processed and packaged, it is then distributed to potential buyers. The distribution stage   is comprised of land, sea, and air modes of transportation.  In addition to being transported, food also needs to be stored in warehouses, silos, granaries, freezers, etc.  In the food supply chain, logistics is the parent discipline that manages the complex network of transport and  storage that enables food in Europe to be shipped and sold in the United States within 24 hours.

Consumption – In the final primary stage, food is then sold and consumed.  Once food makes its way onto the shelves of your local grocery store, it’s sold to you and me and makes its way into our pantries and onto our plates for dinner.  It generally takes months for food to make it from stage one of this flow to the final stage of consumption. From seed to meal, there are many vulnerabilities in the food supply chain, which will be discussed later in this post.

In addition to the primary stages of the food supply chain, there are secondary, or indirect stages that are part of the holistic food supply chain.

Secondary Stages

Regulation -Regulation is a huge part of the food supply chain. In the U.S., the FDA and USDA are tasked with ensuring food safety. On a global scale, the WHO, EFSA, and more all have vested interests in safe guarding the world’s food supply.

Education/Research – Schools, private labs, NGO’s, and even non-profits are responsible for finding ways to increase efficiencies,  educate future generations of farmers, managers, and scientists with vested interests in improving the food supply chain.

Finance & Marketing -the global food supply chain is estimated to represent almost 10% , or $4.8 trillion USD, of the world’s estimated $48,000,000,000,000 GDP. This includes everything from grain commodity indexes, wholesale brokerage firms, and private marketing campaigns by corporations such as ConAgra or General Mills. In case you’re interested, check out the list of the worlds 100 largest food companies.

Vulnerabilities

As with any large scale industry, there are many vulnerabilities to the global food supply chain.  Threats range from man-made malicious weaknesses such as terrorism to uncontrollable elements such as bad weather.  With the average grocery store in the U.S. stocking just three days worth of food, even a small disruption in the food supply chain could have serious disruptions to the availability and prices of the world’s food supply.

Summary

The global food supply chain is one of the world’s largest and most complex industries. Representing approximately 10% of the world’s gross domestic product, there are tens of thousands of firms that comprise the global food industry. The food supply chain is one of the most important global industries as all humans have to eat. Bulk food storage is an excellent way to hedge against inevitable disruptions in the food supply chain.

Food Supply Chain Lifecycle

Learn how starting a square foot garden of your own can help your long term food storage plan by lowering costs and giving you and your family delicious and nutritious fruits and vegetables from your backyard!  If you haven’t done so already, check out our prior entries in our summer series: Gardening & Food Storage as well as Gardening & Food Storage Pt II

The garden’s in full swing and is starting to look more like a jungle than two raised square foot gardening beds!

The lettuce and zucchini plants are already yielding produce less than 30 days after planting them!  As you can see from the picture above, the garden is starting to become overcrowded..

In hindsight, we’re planning on making the following changes next year to improve:

• Keep vertical plants (such as the tomatoes, beans, and zucchini) kept to the 4 outer grids of each bed.  If limited to just one side’s outer grids, it should make them much more manageable and prevent them from choking out smaller plants around it…
• Instead of the teepee style sticks with hanging twine, we’re planning to use one of the vertical methods (picture below) mentioned in the book ‘All New Square Foot Gardening’ by Mel Bartholomew.

Other than that, everything else is coming along great and we haven’t encountered any problems. Pests are leaving the garden alone after the physical and Liquid Fence deterrents were implemented, and the weathers been ideal for gardening (mostly sunny days in the upper 80’s).  Daily maintenance remains around five minutes at near dusk to water the plants.  There still haven’t been any additional weeds we’ve noticed than the one we found last week.

If you haven’t started your own square foot garden to exponentially (and economically) increase your food storage plan, what are you waiting for!?

Pick up your copy of ‘All New Square Foot Gardening’ by Mel Bartholomew today to get started!

Learn how starting a square foot garden of your own can help your long term food storage plan by lowering costs and giving you and your family delicious and nutritious fruits and vegetables from your own backyard!

Welcome back to our summer series on Gardening and Food Storage! If you haven’t done so already, check out our part one – Gardening & Food Storage.

It’s been three weeks since our first post and we have a few brief updates to share.  The garden looks terrific and the weather has been extremely cooperative with a great mix of sunny days and rain showers to speed up the growth of the plants.

We chose to buy young plants and transplant them instead of starting the garden from seeds.  We stuck with a pretty general list of plants to test out the square foot gardening method. The garden includes tomatoes, spring beans, summer squash, zucchini, lettuce, basil, and cabbage.

Water Source

The municipal water source is treated with chlorine and chemicals so we opted to devise a simple DIY rain barrel using a new trash can, a hose, and a gasket mechanism to plug the hose into while creating a waterproof seal.

Vertical Plants

Several of the plants will eventually require support to keep them from becoming top-heavy and breaking so we created a simple, yet effective, method to train these vertical plants by using 3 bamboo rods and some twine.  Once the plants grow larger, we’ll implement stakes to provide additional support as needed.

Pest Management

As with virtually any aspect of gardening, there are plenty of opinions floating around about effective methods of pest control ranging from pesticides to more natural methods such as praying mantises. At this stage, the only nuisance to the garden has been a few rabbits.  In a 24 hour period, they managed to completely destroy a young red cabbage plant.  The initial methods of placing marigolds and hair (obtained from a local barbershop) proved to be ineffective.  In response, we sprayed the garden with a product called ‘Liquid Fence’. That helped, and we also ended up placing a small physical fence around the garden’s perimeter. Fortunately, there haven’t been additional pest problems since then.

Summary

So far, the square foot gardening method has been as efficient and simple as the book claims! There haven’t been any weeds and the only maintenance has been daily watering on dry days.  Other than a few minor add-ons such as the perimeter fence and support for the vertical plants, there haven’t been any significant daily investments of time other than the 5 minutes of watering on dry days.

We’ll post another update in a few weeks as some of the plants start to bloom.  If you want to join in and start your own square foot garden, you can pick up a copy of the book ‘All New Square Foot Gardening’, by Mel Martinez by clicking on the link.

Go to Part 3! 

Welcome to the FoodWaterStorage.com square foot gardening series where we’ll take a look at the benefits of gardening and how it can help you jump start or supplement an existing long term food storage plan.  Gardening has historically played an important part in supplementing long term food storage plans. Given the availability and affordability of starting a garden and obtaining a food dehydrator, there’s no reason you can’t make your very own dehydrated survival food. In addition to the benefit of making your own dehydrated survival foods, you and your family  will also enjoy the healthy benefit of having a fresh garden to obtain your produce from.

Over the course of this summer ‘Gardening and Food Storage’ series, we’ll take a look at just how valuable (and easy) having a garden of your own can be!

Specifically, we are using the square foot gardening method developed over the years by Mel Bartholomew.  Unlike traditional gardening, the square foot gardening method eliminates the hassle of tilling the soil and preparing the ground, not to mention constantly having to strain your back to weed your garden…

Square foot gardening is extremely easy to start, even easier to maintain, and can be placed virtually anywhere including urban, suburban and, rural locations.  It’s a simple concept that makes use of raised garden beds to eliminate the need of preparing the ground. A special blend of soil ensures that plants will receive a potent amount of nutrients to guarantee productivity no matter what plants you decide to grow.  Wood lattices are used to mark off square foot units in each bed to make identifying plants and planning your crops simple.

Throughout our gardening and long term food storage series, we’ll document the progress of two square foot garden beds from start to finish. After the harvest, we’ll also walk you through each step of the dehydrating process to show you how easy and cost effective it is to dehydrate your produce (or anything else you want).

Getting Started

To get started you’ll need just a few basic materials:

• Wood to create your raised garden bed. The wood only needs to be 6 inches deep but for some deeper rooted plants like potatoes, you’ll need 12 inches.  Each bed we used was created from a 2 inch x 6 inch x 16 ft length of board. From each board, we cut into 4 ft pieces to create a 4 ft x 4 ft square bed (16 square ft).  You can use any size you want to create a larger or smaller garden. The main point is to make it square and use wooden lattices or other thin strips of wood to mark off square foot grids, thus making it a true square foot garden.
• Lattices are used to section off each square foot grid. In our example, the lattices we had around weren’t the right size so our grids are slightly misaligned.
• The soil is the most critical part of the garden. Because of the limited space of each garden bed, use the following mix:
  • 1/3 peat moss
  • 1/3 vermiculite (this can be tough to find, a lot of times you need to order online, such as Home Depot or Lowes and use the ‘ship to store’ feature)
  • 1/3 compost (the book suggests using multiple sources of compost if possible)
• Weed cloth
• Screws
• Hammer
• Drill
• Tarp
• Rake
• Hose or some other source of water
• Seeds/plants

Using the wood and your tools, create the actual raised bed.  Try and do this on a flat, even surface to ensure everything lines up.  Once the beds are created, place them wherever you’d like.

Next, spread out your tarp and dump your soil mix onto the middle of it. If you’re making multiple garden beds, you may want to do this step one at a time to make it easier to work with.  Spray the soil mix with your hose and rake through it, thoroughly mixing it up.  Do this several times until you’ve watered all the soil well, but take care not to turn it into mud as this will make it more difficult to transplant into your garden bed.

Once the soil is mixed, lay down the weedcloth over whatever ground surface you’re working with.

Fill the bed all the way up with the soil mix, try and keep it nice and loose taking care not to pack it together too tightly.

From there, take your lattice or thin strips of wood and make your grids. You should nail down the lattices to the edges of the garden bed to secure them in place.

That’s all there is too it! No tilling soil, no weeding the ground first or any other type of maintenance.  Most hardware or home improvement stores will cut the wood frame and lattices for you for free (or nominal cost).  You can make each garden bed as small or large as whatever your living situation permits.  If you don’t want to start from seed, feel free to transplant your vegetables or flowers directly into a grid.

You’ll notice in our grid example that there are 6 one square foot grids and 6 grids of various sizes. This was due to the lattices not being cut to the correct size.  We opted to just use the existing lattices and have a few misshaped grids that we’ll use for larger plants such as cabbage.

What’s Next?

We invite you to follow us this summer to see our progress and ultimately the value that a square food garden can provide you.  It’s easy, inexpensive, and will be a valuable addition to any long term food and water storage plan.  We’ll be posting updates every few weeks with pictures of how our gardens are coming along. If you’re interested in starting a square foot garden of your own, pick up a copy of the book ‘All New Square Foot Gardening’, by Mel Bartholomew.

Go to Part 2! 

Mastering a few food storage recipes is a great way to learn how to incorporate the foods you store into your daily diet.

We’ve compiled a list of recipes using ingredients that are commonly stored. If you have a recipe you’d like to submit, please contact us and we’ll be glad to feature it on our site!