Sustainable Hunting

[Bugflipper]

Reliquary, not much land is needed to support a family of four. A half acre garden will give you more than a year's supply of food if you utilize a root cellar and practice canning and drying.
I run a half acre garden for 2 and it provides a 3 year supply of food in case of crop failure ( relying on 70% meal usage). The third year stock gets fed to the animals during the winter. 1/2 acre should get you easily a 1 year supply, but that is if you eat it solely. Factor in what you can hunt, trap, raise and pick wild and most likely you could stretch it to 1.5 years.

[reliquary]

Thank you.
 
What do you plant, and how much of each?
 
We freeze almost everything now, but "can" jams, jellies, and preserves from the orchard.  We are set up for water-bath and pressure canning if needed, but freezing stuff is easier now.
 
I experimented with some things this year.  Planted a short row of crowder peas, from which we put up 30 quarts.  Those things are OUTSTANDING.  Ran everywhere, still blooming even now.  I put in some butternut & acorn squash to see how they'd grow and to check on storage qualities, had yellow & white squash and zucchini and then some small melons & cantaloupes in the flowerbeds just for an experiment.  Then I went back to the feed store and bought some good quantities of known-producer seeds to store.
 
Tomatoes do well here and I have 30+ quarts canned plus seed saved.  I've raised corn in the past.  Wheat, oats, barley, rice, etc don't grow well in this specific area.
 
 

[mannyrock]

 
 
  As to the effectiveness of small gardens:  When I was a kid, I had a great aunt and great uncle (in their mid 60s) who lived in town in Carbondale, Illinois, only a few blocks from a major university.  They lived in one of those old, large, wooden, victorian type houses that you see in older towns, probably built around 1900.
 
   The front yard was pretty small.  The back yard was larger, but not real big.  I would estimate that it was about 80 feet wide by 100 feet deep.
 
   Anyway, they always had the ENTIRE back yard planted in a vegetable garden.  Rows of beans, greens,black-eyed peas, tomatoes, potatoes, etc.  And they worked in that garden every morning and evening, year round, except when there was snow on the ground.
 
  They were originally brought up on farms, and they knew what they were doing.  It seems like every other day, they were picking and bringing vegetables into the house.  They canned several times a year.  Their basement was full of shelves filled with the vegetables they canned.
 
   It appeared to me that with this small garden, they were pretty darned close to raising all of the food they needed. 
 
   In the fall, they would drive out to one of the nearby orchards and buy a few bushel baskets of cast-off apples, peaches and pears (damaged, or too small etc for shipping), and then they would cut them up into slices and can those as well.
 
  The only food they ever bought at the grocery stores were milk, eggs, butter, meat and cheese.  I'm betting that if they lived in a more rural area, and had just two more acres of land, they could raised all of that as well.
 
  Just some memories.
 
Mannyrock
 

[mechanic]

My grandpa had a fairly large farm for this area.  He planted cash crops, (usually cotton) to take to market, but he planted a one acre spot for vegetables.  They gave away food every year.  When we cleaned out the house after they were gone, there were case after case of mason jars of food, some of it several years old, but all edible.  In the barn there were four pine boxes of salted pork.  In the smokehouse there were 4 hams and a quarter of smoked and dried beef.
 
Ben

[bilmac]

If you live in a city you might have the impression that hardly anybody hunts, but if you live in fly over country, the picture is different. I've lived in many rural areas west of the Mississippi and  the percentage of folks who hunts seems to be pretty proportional to the quality of the resource. In Alaska and Wyo. probably 70% or 80%  of men hunt and lots of women too. Believe me if just half that many folks start getting hungry and relying on wildlife for most of their diet, there isn't going to be any wildlife in a very short time.

[streak]

My grandpa had a fairly large farm for this area.  He planted cash crops, (usually cotton) to take to market, but he planted a one acre spot for vegetables.  They gave away food every year.  When we cleaned out the house after they were gone, there were case after case of mason jars of food, some of it several years old, but all edible.  In the barn there were four pine boxes of salted pork.  In the smokehouse there were 4 hams and a quarter of smoked and dried beef.
 
Ben

mechanic,
Like you my grandfather had a large farm, and when my daddy was in the navy in WWII my mother and my little brother and I stayed with my grandfather and grandmother during this time and my favorite time of the year was in late fall at the first frost and hogs were killed and butchered and alot of meat was put in the smokehouse! I always enjoyed it when my grand mother thought that I was old enough to take a sharp butcher knife and go by myself to the smokehouse and cut off a slab of sugar or salt cured ham or bacon!Man that was good eating!
Of course that smoke really made your eyes smart!!

[SHOOTALL]

After reading and thinking about this topic it seems that sustained hunting would only work where shared hunting was not the rule. If alot of folks hunt the same ground the game could be gone in short order. The Native Americans understood this and protected the hunting grounds.

[mannyrock]

 
Shootall,
 
   Having read posts on all of these boards for years, I believe that the only consistent form of sustainable hunting would be to have a couple of high quality air guns (scoped), and thousands and thousands of lead pellets, and then shoot one or two birds off of a phone line or a clothes line every day.  There are hundreds of millions of birds, large and small, and they are all edible.  Lines strung near a water sources are routinely used by lots of birds to just sit and roost every day.
 
  Don't forget also that if you have access to any type of silo, you can set up a pidgeon nesting area on top, and then harvest baby pidgeons (squab) once a week.  This was a consistent way of obtaining meat in the Middle Ages.   All country estates had one.
 
  Absolutely no need to wander around for hours on end, trying to get a rabbit with a .22, when you could just pop-pellet a couple of birds in the back yard every morning, and throw them in a stew pot.
 
  Just my thoughts,
 
Mannyrock

[243dave]

Setting a bunch of snares(for large and small game) along with some inventive traps for waterfowl are much more efficient than hunting with any firearm (perhaps not legal though) but I guess that would be a different topic.

[Bugflipper]

Reliquary, I really don't know how much I plant of each. My rows are about 200 ft long and I just plant full rows of one item. My spacing is usually double of what would be recommended. The root crops are peanuts, jarusalem artichoke, regular and sweet potatoes, turnips, kolarabi, onions, carrots, rutabagas and parsnips. The legumes are usually planted in the corn since corn needs a lot of nitrogen; beans and peas for fresh/canning and some for drying. Then summer and winter squash. Okra, Tomatoes, cantelopes, watermellons and peppers all are on the same row. My cool season stuff is just one row of radishes, greens, cabbage and the like. It is lettuce, herbs and spinach in the warm months. The greens are allowed to go to seed, then they are replanted in the fall for a manure crop. I am in zone 7.

[SHOOTALL]

Again it would depend on how many are hunting . With reguard to birds where would they get feed if farming was stopped ?

[vacek]

Its becoming more and more an accepted science that the buffalo herds were already in decline before we (non-native Americans)started the mass killings of the mid-late 19th century.  It is estimated at the going rate the buffalo herds may have lasted only 2-3 more generations.  The Plains Horse culture had become very active and efficient with the Sioux a dominant example.  Prior to the horse they were a forage/agriculture based society that changed. 
 
But here is my point.  Sustainable hunting in the type of possible future society we are talking about cannot stand alone, even with a centric focus on birds.  A large reason we have so much game available is directly (we get a very large % of our food from ag) and indirectly (game animals get a lot of their food from ag) related to production agriculture. 
 
Short term, foraging can get us to where we need to be.... in a sustainable community.

[SHOOTALL]

Non Native Americans shot buffs one at a time in great numbers fer sure it took its toll. Native Americans would stampede hundreds at a time off cliffs in many cases . I don't see the difference really .

[SHOOTALL]

Hit the worng key, anyway the same waste will surface at such times.

[mannyrock]

 
   For five to ten years after farming stops, all of the open areas (including front and back yards) will go to weeds, and weeds mean seeds. Birds would thrive and multiply, and assuming that the water is not polluted, waterfowl populations in particular would soar.  Early settlors reported seeing thousands of ducks and geese in single flocks, covering the water for miles.
 
   Don't worry about the birds.  They will do far better than we. :-)
 
Manny

[SHOOTALL]

No need to worry about the birds they will have been eaten long before weeds bear seed .

[Dixie Dude]

I've read somewhere that if modern society breaks down completely, like EMP bombs shutting down our power grids, withing 6 weeks over 100 million Americans would die.  Those sick and injured would probably die first along with the elderly.  Pre-mature babies, mothers needing C-sections, etc.  Most people in America only have a two week supply of food.  Many would go hungry or fight to get food, so they would die.  Many would drink bad water, so they would die.  Most of the deaths would occur in heavily populated areas first.  Once there are a lot of deaths, disease will spread if these people aren't burried or cremated quickly.  There actually might be an abundance of food in rural areas.  Cattle farmers would not have a market for their beef if lots of people die in the big cities, nor other farmers for their grain and produce.  Living as far away from big cities as possible, one would seem to have a better chance of survival.  Hunting might include hogs or cattle, not just wild game.  Chicken farmers might have to let their chickens go for them to survive.  They would revert back to the wild.  It would help if you lived in an area of like minded people to form social groups for protection and food sharing.  Killing a cow without a way to preserve it would be a waste.  Sharing it with several area families would keep people fed and survive until society can recover.  Only problem I have with this, is the 1.2 billion Chinese who might travel across the ocean just to take the land if they are not affected.   

[no guns here]

As a hunter/gatherer society, the population of the plains Indians would have been directly tied to the population of their primary food staple, the buffalo.  If they did succeed in killing off large percentages of the herds, then within the next year or two they would have died off in large numbers as well.  In fact, I surmise that this probably had happened in localized instances prior to the invasion of the white settlers.  Buffalo being a semi-migratory herd animal didn't always move to the same place at the same time every year.  Missing a migration or missing a big end of season hunt would have put a big damper on the survival rates of the old and young over the hard, cold plains winter.  I don't know of specific instances but it wouldn't surprise me to find that whole villages or clans were lost at times due to hard, long winters and lack of buffalo due to the vagaries of migration.  Seems that in such a scenario, the indians would have experienced a die off as well as the buffalo.  The buffalo herds would recover more quickly since generations of sexually mature buffalo come along faster than generations of sexually mature humans.
 
Don't know... just my quick thoughts.
 
 
NGH

[SHOOTALL]

I doubt anywhere east of the mississippi river would have any game left in short order . In the west with in reasonable distance from concentrations of humans there would be none. And the low production per acre with out chemicals the out look would be bleak . UNLESS groups banded togather and protected what they had.

[Dixie Dude]

I have produced enough for 2 people in a 50' x 100' garden.  In the deep south, you can plant year round.  Start plants like tomatoes, okra, etc, from seed in a window or a hot box, then transplant.  You get about a 2-3 week head start from just seeds.  I can plant two summer crops, one in April and one in Late July.  In fall I can plant trunips, collards, raddishes, carrots, rutabegas, onions, and cabbage.  All can grow through the winter.  In late -January you can plant the same fall crops.  Unless it gets extremely cold, and sometimes it will, they will survive.  We have wild plums and blackberries.  Plums are small, maybe quarter size, but they make good jelly, as well as blackberries, which are usually ripe in June and can be made into cobblars and jelly or jam.  Spring and summer crops include corn, okra, squash, tomatoes, snap beans, butter beans, field peas.  I've never been able to produce lettuce well.  It is either too hot or too cold.  There are a lot of pecan orchards around here also.  If you gather them for the owners, they will give you half, and they sell the other half.  Use a leaf rake and you can pick up a lot of pecans when they start falling.  My grandfather had free range chickens, that he fed once a day very lightly and with table scraps.  He provided nests off the ground for gathering eggs.

[SHOOTALL]

Its not what you can produce in a year its what you can protect and keep.

[Dixie Dude]

Part of survival is just having seeds.  Buy seeds that are non-hybrid so you can save seeds from year to year.  Always save about twice to three times as much as you think you might need in case you have a bad year.  Meat is another matter, raising rabbits or chickens would be the easiest with less space.  Having a little land allows you to expand into raising a milk cow, hog, or draft animal.  Hunting, fishing, trapping would be in a dire emergency to supplement what you don't have.  Learning about wild eatable plants and medicinal plants in your area is also a good thing to know.  Even grass roots are eatable. 

[SHOOTALL]

all of that is great advice . Large critters eat alot , a cow will go thru. a 600 + bale of hay a week to a week and a half except in cold weather when it might eat more. A horse even more and the hay has to be better in quality. Hogs are good if you smoke and salt even better. But how will all this be protected ?

[reliquary]

BUGFLIPPER:
 
I never noticed your reply #99 about your garden, and apologize for not responding until now.  My senior moments are taking longer and longer to overcome.
 
I'm far enough south that some of my neighbors raise a little citrus, and the cooler-weather crops don't do well here.  I plant mustard, collard, and turnip greens in the fall and a smaller crop again in the early spring.  Usually in otherwise empty spaces in the flowerbeds and along the lakeshore.
 
My (hard times) garden will have about 75' rows; when I put in my orchard, I left enough room between the trees & vines to have a crop "if & when".  The only things I consistently grow now are tomatoes and green beans.  I am prepared to plant full crops, with seed and tiller on hand, if the need arises.  One of my neighbors read about the old Indian trick of putting a fish in the ground with his seed, and was amazed at how well it works.  He also planted a few hills of the "three sisters" (corn, running beans, and winter squash together) and that worked well.
 
Thanks for your input.

[mechanic]

I have a friend who has begun raising catfish.  He has three small ponds, about 25' x 75'.  He places the fingerlings in the first, then moves them down as they grow.  He dammed a small creek to make the ponds, and regulates the ponds by adding and removing boards in his dams.  You would be surprised how many fish he can raise this way..
 
Ben

[blind ear]

I have a friend who has begun raising catfish.  He has three small ponds, about 25' x 75'.  He places the fingerlings in the first, then moves them down as they grow.  He dammed a small creek to make the ponds, and regulates the ponds by adding and removing boards in his dams.  You would be surprised how many fish he can raise this way..
 
Ben

 
A flowing system like a creek will keep the organic load low in the water and can be made to create extra aeriation where the water is spilling over dams. Both are key factors in not loseing fish to depleated oxygen levels ear