Useful Hard Skills for the near future

[mountainFrugal]

Edit: Chafing can also be an issue with walking long distances. I recommend you do some training to find out if you are a person that has chafing issues and how to mitigate them with things like body glide or specific clothing before ending up in a collapse scenario that requires a ton of walking.

Chafing is something that can take even hardcore ultra-runners out of a race so it is a serious consideration. Chafing is something that is made worse by wet clothing or wet skin. Excessive sweat or rain while hiking can cause unexpected hot spots and chaffing between clothing and your skin or skin on skin. When your clothing is soaked with sweat or rain it will adhere to your body in a different way. Think strange things... butt cheeks chafing together...(for me untested tighter shorts on long rainy run) or elastic bands or thighs etc. Test specific clothing in multiple conditions if possible.

[white belt]

With all of the talk of possible grain disruptions due to the Russia/Ukraine conflict, I'm wondering if anyone on here grinds their own flour? There seems to be a variety of hand-crank and electric grain mills on the market. Wheat berries have a decades long storage life compared to the months long storage life of flour (without oxygen absorbers).

[Ego]

good footwear is a major asset and bad footwear is a major liability.

This has changed a lot in the last decade or so. I've bought and sold hundreds of pairs of Danner's GTX boots over the years. They are excellent, high quality, long lasting boots but you are not going to do much running in them.

The newer lightweight special forces alternatives made by running shoe companies (Salomon Quest, Nike SFB, New Balance Abyss, Reebok Zig, UA Tac and the funny looking but super-comfy Altama Maritime Assault boots) weigh about half as much as the Danners and are way more comfortable for long days (IMO). Some are made to be submerged and the fabrics don't hold moisture. Whenever I find a pair in my size I try them out for a while before selling them. Right now I've got a pair of NB Abyss mid boots. The Nike's were the most comfortable for me but they look too tacticool.

[mooretrees]

With all of the talk of possible grain disruptions due to the Russia/Ukraine conflict, I'm wondering if anyone on here grinds their own flour? There seems to be a variety of hand-crank and electric grain mills on the market. Wheat berries have a decades long storage life compared to the months long storage life of flour (without oxygen absorbers).

I do mill our own grain with an older used electric grain mill ($50) I bought a few months ago. It's noisy as hell; we actually wear safety headgear when we use it. There's a lot of options for wheat berries depending on your desired use. I found a 25 pound bag (I think around $19) of a white winter wheat. It seems like a good all purpose baking flour. I grind around 6 cups at a time and that lasts anywhere from two weeks to a month. The texture is not too hard to get used to, just a little coarser than white flour. I've baked breads, muffins, Dutch babies and more and we had no problems adjusting to the flavor. In some instances we preferred the wheatier, coarser flavor and texture.

[AxelHeyst]

+1. I can't think of any reasons why ERE folk who eat flour wouldn't grind their own? Mills can be somewhat expensive but even a corn grinder for 40usd will get you cream of wheat coarseness.

[take2]

+1. I can't think of any reasons why ERE folk who eat flour wouldn't grind their own? Mills can be somewhat expensive but even a corn grinder for 40usd will get you cream of wheat coarseness.

I’m curious as to the financial benefits of this? (I understand that the purpose of this thread isn’t financial)

Is there a conversion from weight of wheat berries to flour that I’m missing or is the weight just weight? I ask because in our household we buy 16kg sacks of flour for roughly £15, or about 35lbs for US$20. That seems way cheaper than 25lbs/$19? We use about 800grams a week, so it lasts us about 4-5 months on average.

Beyond long term storage benefits are there any others? I would be interested to try but have lack of storage capacity and some skepticism on added value of introducing this.

[AxelHeyst]

Not just long term storage but long term preservation of nutrients, which are soon lost upon milling is my understanding. I wouldn't be surprised to find that in many locations it's less expensive to purchase flour, although I think in my location in the US bulk wheat berries are less expensive/calorie than flour. But for ease of long term stock of a staple that is highly versatile, wheat berries + a mill is hard to beat.

Also... Eat pancakes with store bought flour, then eat pancakes made from fresh ground flour. QED.

[jennypenny]

You don't have to use wheat; I'm allergic to it so we never have it in the house. We grind other things for 'flour' which are also useful whole in other ways. Wheat is kind of a one-trick pony.

That was my first thought re: Ukraine ... the most useful food prep isn't stockpiling wheat but knowing how to make bread/etc out of other food stuffs.

[Jean]

The worse chaffing (the one that happen around your groin can be greatly reduced if you wash your butt with water (in addition or replacement of toilet paper) after pooping.

[jacob]

+1. I can't think of any reasons why ERE folk who eat flour wouldn't grind their own? Mills can be somewhat expensive but even a corn grinder for 40usd will get you cream of wheat coarseness.

Berries are a lot more expensive and harder to find than flour? Our last bag of 50lbs white flour was $26+free shipping.

Incidentally, a vitamix blender (or I suppose any other 750W+ blender) will also grind.

[7Wannabe5]

White flour is currently just over $.30/lb in 5 lb bag at Walmart. Pretty much impossible to beat in the 30 years I've been tracking food prices.

Also, I think that thinking about food storage over periods like 30 years is in contradiction to the reality that life is cyclical and you may very well need to hustle on a daily basis in order to survive.

OTOH, it does seem like a good idea to know where the nearest grain elevator is located.

[Sclass]

I’ve mentioned my parents wheat stash here a few times. I recently cleared out their half dozen five gallon buckets of whole wheat. They bought it cheap at a feed lot. The wheat grains outlasted the buckets. It still looked edible after 50 years.

When we bought it and stashed it we got together with a neighbor and he had a mill. We milled a few pounds and mom made bread. It was so much work she never did it again. Our basement was full of 5 gallon water bottles and these five gallon plastic buckets of whole wheat. The plastic had become brittle and cracked. It was breeding rats. Parts of the basement are now covered one inch deep in rat droppings.

The neighbors mill was a simple thing that looked like a meat grinder. It screwed down to a table and ran on a small appliance motor. I guess we had some kind of deal - he had a mill we had wheat.

This was some kind of plan hatched out of a mix of fear and fantasy.

[AxelHeyst]

Hm. I learned some things about wheat from this thread - I didn't realize preground was so much cheaper. I'd never thought of it much to be honest; mom has always had a couple buckets of wheat berries, always ground our own flour, always made our own bread and pancakes and stuff, no big deal, as long as I can remember. Just part of eating in the Heyst household. Think it was mostly a health thing for us. Also, dad is type 2 diabetic and his blood sugar levels can handle homemade/ground bread but can't with the store bought stuff.

Comparing white flour prices to wheat berry prices is apples and oranges from a nutrition and glycemic response perspective, I think?

[7Wannabe5]

Comparing white flour prices to wheat berry prices is apples and oranges from a nutrition and glycemic response perspective, I think?

True, but you could cost in other cheaper ingredients to add roughage, fat and protein. I'm currently on high soluble fiber/no insoluble fiber " gastro soft" diet, so I am avoiding all whole grains including whole wheat. I'm actually wondering whether all the whole pantry staple foods I was eating during the first months of Covid lock-down didn't contribute to onset of Crohn's disease. My BF had a tendency to sometimes undercook the pinto beans and raw almonds were my go to snack. Combine all that indigestible gut scraping roughage with Vitamin D deficiency and a dose of Ibuprofen for my old hip injury pain....TRIGGER of incipient chronic auto-immune response!

There can always be too much of a good thing when it comes to ingestion. My two-track-mind (money and health) multi-millionaire friend poisoned himself to the point of needing to be hospitalized by drinking too much water.

[Sclass]

Most certainly a big ag volume thing. The flour mills must buy the wheat by the silo. Our feed lot was buying by the pallet. Also not all wheat is created equal. Some is better eating. You can see the price variation in flour brands at the store. Some boutique brands just make better bread than the generic Con Agra or ADM stuff. I think it is just a different variant that trades off taste for yield.

It was pretty economical for my family to buy the buckets of wheat berries. My dad was very excited we could get this “red wheat” at the feed lot for a good price. We wouldn’t have done it if it had been costly. He and mom saw it as cheap insurance against starvation.

Sometimes we made a breakfast cereal that looked like this.

https://aprettylifeinthesuburbs.com/wheat-berry-cereal/

[white belt]

Thanks for all the helpful insight re: grain mill. Maybe another way to frame it is in terms of fragile, robust, and resilient? Having ~0 food stored on hand is fragile. Having a lot of food stored on hand is robust. Having a lot of ingredients on hand to combine into many varieties of food is resilient. Perhaps having a grain mill is another level of resilience? It allows you to turn a wider range of raw ingredients into food for human or animal consumption. I still struggle with what would be antifragile in this example.

Since one can use mylar bags and oxygen absorbers to store flour for years, maybe it just doesn't make economic sense to buy wheat berries and process them yourself. On the other hand, economic variables can change relatively quickly, particularly in times of collapse. Processing raw ingredients into flour is one more skill to have in the skillset, while the grain mill is one more tool to have in the tool kit (acknowledging that one can use a variety of implements to mill grain). Things probably make more sense if you are in a region with grain producers nearby.

Another way to think of it is a way that I believe @Mister_Imperceptible has discussed in previous threads. Basically as humans, we are all short anything we must consume to survive (food, water, clothing, security, medicine, fuel, etc), so maybe it makes sense to hedge our risk by stockpiling some of those goods? I'd expand the idea of stockpiling to include developing skills and connections associated with the procurement/production of such goods.

Although @Sclass' example is a bit gross due to the rat infestation, in the grand scheme of things I think stored wheat berries are pretty benign on the list of possessions that humans leave behind (at least they are biodegradable and could still be fed to animals or desperate humans). Personally, I don't store food things unless I actually use them regularly. If one thinks of it like an emergency supply, then not having to use your stockpile of wheat berries may fall under the classification of "It was a good day" like not having to use a fire extinguisher, tourniquet, or airbag.

In my dream human-powered homestead, I'd have a grain mill that can connect to a pedal bike setup (with the ability to run an electric motor as an alternative). At my current Wheaton Level, I'll probably just stockpile a little more flour and practice making bagels/pasta/tortillas from scratch.

[rref]

There are many ways to prepare and eat wheat berries besides turning them into flour.

[Stahlmann]

Switching to different point: how to predict borders closing for males in productive age in Poland/Slovakia/Belarus?
I hate my life, but I don't want to sacrifice it before 30s for Polish/Russian politicians/oligarchs.
For political perspective, I consider myself as low tier opportunist (if living with parents gives me right to be called so).
How to predict such things? How to think about it?
Do we have NATO intelligence officers over here?

[chenda]

Switching to different point: how to predict borders closing for males in productive age in Poland/Slovakia/Belarus?

I suspect Stahlmann there's a good chance you'll be hauled up for military training before long, if you've not already been. So maybe nows the time to leave and established residency somewhere else, with better wages and opportunities.

[white belt]

@Stahlmann

Each country has its own laws and processes regarding conscription, along with unique military size and capability. For example, the USA has the Selective Service System, even though it often perceived as the most dominant military force in the world and made up completely of volunteers. That system generally gets no attention except in times of total war and since the USA homeland hasn't been threatened by war in a long time, I think it's mostly disregarded by the average citizen. Since large governments are bureaucracies, they tend to move slowly in reacting to anything, which buys you some time. Conscripts are much less valuable than even poorly trained volunteer militias (who at least will already have equipment, some familiarity working together, and motivation), which means they generally won't be called upon unless conditions are desperate.

I would follow very closely how many of the reserve/militia/homeland defense forces have already been activated in your country because that will generally be a prerequisite step on the way to conscription. Additionally, you should know what laws are on the books in terms of priorities of conscripts (e.g. they may say the first wave is males 18-22, then gradually expend the pool of eligibility). Some countries like Israel and certain Nordic countries (?) conscript females as part of the first wave. Since your country is part of a defense alliance like NATO, it would also be helpful to be familiar with those alliance terms as well.

Ukraine started activating reserve forces months ago in response to Russian aggression. Ukraine activated all remaining reserve forces on 22 February and banned males 18-60 from leaving the country on 24 February. In hindsight, Ukrainian males had a 48 hour period to get out after last reserve activation and before travel ban, however that was probably not clear in real time. Note that technically Ukraine has not resorted to conscription, however they are clearly hoping that blocking alternative options for males will persuade them to voluntarily fight.

Like most refugee situations, it probably benefits you to be a first mover rather than waiting for the masses to catch on. I'm not saying that to influence your immediate decision, just speaking in general.