How to Start a Prepper Food Pantry

Hi I'm Jaime from Guildbrook Farm let's talk about how to stock a prepper pantry there are many reasons why i have a prepper pantry things like job loss blizzards ice storms hurricanes and even earthquakes are all things that i have personally experienced in my life where having a stocked pantry has been vitally important to not only my survival but in getting through very tough times more recently in our state of North Carolina there have been riots in Charlotte and martial law that was enacted so going out into a grocery store was not a viable option at that time. Currently it is post-election and there are a lot of protests going on now, a lot of violence with those protests there are three types of prepper pantries. One would be a working pantry where you're continually using the product that you have stocked. Another would be a long-term pantry where you're stocking maybe 5, 10, sometimes 20 years worth of food for say long-term emergency and the third type of prepper pantry is one where peppers are storing food for say a complete and total collapse of the economy and they would use their stored goods as a form of currency. Now the type of prepper pantry that I have and that I use is a working pantry. Everything that you see here are all products that i use on a continual basis. The only exception to that is my water and my water is used for emergency only. so I stock a six months to one year pantry. So which is it is it six months or is it one year? Well when I buy an item i buy a one-year supply of that item. But because this is a working pantry I'm continually using that item so it immediately starts depleting. Somewhere between the six month and probably nine-month mark I starting to look for sales for that particular item and I will go out and i'll buy additional supplies to bump it back up to one year. At any given time I have a six-month supply everything on hand but I could have as much as one year and in some cases on items that I don't use as much a little bit over a year. So the first thing that I did when building a prepper pantry was to write down every single item that I used over the course of a year. That's a lot of work! I got an Excel spreadsheet and I categorized all my items and I wrote down everything that I used and then I started eliminating items that I don't use very often. It's very important that when you are starting your pantry that you consider the amount of space that you need and more items that you have the more space you're going to need and more things that you need to keep track of when you're replenishing those supplies. Another thing that I considered when creating this document are items that i can use for different things throughout the house. So to give you an example i use rice for our meals but i also use rice to create a gluten-free flour. So there's something that has a dual purpose that I can use for several different things. Another example would be vinegar. Vinegar is something that i use for canning but i also use that as a cleaning product. So again trying to find items that you can use for multi purposes is something that's really going to help you in building a prepper pantry. After I got that list narrowed down to the bare amount of products that i needed I started writing down all the prices that I could currently get those items for and then I price compared with other stores and bulk suppliers. I found the cheapest price or notated the cheapest price for all those items and that's the store where I purchased that particular item. I found that a one-stop-shop just doesn't happen. You're going to find prices that are a lot higher and a lot cheaper at one store so you need to be able to get the cheaper prices at the cheaper stores that means shopping at multiple places. For me I shop at my local grocery store when they have big sales, I shop at Walmart when they have some cheap prices on things like rice and beans i shop at Trader Joe's because they have some good prices on chicken and where I get a lot of my bulk grains and products is a company called Azure. If you're interested in Azure i'll leave you a link to that. You can see if that's right for you. Meat is an item that I store mostly by canning. Some meat I store in the freezer just because it's really hard to make a meatloaf out of canned ground beef but for the majority of my meat I store it in cans. Now this will last a minimum of one year. i've ever read about people who have opened up cans of meat that was five years old and it tasted perfect. Mine doesn't last that long but it does last quite a while. Now here i have a bunch of canned tomatoes and store-bought canned tomatoes My goal is to eventually replace all the items that I purchase at a store with things that I can grow on the farm. However we had a really terrible year with tomatoes this year because we had a plague of squirrels that came in and basically ate all the tomatoes from our garden. But my goal there is to replace all of my items with items that we can grow here on the farm. Canned tomatoes here will last several years. Potatoes I buy my potatoes in bulk I did try growing them this year I just don't have the space to grow as many as i use so i buy a 50-pound boxes of potatoes and I keep them here in the basement. Now to store potatoes you need a cool environment and you need to look at your potatoes often. You need to pull out any ones that are rotten and snap off any eyes that grow. Once the potatoes start to get a little bit wrinkly then I can them and these are fantastic for making like quick mashed potatoes. Beans are an item that I used to purchase through stores but now i can my own. I find it's a little bit cheaper and a little bit healthier as far as sodium. Now what I do is I by a 25-pound bag of each type of bean that i use and then what I do is I can just a small batch of each. It would be ridiculous for me to can 25 pounds of every type of bean. That would be a lot of jars and a lot of canning. So what I do is I can a small batch and then as I start to use those beans i'll just do another batch. What do I do with the rest of the beans? Well I store them in mylar bags now the mylar bags this is a 5 mil mylar bag that i got from US Emergency Supply and inside of here is an oxygen absorber. Now what this does is it helps to remove the oxygen from the bag so that bugs can't hatch. These beans will probably last longer than a year. If you're storing for less than a year probably not important to use mylar bags but for me this is a really good option because this is going to be one batch that I do for canning. these are the mylar bags that I buy. This particular one has a zip lock on it. You don't need to buy that. But what you do is you fill up the bag with your beans then you add one of these oxygen absorbers to each bag and then very quickly you're going to seal it with a hot iron. That's how they store. Rice is an item that I store in a 5-gallon food-grade bucket with a gamma lid. Now a gamma lid is an item that you can again purchase from US Emergency Supply. There's a bunch of other sources that sell it actually Azure also sells these as well. It's a lid that just pops onto a 5-gallon bucket and it is airtight leak-proof bucket and it's really convenient for items that you use on a continual basis . Now because I will go through this entire bucket within the course of a year I don't need to use the mylar bags i just put it into five-gallon buckets with the gamma lid and I throw some bay leaves in there to help prevent bugs. Spices are an item that i buy in bulk and because are already in plastic bags I just store them in a plastic container. Now I tried storing them in canning jars and putting a oxygen absorber in there but they didn't quite seal. So this is really not a great option. I found this is just fine. Now these spices here will last couple years or more. Pasta is an item again that's prepackaged very simple to just throw it into a plastic bin. This is a one-year supply of pasta for us. It was just on sale recently so I just stocked up and this is my full one-year supply. Dried fruit is an item that I sometimes buy in bulk. Raisins i do buy in bulk and I just store it here in a 5-gallon food grade bucket, I actually think this is a 3-gallon food grade bucket and then some dried fruits are already pre-packaged so I just mix them all together in a bucket. It will last for at least a year. So let's talk about some things that don't store very well. Brown rice is one item that doesn't story well because it has a higher nutrient value than a lot of the white rices. Iit will only last about six months. White rice can last 10 years. Brown rice will last only about six months. Another item that doesn't store very well is whole nuts because they have a high oil and fat content. They will probably only last about six months. Regular cooking oils such as olive oil again this won't last very long. Some six months to a year. The exception to that is coconut oil which can last up to two years. Nut butter which actually is a nut actually stores a little bit better than just whole nuts. It will last about a year past the expiration date. Another item that doesn't store very well is processed grains. So flours. They have a very short shelf life maybe up to six months. So this is another reason why I make my own gluten-free flour. You'll probably notice that a lot of the items that I have our barebone ingredients. Items such as rice and beans and just canned tomatoes and meat. That's because I cooked the majority of my meals from scratch. Now if you don't cook from scratch that's okay you can just stock your pepper pantry with things that you currently use whether it be canned soups or whatever. Just make sure that when you're stalking your prepper pantry that you only stock items that you use. You don't want to stock items that are going to go out of date and expire because you're just wasting your money. Another thing to take into consideration is the nutrient value of the items that you're storing. You probably don't want to store 20 bags of Doritos but an item that would be good to store if you eat it is to fish so make sure you keep that in mind. Items that are nutrient-dense are going to be really important especially if it's a crisis situation. So another thing to consider is where and how you're going to store the food that you're purchasing for your pantry. Several times here i mentioned food grade buckets. Now these round buckets can be purchased from an emergency supply place for about seven or eight dollars each however you can get them for free at a lot of bakeries. What i like to do is I like to take my ten year old along with me as cute bait and then go up to the bakery managers and ask them if they have any food grade icing buckets that they can give me. A lot of times they give it to me for free. My daughter doesn't mind going along because basically she uses that as an excuse to raid all of the free samples in the grocery stores. But that's one option that you can try. Now if you can't get those another option is these rectangular buckets that you can get for one dollar at the walmart bakery. They will charge you a dollar per bucket. It's a bucket and a lid and honestly that's kind of worth it because it's it's a really cheap bucket you would normally be paying seven or eight dollars. Now the only problem with these buckets is they do not work with the gamma lid. The gamma lid is round, these have a rectangular lid. Another thing to consider is shelving, where you going to store your food. Now this these two shelves here were our original shelves for this house. They are designed specifically for canning jars. You can see that there is just barely clearance here to conserve space we recently had built these other shelves over here which are designed for these five gallon buckets and for these plastic bins underneath. Let's talk about pests. Anytime that you have a pantry or food storage you're going to have pests such as bugs and mice. For mice these cheap mouse traps that you can get four for a dollar at the dollar store are a fantastic method. Just throw some peanut butter on there and make sure you monitor your traps. Throw them away whenever they're full. The other thing you notice that I have everything in double containers so I have most things in a food-grade bucket or in a regular plastic bin such as this one and usually the food is inside of another package item inside. That's a deterrent against both bugs and mice. that might chew through those items. Make sure you monitor those buckets to see if you see any chew marks. If so make sure you put out your mouse traps. As for bugs there are a couple different things you can do. One thing that I do is bay leaves. In my open containers i will put bay leaves in which is a deterrent against bugs. The mylar bags also by removing that oxygen helps prevent bugs from hatching. Now there are two methods that I don't use that other people use: one is diatomaceous earth. I use it in my chicken feed but i do not use it in my personal food. The reason why is because I did a test on that and i found it made me have an upset stomach. So if you guys are going to want to try that option make sure you test it on yourself before you put it in your food another option is putting your food in the freezer for about three days which supposedly kills all the bugs. Now I buy such large amounts of food it would be impractical for me to put all that food in the freezer for 3 days even if I broken into small batches. It's possible that i could put it outside in the winter time to kill the bugs it's not something that I've tried. I really don't have that issue right now so until i do that's not something I'm going to try but it's something that you guys might want to look into. So let's talk about some special circumstances. If you guys live in a flood zone you're going to want to take precautions against your food getting damaged by floods. Make sure that you have it up off the floor so that it will not get wasted. Another thing that a lot of people have asked me about is whether our shelves were earthquake-proof. They are not. We do not really get earthquakes here in North Carolina but there are a lot of weird things going on these days like in Oklahoma and earthquakes that it probably wouldn't be a bad idea for us to go ahead and make these earthquake-proof or earthquake-resistant. We'll probably do the upgrades to these shelves in a future video. We also need to add some support as well so you'll probably see that coming out. So there you go guys this is our six months to one year food pantry and how we store all the items and how long we store them for. Now if you guys don't want to store a pantry that is that large, that's ok. You can apply the same principles to say a 2 week to 4 week pantry. I'm by no means an expert on food storage however there are a lot of people on the YouTube community that are so if you have any tips or tricks, feel free to leave those below and if you have any questions or comments leave those below as well. If I don't have the answer I'm sure somebody else will. If you guys like this kind of stuff feel free to like and subscribe and we'll see you next time Some items are significantly cheaper... Really? I'm watching your eyes follow that gnat. (laughing in background) I thought he was going to land on me! Beans. I used to buy canned beans but now I can

Channel: Guildbrook Farm - Off Grid Living

Views: 600,959

Rating: 4.9357982 out of 5

Keywords: pantry, prepper pantry, prepper, survival food, pantry storage ideas, pantry storage, pantry organization ideas, pantry organization, prepping, survival, preppers, food prep, emergency supplies, prepper food storage, food storage, storage, emergency food, emergency food supply, survival food storage, long term food storage, prepper food, emergency rations, disasters, food rations, food supply, disaster preparedness, emergency preparedness, preparedness, canning, homesteading

Id: PuM17eG1nao

Length: 15min 59sec (959 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 13 2016