Long term food storage on a budget - $25 or less at a time

hey everybody its Courtney with Arkansas preparedness Network coming into this evening I wanted to do a video and hopefully I'm going to be able to keep it rather short but I want to talk about doing long term food storage on a budget not everybody can buy big pallet of freeze-dried food or you know $10,000 or food dehydrator or whatever so most of us have a budget that we have set for preparedness supplies so forth and so on so this will help you keep in there I actually did this presentation at least to some degree at the extravaganza back in June and this is I want to talk about rice and beans you know everybody hears all the Preppers talking about well you gotta have rice and beans you gotta have rice and beans well why are rice and beans so important because together rice and beans or beans and any other grain corn things like that like beans and cornbread rice and beans together they make up a complete protein which provides each of the amino acids that the body cannot make by itself so if you're in a hard time situation and you're resorting to your emergency food you need to make sure that it's going to nourish your body as best as possible now I'm not saying rice and beans is gonna be the only thing that you're gonna eat let's hope not it could be but if it is then at least it's something that's somewhat nourishing hopefully everybody is going to be supplementing that with with other things and we'll get into that in a minute so if one pound of rice is 1650 calories now this is one pound of dried rice is 1650 calories one pound of dried pinto beans is 1550 calories so if you take a half a pound of rice and a half a pound of beans that's one pound of food for you in in a DIYer ration per day that's 1600 calories for one person one day now if you're having to chop wood and stuff like that that's not going to sustain you if you're just staying inside and feeding the fire to stay warm then this will be enough hopefully you know if you're like me you've got a little extra stored away what is it TJ calls it yes TJ I'm calling you out it's a stored calories I forget what he calls it maybe he'll post something down there and explain to us what it is but anyway that's why rice and beans are a big thing because they provide together they provide the complete protein that is all the amino acids that our body cannot produce on its own now there are a couple of ways that you can do this if you can afford to spend about 150 or 160 bucks you can go buy a hundred pounds of rice and a hundred pounds of beans and six of these buckets from Home Depot or Lowe's or whoever your preferred deal is I prefer Home Depot because if you can see in there that black that is a Gaston the Lowe's buckets don't have the gasket in there I like the Home Depot buckets because they do have the gasket they both cost about the same so you're also going to need some of these mylar bags this is one five gallon mylar bag it folds flat it's just a big rectangle and to give you an idea how big it is and it's open at one hand and sealed on the other end that has been kind of opened up and putting this bucket and I have already put a bunch of beans in here because I know you guys didn't want to sit here long enough for me to dump in 34 bags of these beans but to show you this is what I this is this is bag number 34 that's 34 pounds of beans in that bucket and this is what these are because I don't want to get all caught up on just having pinto beans or anything you get tired of eating the same thing over and over again and then you just get to where you don't want to eat and then you end up starving to death so mix things up so there are a lot of ways that you can do this now I can't get the red beans because I like red beans and rice I'm actually those of you that have come to the last two events have probably tasted my red beans and rice and hopefully you think they're pretty decent my wife and I are pretty fond of them so we like the red beans and rice my wife is also very fond of lima beans ford hook style lima beans the mixture in lima beans so that's a that's a two pound bag that cost about four bucks this is a four pound bag of pinto beans from Walmart this is just great value plating right at four bucks this is a five pound bag of rice I like the parboiled rice because it doesn't stick store what you eat right that's about three dollars and fifty cents so hopefully you can figure out oh and these right here these cost I think a dollar and fourteen cents each so every time you go to the store and you're buying groceries just grab a bag and throw it in your cart now there's one thing that I want to stress this is very important so everybody please pay attention when you're doing this it's gonna take you a month or two months or whatever to get enough stored up to fill a five-gallon bucket because you're gonna want around 30 or 35 pounds in there so when you get those bags you need to put those bags in your freezer for at least three days the reason is that there are meal worms usually have laid eggs on those grain even though they get washed before they get bagged and all that they're still going to be some eggs in there and this is what happens if let's see can you see all that meal that's in there yeah I think you can see all that meal this is a bag of this as an overvalue see this one's red but it's the same it's the great value small red beans and the mealworms because I didn't stick them in the freezer the mealworms got in there and got too so these are gonna end up going to the chicken instead of in a bucket so put them in the freezer for three days at least three four days then take them out storm on your shelf or whatever then when you get enough because being in the freezer for three days will kill the eggs of any bugs that might be in there and then when you store them for a long term you're going to try and get as much of the oxygen out of there as possible to ensure that there are no more bugs in there if they do they won't live very long and they won't eat much of your food so we've covered different ways to do this to come up with a bucket of food that you can store if it's five dollars at a time the bucket and the lid together I think is about six six fifty I get the mylar bags I get ten mylar bags and they come with ten oxygen absorbers I think these are 2000cc oxygen absorbers they come with ten of these and they're vacuum sealed when they come all ten of them together ten oxygen absorbers and ten mylar bags for about 21 or 22 bucks from Amazon that's delivered to my house so everything involved in this can be done for less than 25 bucks so if you can do 25 dollars a month and just trudge away and do this then you can put away a bucket every month or two or maybe even three months to get you depending on how expensive the beans are because quite frankly these are not that inexpensive that's over a dollar a pound and like I said the lima beans are the most expensive and this is what I actually did at the extravaganza two pounds cost me four bucks that's two dollars a pound but these are my wife's favorite beans so happy wife happy life right so that stuff that you can put together to put in a bucket now before I get into showing you how to actually secure this bucket I want to talk about a couple of other options already see the lima beans and the pinto beans and I'm going to show you right here hopefully I can get close enough that you can see there's a date here of January 15 2018 and these are lima beans these are vacuum sealed bags and this one here is pinto beans from June 3rd 2018 so every now and then when I go to the store I buy a little extra and I'm a vacuum seal some so that I've got a few that are handy and I like to put some in buckets so that I've got plenty stored away for in case things you really get bad but this keeps the bugs out as well vacuum sealing and to keep things a little interesting this right here is some 50 I don't know if you can we go maybe you can see that this is just a bag of 15 bean soup and you can't really tell but the little flavor packet is is in there too and I took the instructions for it and all that cut that out of the bag in a vacuum seals that now the vacuum seal that I use I got this I don't know three four or five years ago this is a FoodSaver game-saver and you can get some that are around 75 80 bucks this one here I think I paid about 120 bucks for because this one has a 10-year warranty and it's designed to be a little heavier deuce heavier use as the name implies game-saver it's for people that hunt deer and larger animals that may have to package an entire animal and this thing can stand up to constant use for an hour or two at a time yell excuse me a second I'm gonna take a little nip of grandpas cough sir so we've covered all know I've got one more option here for you again Walmart now you probably won't find this stuff at the store unless you order it and have it shipped to the store to pick up but it's usually this kind of stuff they want to ship to your house they don't want to send it to the store but if you go to Walmart calm and go to the grocery section they have an emergency food section there are all kinds of good values in there this is a number 10 can of butter power ok it's not real butter but hey it's something to make my rice taste a little bit better after I've been eating for a week at a time right you can get dehydrated onions they have all kinds of stuff you can buy prepackaged flour if you want to all that kind of good stuff each one of these cans depending on the product may cost anywhere from 8 bucks to 15 bucks or whatever and I think if you order at least 35 dollars I could be wrong but I think it used to be 60 bucks but now they're trying to compete with Amazon so I think if you order $35 worth of product at one time they'll ship it for free now you because there's a Walmart near almost everybody you're gonna have to pay sales tax on it but it gets delivered to your house so don't forget to do something like this to mix things up so you're not just eating rice and beans get some dehydrated onions there's like potato slices all kinds of stuff Walmart calm groceries emergency food go check it out pretty good values in there all right I think we've covered you know the different options that my wife and I do for long to term food storage now you saw me dump the last two bags of beans in here so there's 34 pounds of beans in here and I wanted to go over that because we were talking about calories earlier so if we're talking about a pound of rice we'll a half pound of rice and a half pound of beans that's about a pound of food per day at 1,600 calories barely enough to sustain you but if you've got chickens you've got eggs if you can go hunting maybe get you some sort of game animal or if you raise sheep goats whatever to supplement foraging wild plants whatever you may have excuse me whatever you you may have growing in your garden or canning food in jars you can supplement your diet and easily get that up to 2,000 calories a day now that's basically a pound of food per day when you store it in a bucket like that so basically one bucket is about one month's worth of food for one person on a tight ration so when you're looking at your food storage if you've got six buckets back there that six bucks worth of food emergency food for one person so if it's two people that's only three months worth of food if it's four people that's only a month and a half worth of food for four people so keep that in mind when you're trying to do something like this but one bucket roughly equates to one month's worth of ration food per person and again if you wanted to do it a hundred pounds at a time if you've got a Sam's Club membership Costco membership something like that you can get 50-pound hundred pound bags of beans and rice and get a much better value and like I said if I do six buckets at a time with a hundred pounds of rice and a hundred pounds of beans it ends up costing me about a hundred and fifty bucks and that gives me six months worth of emergency food for one person so now I want to talk about how I do this now I told you that I get the mylar bags and the oxygen absorbers in a pack of ten I have the vacuum sealer so before I did this I pulled one out and vacuum seal it because I don't want it to be exposed to the air anymore than it absolutely has to if you do not have an a vacuum sealer you can get the smallest canning jar that you've got and stuff these things in there the ones that you're not using stuff them in there make sure that lid is down they're tight they will absorb the oxygen that is in that jar and then they'll quit and they'll still be active and usually in the package there's a little piece of paper that's purple or blue or something like that and as long as it doesn't turn black usually is what happens then it's still okay and they're still good so for this demonstration I pulled one out and vacuum-sealed it back the vacuum sealed the other ones back up so that I can keep these in as good a shape as possible because I want to preserve my food as best I can so let's get back to this I've got my oxygen absorber my mylar bag and you notice this one here is quite a bit shorter than this one here because I've already trimmed it and I'll explain why but I trim about three inches off the top because it makes it a little easier to seal and for me to get all the oxygen out and I'm going to show you how to do that now before I'll show you how I do it I'm going to show you the way that most people that you see out there on the internet will tell you to do it and it will work but it is not the best way to get all of the oxygen out you can take your bags and you can take just a scrap piece of 2x4 or whatever and set it up here this up here and take a regular household iron you see it's just a household learn and you can iron about two-thirds of that clothes because all it takes is heat just put this on high no water in there you don't want to steam it just put it on high and you if you've got a really good iron you may not want quite all the way high you may want like medium high ceiling about two-thirds of the way put your oxygen and absorber in there try and squeeze out as much air as you can and then finish sealing it up now like I said I don't like using that method because as you can see there's still quite a bit of air in it well maybe you can't tell as well as I can but there's still quite a bit of air in there that I would prefer to get out now another way to do that is you can use a vacuum if you want to clean your vacuum attachment most vacuums come where you can pull the hose off and then they've got that little small thing to get down in the couch to get the you know popcorn and stuff that falls down in between the cushions you can wash that thoroughly yeah make sure your hands are clean and everything that you're doing here is clean it doesn't have to be you know completely sanitized or anything but you want to make sure you wash your hands and all that kind of good stuff and you can seal this thing down put your oxygen absorber in there and then you can take that vacuum to turn your vacuum on and kind of stick that tube in there a little bit and that will draw all of that air out and give you a very mild vacuum seal it won't be near as tight a vacuum seal as that it won't come anywhere close to to being that type however if you get as much of that oxygen out of there as you can with your vacuum cleaner and then get it sealed up with that oxygen absorber in there that oxygen absorber will finish pulling an oxygen out and it will end up drawing down nearly as tight as that so what I do because I don't like using the the household iron and the board method is I use my hair straightener you see how straight my hair is that's because I use this thing all the time so but I use this hair straightener to do this because it allows me to get much more of the air out so I'm gonna turn my back to you so I can go ahead and get this thing partly sealed up and then I'll be right back okay and I told you that I try to do about 2/3 of it so I'm gonna start down here and I'm just going to pinch that on there and then just start pulling it over this way and then we'll do that a couple of times make sure that that's good and seal and I hope you can hear me with my back all right I've got 2/3 of that dude sealed up pretty good I've still got space over here to get my oxygen absorber in there so my beans are kind of flat and level down in there then I'm going to go ahead and take my scissors the same scissors that I cut the top of that off with and I'm gonna open this vacuum seal bag here and take this oxygen absorber a little flat and then I might push as much of this air out of here and I possibly can and finish sealing this bag the other way all right so hopefully you can see that that I pushed as much of that air out as I can and the bag is completely sealed up now if something happens and I accidentally poked a hole in it or something like that that three inches that I cut off I can cut a piece of that out and make a little patch and use my iron if I have to use the household iron or if I want to use my hair straightener or whatever then I can make that stick to that and seal that hole back up so don't throw that away immediately now I forgot to get a magic marker let me pause this for a second because I can't find my magic markers okay I'm back I've got a magic marker now why do you need a magic marker because I just put wait what what did I put in this bucket oh that's right small red beans and I also probably need to put the date that they were packaged on here too right so I'm gonna write on here then these are small red beans and because I don't keep a calendar in my head I'm gonna look I'm gonna cheat today is August the 2nd of 2018 hopefully you can see that so I mark the bag because if something happens to the bucket the bag may still be intact [Music] [Music] and then I'm gonna write on here the same thing actually on the outside I put my initials and then the initials of what's in there so I'm gonna put GM and then it's going to be s RB and then I'm going to put today's date I'm gonna put it on the top and I'm also gonna put it on the side here so hopefully I have covered everything if you've got any questions about any of that stuff hit me up in the comments and I will try to answer your questions hopefully this video hasn't been too long and hopefully at least some of you folks will find this quite educational and this will help you get better on the path on a tight budget of getting some long term food storage alright with that I'll say goodnight god bless and I'll catch you next time

Channel: Arkansas Preparedness Network

Views: 240,788

Rating: 4.9303708 out of 5

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Id: RtGNTOSVsSY

Length: 22min 58sec (1378 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 02 2018