Nyhillbillies
Songster
Are you for rent?!? We’d like to be off-grid with greenhouses but barely have the energy & finances to sustain our 5 acres. So we exist, do the best we can with stashing here & there, watch the tide of humanity as reported by various media & see if we can stay afloat.With all that is happening on the world stage, I have been researching and devising a plan to better protect my animals from nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons....why you ask? Well if you haven't been following news you may be asking "why?"....but I do have military intel contacts that have been telling me increasingly more and more (especially for the past year) to be prepared for a nuclear war, as well as chemical, biological, conventional warfare, famine, social unrest, natural disasters, etc.....I am a minister, and student of eschatology, so I have been preparing for all sorts of disasters most of my adult life as I've seen where things have been headed ,so now I have a remote off-grid homestead with some livestock (ducks, chickens, turkeys, pigs, goats, cats and dogs) and I am focusing on protecting them better as well....I do this not out of fear, (being a woman of faith) but because I have been led to, and very blessed to be able to do so.... and the better prepared my family and animals are, the better prepared I am to serve and help others in times of crisis....but lets just talk about protecting the animals during a nuke event from here on out.
We are pretty far from any predicted nuclear strike targets (military bases, major cities, large infrastructure, etc) so the main concern for our animals is irradiated fallout, which could reach us as quickly as 30 minutes after a blast (but likely longer in our area) depend on the wind direction.
We have a small concrete fallout shelter for us, and if need be, plan to take with us a young rooster and 2-3 young hens, but we don't have enough room to accommodate more animals on top of those few birds with their cages and a couple weeks worth of feed.
Our dogs and cats would stay inside of our home with several pre-prepared 5 gallon buckets of food and water which we would open before leaving for our shelter, and we currently have them trained to relieve themselves in a back room with a large section of floor that is covered with kitty litter in the case that we aren't here to let them outside .....It's not ideal but it's the best we can do for them, , and at this point they would be better off than our poultry and livestock who just live in their (not so air tight) coops and log-slab barn.....so it is on those animals that I am now focusing being able to better protect!
Here is my idea..... we have a large greenhouse that is pretty tight and at this moment it is mostly harvested, aside from some cole crops growing along the east side wall. Last year I protected that side by building a mini greenhouse area over those cold tolerant plants and my poultry lived in the rest of the greenhouse over the winter. I wasn't planning on doing that again this year since a ton of weeds came up from them scratching in their feed everywhere, but now I'm thinking that may be the best place for them to spend a week or two in case of a fallout event.....pre-prepared with lots of food and water and a portion sectioned off with cattle panels to put my two goats (so they don't trample the birds). Unfortunately, I don't think I could get my 2 pigs across the property and into the greenhouse quickly enough, and I'd be concerned about them getting at the birds.
During my research I didn't find very much info on this subject but I did locate an archive of a downloadable USDA brochure from the cold war era, titled
"Your livestock can survive fallout from nuclear attack"
Here is the link https://ia902704.us.archive.org/29/items/CAT31305039/CAT31305039.pdf
I hope this helps!
Please post if you have any other info or ideas or think their are faults or missing pieces to my plan.... or just say whatever is on your mind....I'd love to hear from you!
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