[danaris]

Serious survivalists know perfectly well that what you'll need is water, food, and skills like farming, spinning, sewing, cleaning, digging latrines, etc.

Unfortunately, there are a hell of a lot of people in the US who are essentially "survival LARPers" who imagine themselves as heroic alpha (or, better, sigma!) wolves who fight off thousands of degenerates coming for their canned food. ...Hey, did anyone think to get a can opener?

[chrisco255]

A hell of a lot of Americans are descendents of literal frontiersmen and women who were subjected to cow thieves, roving gangs, robberies, Indian raids, revolutions, European proxy wars, dust bowls, depressions, and terrible diseases (with no cures in their day) hundreds to thousands of miles from the closest forts or cities.

Yeah no one in the country doesn't own a can opener AND a shotgun or rifle AND know how to can their own veggies. But if you don't have peace, you aren't going to be able to farm in peace.

Do you even have acreage to farm? Do you have tools and skills to farm? If not, how would you get access to it?

[danaris]

First of all: Those "frontiersmen" suffering "Indian raids" looked, from a very slightly different perspective, an awful lot like "foreign invaders who murdered millions and took their homes being attacked by some of the few that remained trying desperately to avoid also being murdered and having their homes stolen." Parroting Manifest Destiny narratives isn't a good look in 2023.

Also those "dust bowls" were largely caused by their own incompetence at land management, expecting to import a specific brand of European farming practices to a completely different continent with many different biomes and have everything Just Work, because, of course, God Wanted Them To Take It.

I'm also not trying to claim that there's no value in having the knowledge and tools to defend yourself. But when you've got a bunker full of thousands and thousands of rounds of ammo, enough canned food to survive unpleasantly for about 6 months, and no understanding of how to grow more or interest in learning, that speaks of someone who expects to be murdering other people and taking their food to survive for the rest of his life.

If you want to farm enough to feed your family, you don't need 2,000 acres of farmland. That kind of acreage is mostly needed for specialist farmers and for grain. Furthermore, what's actually effective at making you ready to survive in a situation like what's being posited isn't total self-sufficiency: it's community. The people in the area get together and work out what land should be used for the village's potatoes, peppers, onions, etc, what should be used for pasturage for the animals, and what should be left fallow this year. (Hopefully in collaboration with some of the indigenous people who we haven't totally managed to wipe out, and some of whom still retain their historical land management practices, which were effective at making this land a flourishing place providing plenty of food for millennia before my ancestors came and tried to exterminate them in the name of gold, God, and glory.)