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I suspect for many it would be very difficult for many to pack up and simply move to Montana, Idaho, or Wyoming. Seems there are issues everywhere e.g. west has water issues, north is cold, south is hot, etc. Is there one "best" location according to some computer calculation or some formula? Maybe. But everyone has a situation they are in that might put inhibitors.
Two of my inhibitors is my job and family. I have a decent sized family both nuclear and extended, my parents are going to need to be assisted as they are aging, I have a job that requires certification(s) that vary from state to state. It's OK, one my huge assets is my family, whom I live close to, and whom believe like us and see the world like us. THIS IS HUGE!
Then of course there are religious/spiritual issues which are ultimately most important. I don't feel called (at least not yet) to a mountain west state, and that of great significance to me. We're very involved with our church and feel very useful right now.
CAN I move. Sure. SHOULD I move? No, at least not now. Could I improve my situation by changing my location from the suburbs to a relatively nearby area with some acreage and a homestead that would allow us to be more-self sufficient and allow us to live at our retreat so-to-speak? Yes.
My point, not to sound all "relativistic" but we all have different situations (physically, mentally, socially, professionally, religiously, economically) that are limiters and have our individual situations. I find it sometimes tough to keep that perspective. Sure I'd love to "head out west" but it isn't really too practical or realistic for us RIGHT NOW.
Personally, I envision a place in the lower-midwest that would have maybe 10-40 acres, at least 5 acres in woods, a well, propane or natural gas well, at least 5 acres of pasture, an area that has good soil (for myself and others around me), some room for a garden, a barn or large shed, chicken coop, and a stream or pond. Yes I know that fallout could be a problem in this region and there are flaws, but it actually seems to have decent balance when considering the criteria.
A lot of self-sufficient folks are in the Ozarks area - you have good soil, water, forests etc.
A place like Montana or Wyoming, while wild and beautiful is green only a few months of the year, growing season is short, it is bitter cold most of the year and finally, land is expensive! I don't want to have to spend $200K for 10 acres just to get started...
A lot of self-sufficient folks are in the Ozarks area - you have good soil, water, forests etc.
A place like Montana or Wyoming, while wild and beautiful is green only a few months of the year, growing season is short, it is bitter cold most of the year and finally, land is expensive! I don't want to have to spend $200K for 10 acres just to get started...
Long Island NY would be The Worse place with one of the highest taxes,few evacuation routes,cold winters and even fire wood expensive if one has a wood stove,town zoning codes are not home owner friendly for the most part,school taxes are outrageously high with no relief in site.MO
Long Island NY would be The Worse place with one of the highest taxes,few evacuation routes,cold winters and even fire wood expensive if one has a wood stove,town zoning codes are not home owner friendly for the most part,school taxes are outrageously high with no relief in site.MO
Don't forget escalated crime as hungry people mill around the streets and go through people's garbage (or break in to others homes) looking for food. Cities are not the place to be when SHTF.
In choosing a safe place, you also want to study weather patterns. You want to be far enough away from the coast so as to not be affected by a Tsunami. You also want to be away from earthquake fault lines where in our country like in Japan some nuclear reactors have been placed.
Hi, ChrisC and Mac_Muz! As you can tell I've been busy...
Honestly, there is NO "safe place" from Mother Nature. Even if you abandon the cities, you still have to think about things like drought, fire, blizzards, and the aforementioned tsunamis, earthquakes, and hurricanes - and tornadoes. While all of this might seem daunting - especially if your food supply depends on a regular water supply - you basically have to buck up and think about what you can handle and what the "what-ifs" are... and whether you can prepare for them.
Sure, we have a propane heater, but the woodstove heats the house so much better and more proficiently. Yet we don't burn the wood all of the time; as long as we can keep the propane tank filled, we save the wood for bad times. (The 'green' wood we got from the town went to the back of the pile to cure, we have some 'dry' wood from last year that we are still cutting up and that will go into the front of the pile.) We don't have earthquakes - the closest fault line is 200 miles from here, and it is small and rarely moves. The big ones closest to us are Yellowstone (800 miles north) and the New Madrid (800 miles east). I have to say that tornadoes don't scare me much, as here they spring up quickly but go by just as quickly and are usually small; the local winds and terrain tear them apart. (I used to sit on my front porch and watch the Ohio ones go down the Scioto River).
People talking about water access make me nervous; if muni water supplies fail, knowing where a lake or river is, is only half of your problem. The owners or surrounding property owners might decide to guard them or ban their access, or they might decide to charge you per bucket. Unless you have unlimited access to a solid supply - one that cannot be tainted or poisoned - you are thinking short-term. We have bleach bottles (the unscented kind, unrinsed and then filled) in the basement for emergencies, but for the long term, even the 55-gallon drums are not practical. I lived on a dry ranch in NM; I had to carry potable water for three miles (the well was alkaline). You can do that - for awhile; but you had better have a long-term plan that doesn't involve carrying or fighting for it.
We can put in a well pumped by a windmill here; the Ogallala aquifer runs beneath our property, and altho it provides the water for 7 states and there are rumors of it going dry, we are in an area where the wells (so far) have never gone dry. In a SHTF situation, there will be fewer people using it.
I feel for those who don't feel that they can move. Our tipping point was when DH was crippled (spine and hip crushed) at work, and I was diagnosed with Lupus. Rather than stay in a place where we were used to running 15-20 hour days, mostly taking care of other peoples' needs, we sold out and moved to take care of US.
Having family around is not always a good idea; our brothers and sister are the entitlement types, and anything we get they feel that they have a right to. In a SHTF situation, these types are more dangerous than the armed-to-the-teeth banditos; they are already IN your house and will take anything that isn't red-hot or nailed down - and whine because there isn't more. In a push-to-shove situation they will kill you in your sleep, or disappear with your last supplies - and see nothing wrong with it. At least we know ours would.
A lot of self-sufficient folks are in the Ozarks area - you have good soil, water, forests etc.
A place like Montana or Wyoming, while wild and beautiful is green only a few months of the year, growing season is short, it is bitter cold most of the year and finally, land is expensive! I don't want to have to spend $200K for 10 acres just to get started...
OD
Yeah, it may get cold in the north country. But tell us how hot and humid it gets in the Ozarks in the summer? Some of us can't deal with that heat and would rather tolerate the cold.
Also, there are areas up north where good, farm ground is very cheap. It only tends to be expensive around large cities, in the areas that have been "Californitized," and places where folks want someplace they can "camp" in their 50,000 sq ft "cabin" once a year.
Tru dat, Chris. I can't take the long hot humid summers any more, and we wanted snow. The tradeoff for that is a shorter growing season. However, where we moved, the soil is sandy (totally opposite the hard clay we are used to) and is more easily plowed up and built up with compost than the clay. Plus sinking fenceposts doesn't take all day!
Most folks raised in the Nawth look to move to sunny climes, and talk about the endless greenery of the south. That comes with a price - hot and humid and the "endless greenery" means more kudzu and other invasive weeds. Property that is in the colder climes - not "California-ized" is usually very cheap. We paid $97,000 for 60 acres and a two-story 100 year old farmhouse with a full walkout basement - and 3 inch maple trim throughout. They don't build 'em like this any more!
There are trade-offs wherever you go. We looked in Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, but the prices there for even the most rural places were well beyond our range, and the soil was rockier. We looked in SD and ND - they have even shorter growing seasons, plus the flooding in ND was getting bad even then, PLUS the oil rigs in ND made buying there prohibitive. It's all in what you want, what you are willing and able to overcome.
I have lived in Montana all my life. It has some very positive benefits, very low population density, long way from major urban areas, wildlife, beautiful summers, but....
Montana is a huge state, the 4th largest in the nation and we have several climates. Most folks who think of Montana think of the commercials for Glacier Park, or tour magazines showing the Bitterroot and Mission Valleys west of the continetal divide. High glacier carved mountains blanketed with fir and pine trees, the tamaracks whose needles turn orange in the fall and are shed like leaves. The pristine creeks, rivers and lakes, or Yellowstone with the geothermal hot springs, wide open valleys surrounded by the Absorkee Beartooth wilderness.
Skiing, snowmobiling, boating on the lakes, multiple varieties of fish, the American Serengetti with wildlife and game animals all around.
OK, Most of that is true, however, living here is far different from a vacation.
Montana has less than 1,000,000 people in population, so help or neighbors can be a long way away. Most of the population is in the western 1/3 of the state where the water, most of the mountains and the scenery is. Jobs are few and far between and Montana leads the nation in people who work 2 or more jobs just to survive as wages are extremely low.
Land prices are outragous at best. I recently saw a listing for an excellent piece of land near Bozeman that was listed for nearly 30k per acre for a 65 acre piece. No house.
If Montana didn't have such severe weather and no jobs, we would have been populated like california years ago. As it is, very few people can stay here on a year round basis.
There is a lot of the land that is not arible. In some areas the alkali poisons crops, in others the bedrock is just a couple inches under the surface. Water can be problematic. In some areas of the eastern part of the state, surface water isn't potable due to alkali or metals, wells have to be deep. I know of several wells dug to 12-1500 feet to just reach water, then you need some way to purify it or you still can't drink it.
Other areas, water is non existant and you have to haul water to fill your cisterns.
On the plains, there is no wood for fuel so you need to think of some other way for heat.
Our growing seasons are very short with frosts sometimes coming as late as early June, and snows starting in September. We can and have gotten snow every month of the year. In 1991, Great Falls had the largest single snowfall of the year in August, and that was about a 2 foot storm.
Sever weather is always a problem. Winds of 60mph plus for several days are not uncommon in some areas, at other times it really blows hard.
Most of the state gets snow in feet, not inches and it can lay from October to May.
The tempuratures can range from over 100 to a recorded -68 degrees F. (add a wind chill from a 30 mph wind and that is chilly).
We can have temperature swings of 80 degrees in a few hours.
We can get torrential rains that flash flood or raise the streams and flood causing erosion. My great Grandfather had a small farm on the Yellowstone River that during one flood he lost 50 acres that went downstream with the flood water. Soil was washed away to the gravel. Useless.
We get flooding nearly every spring when the snow melts too.
Much of the state is very dry, high desert with less than 20 inches of moisture in any form per year.
This means that the carrying capacity of the land isn't as high as the midwest for instance. If you can raise a cow/calf pair on 3 acres in Ohio, in eastern Montana expect to have to have at least 40 acres unless you can irrigate the pasture.
Secondly, you will need at least 4 to 6 tons of hay per animal unit to feed them through the winter.
We don't have the bugs that most areas have because of the cold, but in some areas like the Milk River, the mosquitos are so thick they look like smoke rising in the evening, like the river is burning.
At the present time we have an infestation of Pine Beetles decimating the forests, killing the trees and making the forest one huge tinder box just waiting for one of the wildfires we get nearly every summer that burn thousands of acres of timber. We can get fires that burn areas as large as some of the smaller states such as Delaware.
And finally, the wildlife. If you try to raise livestock, we have Black Bears, Grizzly bears, Cougars or Mountain Lions, Lynx, Bobcat, Coyote, and worst of all, Canadian Grey wolves introduced here in the 1990s. Recorded instances of wolves killing over 100 sheep in a single night have happened.
You better be a good veterinarian to raise livestock here because animal's feet and ears will freeze, delivering calves or piglets in a blizzard with subzero windchills, knowing how to sew your stock back together after it has been run through a fence by a preditor, or sewing them back together if they survive the attack.
You need to know what to vaccinate for, how to doctor several diseases, and basically keep your stock alive until you sell or eat it.
Living here in the case of a societal meltdown would be better than some areas, but the reality is that living here now can be an exercise in survival.
There are positive things here too, but this thread is about looking for a place that promotes living off the land. Many places in Montana have very fertile soil, but you will have to pay big bucks for it.
The land here doesn't promote survival, it tests it. You have to fight to wrest a living from it every day.
There are far better more welcoming places to homestead.
Just my 2 cents.
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Long Island NY The Worse
