LND: Location.

   What you really need for a good doomstead is several thousand acres in southern Eden with a discreet air strip for your private jet and a sheltered harbor for your yacht.  But, if you find yourself a bit closer to the 'cardboard box under the highway overpass' end of the economic spectrum, you might have to compromise just a little.

   There are several things to consider when looking for a doomstead location.



-Availability.

   If you're lucky enough to have some rural property available to you, perhaps Grandpa's dilapidated old farm or the like, go for it!  Even if it's not the ideal location, it may be better than letting years slip past you while you wait for a better chance.



-Familiarity.

   Doomsteading can be challenging enough without making yourself a friendless stranger in an alien climate.  The frozen North is no place for a cracker.  A Yankee might find it just a little unsettling to live where the old log by the creek may try to take a bite out of you, and the mosquitoes have been known to carry off cattle for a snack later.

   There's usually some advantage to staying where family and old friends are nearby.  Especially if they are like-minded.  Isolation is an occupational hazard for doomsteaders.



-Urban Proximity.

   You might think that the farther away from towns and cities, the better.  But cities have their resources.  We don't know how long some semblance of BAU will hold-together.  While it does, it's handy to have goods, services, and utilities nearby.   Also might be important to the whole 'making a living' thing.

   Obviously you don't want to doomstead in the shadow of a major metropolis where the urban unrest can quickly spill out onto you, or you could be engulfed by suburban development.  So it's a judgement call.

   Our place is over an hour drive from a good-sized city, in an unincorporated farming area roughly equidistant from a few small towns.  Subtract automobiles from the scene, and that city may as well be on the other side of the continent, and the towns are a day-trip by horse and buggy.  Seems like a good balance.



-Natural Resources.

  Not all land is created equal.  There's probably a way to successfully doomstead on forty acres of desert sand, but I'd sure hate to have to figure it out myself.   Already standing forested land can provide you with firewood and game straight-away.  A good aquifer is a must, and surface water is a big plus.  Lowland sections are often great pasture soil, but you'll want plenty of high ground for the house and barn.  Creek, pond, or lake access for fishing may be great.  But you have to be careful these days due to development pollution and industrial agriculture run-off contaminating the water and the creatures therein.



-Privacy.

   I knew an old horsetrader down on the islands who built his place on a corner lot and lover to brag about how much road frontage he had.  Never seemed like a benefit to me, although I suppose maybe it's good for property value.

   Our main lot was one of three cut from an older holding.  When the division was done, we were glad to wind-up with all of 60' of road frontage.  The minimum amount to avoid difficulty with the county when it comes to home permits and such.  The last thing we wanted was for our place to be visible from the road.

   Of course, we're not doing anything wrong in doomsteading.  But we don't want to advertise our activities or entice thieves, looters, or trespassers.  Nor do we want to be an open book for Little Tin Gods who want to demand permits, fees, and inspections for every little thing we build, critter we keep, or action we take.

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LND: On Doomsteading.

   Doomsteading is developing and running a relatively self-sufficient farm intended to remain operational even after the breakdown of modern infrastructure.  This is one approach to coping with the converging crises that threaten to end the Cornucopian Era.  There are many others which may be preferable for other people and situations.  Staying in a major metropolis will likely give some folks access to infrastructure long after it has failed in the countryside.  Being ready to Bug Out allows more flexibility than being tied to one location.  But doomsteading has its own advantages, and suits us best.

   In my youth, I worked horse and cattle farms on the coastal islands, where hurricanes were a thing.  It's not like living in an apartment where you can stuff your cat into a carrier and head inland when the 'authorities' call an evacuation.  Herds of valuable animals depended on me to stick it out and hold things together for them despite weather, utility failure, and being cut-off by flooded and blocked roads.  So hunkering-down rather than bugging-out is second nature.

   As prepping strategies go, doomsteading is betting big.  Putting far more at stake than just a Bug Out Bag, Bug Out Vehicle, or basement bunker remodel.  But the potential payoff is huge.

   Even if some semblance of BAU manages to hold-out for years to come, the grounded doomsteading lifestyle, focused on real accomplishment, has its rewards in the here and now.

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LND: Nonsense...

   Over my many years interacting with various Doomer communities, I've seen a lot of nonsense that just keeps popping-up again and again.  Let's start off by addressing some of the most frequent categories of the stuff so that I can reference them as we progress with the more practical portions of this tome...

-Hate-Filled Doomster Nonsense.  (Doom-Hipsters.)

   Counter-intuitive as it may seem, prepping and doomsteading are essentially optimistic pursuits.  We may call ourselves "Doomers", but it's the Cornucopian paradigm that we see as doomed, not ourselves or the world.  We intend to survive and come through the discontinuity in as good a shape as possible.

   But some people just want to watch the world burn.  There's always a faction of malcontents who insist that any prepping is a waste of effort, since global extinction is inevitable and impending.  These Doomsters hate hope, humanity, Christianity, Western Civilization (especially America), and themselves.  They tend to have a zealot-level religious devotion to Anthropogenic Global Warming (aka Climate Change when it's cold out), which allows them to declare the situation hopeless and lay the blame for the rapidly-approaching End of All Life ON Earth on evil, greedy, Capitalist Western men.

   Basically trolls.  If these Doomsters believed what they claim, they'd be out partying with wild abandon to make the most of the little time we have left.  Or they'd take a long jump on a short rope and get it over with.  They certainly wouldn't be using a corporate-logo smartphone over a global network established by the Western military industrial complex to post thousands of messages to forums that are fundamentally about doing what they say is pointless.



-Too Clever By Half Nonsense.

   Sort of an offshoot of the Hate-Filled Doomster Nonsense which operates with the conviction that everything ever espoused by Western Civilization must be considered automatically wrong, and promptly discarded, even if it worked well for centuries before the rise of the Cornucopian era.

   When considering ways to weather the collapse of modern infrastructure, I tend to turn first to how the generations just before the rise of said infrastructure coped without it.  They were, after all, the culmination of millennia of human survival without an electrical grid, automobiles, etc.

   Of course, technological reversion isn't a large-scale solution.  We can't support 21st Century population levels with 19th Century tech.  But, on the individual doomstead level, it's a good place to start.

   Going old-school isn't always the best avenue even on the small scale.  Some of our grandparents' approaches were dependent on 19th Century infrastructure and resources that were bulldozed by the 20th Century.  In other cases, modern tech is superior to what they had, and can be maintained without continued 21st infrastructure support.

   Some people are so hellbent to get away from anything in the Western tradition that they'll glom onto any newfangled, theoretical, or imported alternative to the Tried And True.

   Keeping an open mind to innovation is fine.  But it's no good to keep reinventing the wheel SQUARE.



-Wishful Thinking Shortcut Nonsense.

   Recently saw an ad for prepackaged doomsteads in boxes.  Supposed to be everything you needed to set-up a self-sufficient doomstead on a small plot of land, capable of feeding your whole community, delivered in a shipping container.

   Shameless hogwash, of course.  But nothing new.  As long as I've been paying attention, there have been stories and writings about setting-up super-productive micro-doomsteads that can be up and running in no time with little effort.  Gardening techniques that produce bushels of food from a tiny back yard (or less).  Doubters of these miracles will inevitably be told of how someone's grandma fed her neighborhood through the Depression from her little garden.  (I'll get to that in the Flora section.)

   The truth is that doomsteading takes resources, tools, skills, time to get up to speed, and a lot of work.



-Moonbat Nonsense.

   In their cannabis-fueled reveries, the hippies of old often embraced vegetarianism, pacifism/hoplophobia, ideals of perfect "oneness with Nature", and various other warm-and-fuzzy notions.  Some actually tried to put these into practice on Back To the Land communes, and quickly modified their views to something more in-line with reality.  Others held onto their delusional ideas and passed them down to the current generation.

   These conceits will not long hold without the support of Cornucopian infrastructure.



-Absolute Nonsense.

   You run across the nonsense of absolutes a lot on Doomer forums.  Especially when it comes to Self-Sufficiency.  Since one cannot be absolutely self-sufficient, some claim that any attempt to stand-alone doomstead is futile.

   Self-Sufficiency is an inherently relative concept.  There are people who can walk alone into the wilderness in their skivvies and survive without contact with other people or civilization for years.  Others would be buzzard bait in mere hours.  Doomsteading is about moving toward the more independent end of the spectrum.  It doesn't mean that you won't interact with the rest of the world... Whatever is left of it at any given time.



-"Saving Up" Procrastination Nonsense.

   There is some wisdom in saving up to buy quality.  Some truth to "You get what you pay for."   But that also goes for "A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush." Waiting until you can afford the fancy, top-of-the-line whatever can just be an excuse to procrastinate and do nothing.

   Sure, an expensive, state-of-the-art fire suppression system may be better a cheap extinguisher.  But, when your house is ablaze, actually owning the latter will be far better than having a plan to eventually install the former.



-Cheating Nonsense.

   I think it was Eustace Conway who said that someone accused him of 'cheating' by using chainsaws on his Turtle Island Nature Preserve...  He said he didn't know he was playing a game.

   We use a lot of 19th Century technology because it is tried and true in a non-Cornucopian world.  But we aren't Luddites or historical reenactors.  We're working towards being able to continue a decent standard of living in the face of Cornucopian infrastructure collapse, using whatever resources are currently available to get there.  Some solutions are actually modern tech.  And we'll certainly put the electrical grid, Internet, and petroleum to good use as long as they remain available and affordable.  We just won't be ruined when they're not.

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LND: Introduction...

   I grew up in the rural South without a lot of money.  Spent a good bit of my life on farms and in the woods, away from the modern world.  Cultivated a more root-level perspective on the necessities of living than a lot of folks these days seem to have.  Found a career in what most people would consider an archaic, Lost Art.  Developed a weird inclination to make and repair things rather than just buying and replacing them.

   Lived in the shadow of the Cold War, when many believed a nuclear WWIII was just a matter of 'when', not 'if'.  Experienced the Energy Crisis and subsequent recessions.  Sundry hurricanes and the odd blizzard.   Even managed to survive Disco.

   As the 20th Century waned, we didn't really expect Y2k to bring TEOTWAWKI.  But it did cause us to reflect on just how the crazy-complex house of cards that is Cornucopian civilization could collapse if hit by the right breeze.  As we were finally building our own little ranch at the time, we kept the potential loss of outside infrastructure support in-mind.  We were doomsteading.

   Eventually Y2k came and went without serious incident.  A week later the prepping paid-off though, as we were clobbered with a severe winter storm, taking down the power grid and blocking roads, which was only a slight inconvenience to us.

   Twenty months later came 9-11, then friends and kin who'd always though our doomsteading was a bit crazy... Well... Didn't anymore.

   Amid the chaos, wars and rumors of wars, massive infrastructure failures, assorted catastrophes, we discovered LATOC, Matt Savinar's information clearing house on the Internet that explained the prime movers of the collapse, and chronicled its 'progress'.  I became a moderator on the very popular discussion forum, and remained with it until endless server problems (sabotage?) and the general madness of it all drove Matt to pull the plug.

   Over the years, we saw a lot of 'discussion' on LATOC and other venues among Doomers, Preppers, and Posers.  After two decades on the actual doomstead, we've got a decent grasp on what works well, not so well, or is just nonsense.  This book will detail the former, and reduce the latter to comic relief.  We do need just a little nonsense to keep survival in the face of widespread collapse from getting depressingly grim, after all.

-LATOC's Old Horseman.

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LND: DISCLAIMER!

BE AWARE!

   The very concept of doomsteading involves coping with the absence of civil authority and trained professionals.

   I'm going to detail what has worked for us.  Many of the things covered in this book may not be up to code or in accordance with statutes in some jurisdictions.  Others may be inherently dangerous for some people in certain situations.  Use some common sense, and don't get in over your head.  Proceed at your own risk.  (Don't at your own peril.)

   Natural Selection is still a thing.

   And, as Granny used to say: "If you break your fool neck, don't come runnin' to me!"

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Signs of Doom: Tale of Two Trucks...

   Here are two pickup trucks...

   This is my old work truck.  It happens to be a Dodge.  But, for purposes of this observation, it could just as well be a Chevy, Ford, or pretty much any Nixon-era truck.

   This is the make/model of our current pickup.  Pretty typical 21st Century specimen.

   These vehicles are alike in a lot of ways.  Both haul/pull comparable loads at similar speeds over the same roads.  Both made in the USA.  Both rely on lead/acid batteries to start them up.

   And those batteries have to be replaced every now and then.

   Let's see what is required to accomplish this.

   Nixon era pickup...

-     A 1/2" wrench. (Or socket. Whatever.)
-     A replacement battery.  (12v auto battery. Bigger the better. Lot of leeway.)
-     Five minutes. 

   Modern Pickup...

-     An 8mm wrench.  (Must be box-end, six-sided.  Socket won't work. Twelve-sided will strip.)
-     A ratchet with a 13mm socket and very long extension.
-     A 10mm socket.
-     Vice grips. 
-     A midget.
-     A very specific replacement battery.  (Others won't fit.)
-     Forty-five to ninety minutes.
-     Extra BP medication.

   And this, gentle readers, is one of many examples of why this civilization is ultimately DOOMED!

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'Tis the Season...

   Well, the Thanksgiving Feast is done.  Hope this season found y'all well and in good company!

   Now it's for those turkey sandwiches, midnight pumpkin pie raids, and (of course) the start of the holiday shopping season!

   For those of you with tech-inclined horse-folks on your shopping list, Millwater's FARRIERY, the encyclopedic reference of hoofcare and horseshoeing, is now available in Kindle Edition for less than half the trade paperback price.  This ebook version includes all the content of the print edition, and has hyperlinks for cross-referencing with a tap or click!

   For the Christmas season, I'm activating Amazon's "Matchbook" feature that allows folks who buy the paperback to add the Kindle Edition for $2.99.

   For Black Friday / Cyber Monday you can also get the trade paperback version of Millwater's FARRIERY for one-third off the list price by ordering direct and using code ZT7855DA .  This code only works for direct order, not on Amazon.

   Of course, Amazon will be running various promotions of their own.

   You can follow Millwater Publishing on FaceBook and Twitter for the various discount sales of the Hardcover Edition and eBay promo copies.

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