- SHORTAGE OF FOOD
The immediate impact that everyone will face is a shortage of everything. It starts with your food. The shortage of natural gas getting to the processing plants results in smaller supplies of fertilizer. This leads to skyrocketing prices for fertilizer which we are already seeing. This means less fertilizer for farmers and smaller crop yields. The Russo-Ukraine conflict significantly impacts the global supply of sunflower oil, wheat, and corn. Whether these are used in other products, consumed by humans, or fed to animals, global markets are impacted. Other countries can’t simply ramp up the production of wheat, for instance. Winter wheat was planted before the war and its subsequent soaring demand. The new wheat seed must be acquired, planted, tended to, and harvested as part of a cycle that involves months of time before any harvest can be reaped. Beyond just that grain, the lack of wheat and corn, and fertilizer puts pressure on the other major feed grains: sorghum, barley, and oats. It puts pressure on all grain production from barley to soybeans. You might think in precise terms with grains like wheat equals bread, corn comes on a cob, oats come in a bowl for breakfast, and rice is eaten out of a bowl as a side dish, but these grains are processed in so many different ways that they compose the majority of the products on almost every food aisle of your grocery store.
You see it at the grocery store. If there is less grain to feed animals, meat production has to be scaled back. More than one million animals are eaten per hour in the US alone. So, just the shortage of just a few grain products and a lack of fertilizer for current and future crops, and there’s a rise in price for all the food you buy. Beef prices have been driven up recently by worker shortages, supply chain disruptions, drought in some countries, higher prices for feed grain, the corporate drive to keep profits high, and accelerating consumer demand. Rising food costs price some out of the store altogether. That is why the first key to surviving a World War is the same as one of the primary pillars of prepping: get your food storage in place. Find and start utilizing alternative forms of protein. It isn’t likely that you will be able to raise animals in the suburbs with your Home Owner’s Association, but is there a local source for eggs and meat? Is there a local grower of vegetables, or is this the year you convert your grassy backyard to a functional garden? One apple tree can yield 200-300 apples per year, but they take at least a year to establish. Just two tomato plants can keep you and a small family in tomatoes for a season, and with a dehydrator or freeze-dryer, you can extend both tomatoes and apples out for an entire year. It doesn’t have to be these two fruits, but plant, grow and harvest something. Supplement your food sources and reduce your grocery bill. A bumper harvest also gives you a tradeable commodity to acquire other things which may be in short supply.
- COOK, DEHYDRATE, CAN, PICKLE, FREEZE-DRY, WASTE NOT
Learn to use every ounce of food that passes through your kitchen. Learn to waste nothing. If that means you have to learn to cook for yourself and figure out the correct portions that will result in zero leftovers or waste, do that now while you have the luxury. Pull out the dehydrator and start processing food today to be snacked on and preserved for later. We have had fancy dehydrators and inexpensive ones. My go-to dehydrator is pretty simple and affordable. When my garden is in full swing, I run it 24/7. Through the rest of the year, we press it into service on whatever we can get my hands on. We are continually adding to my food stores between the dehydrator and the freeze-dryer.
Beyond drying and freeze-drying, make a batch of pickles or sauerkraut this spring with nothing but salt and water. You will find how to do this through videos on this channel. Understanding the basics of pickling now may be helpful to you later. The dustbowl and great depression survivors were so desperate for food that they pickled and ate tumbleweeds. Hopefully, you won’t ever become that desperate in a World War, but it’s possible. It’s better to have the skills you need now, even if they are just a side hobby today. Understand the connection you get when preparing your own food. If you don’t know how to cook, you absolutely need to prioritize this like you do your preps of food.
First, it is a massive saving for you. Just the cost of one meal out could feed you for days. Second, you can’t be self-sufficient if other people cook for you. When the supply chain is significantly disrupted from a global war, prices for food from restaurants will skyrocket, and they will suffer from product scarcity even more than you. It may be hard for you to get flour if there is a significant decrease in wheat production, but imagine if you are a fast-food restaurant trying to serve up six-and-a-half million burgers on buns every year. Getting the wheat you need may prove to be too challenging.
Growing a little bit of your food and learning the skills you need to process and cook your foods won’t be enough on their own to keep you alive unless you also have a good chunk of land and lots of dedicated time, but it’s a start. You also need to tend to your overall food preps. Go beyond emergency rations of 3-days, 3-weeks, or a year. Learn how to store rice and beans, make those purchases now, and store them properly. You can still buy 20 pounds of rice for under $20. With the pressure on grains, people posturing and preparing for war, and inflation, that price isn’t likely to stay that low. Dry beans are even cheaper right now. Have you considered adding 10 pounds of dried carrots to your inventory? That’s also under $20. A number ten can of freeze-dried peas that will stay preserved for up to 25-years is also under $20. The list goes on and on, but what you store will depend on your needs, your ability to cook it, and the costs right now. I have a video on this channel that takes you through the steps of building food reserves, and if you do just one thing, do that. That will be the single most significant key to your surviving the impacts of a global war.
- MARKET & CURRENCY COLLAPSES
At the same time that prices are going up, the currency will be bottoming out, and some markets will collapse altogether. Some investment firms have already started allocating their excess funds to bonds, defense industry stocks, and slower-growth but reliable investments. We have seen for years the rich buying up land and water rights. They know that the smooth upward trajectory that leads to profit in everything from real estate to soybeans is cyclical and has to end somewhere, so they have been quietly buying up the most stable resources they can find. With war threatening to explode worldwide, you will see even more investors fleeing instability and seeking more stable havens for their money.
We are not one of these mega-millionaires or market movers, and you probably aren’t either. Still, we have to prep finances just as we would anything else. We are also not a financial consultant, and we don’t give financial advice, but we don’t have to be to tell you that finances are a part of prepping. If you can refinance your house or you feel you might need to lock in a home equity line of credit for essential repairs now, you should before interest rates soar. If you have two cars, but one you don’t drive anymore because of job changes from the pandemic lockdowns or the gas price today, now might be the time to unload that second vehicle.
Get your budget insulated. Even minor changes like auditing all your subscription services and eliminating any you don’t use regularly can have a significant impact on your bottom line. Suppose you have never written down your expenses and income for a month and created a budget, approach doing so now as a core prep. Some people don’t think of budgeting because they always just make enough to survive or are only late or stressed about a bill or two. Ask anyone who lives paycheck to paycheck, and they will tell you the importance of a budget. Just as economies of nations adopt a war-time fiscal posture, you should too. The business you work for is likely going to contract as a result of a global war. If you work in a service industry, expect fewer customers when money gets tight. If your employment suffered from the lockdowns, you could expect at least that again if your country gets meaningfully involved in a global war and consumers start counting their pennies. Look for ways to increase your revenue streams, tighten up your purse strings, and re-allocate your assets to essentials that will get you through.
- DON’T WALK, RUN
If you have already trashed your New Year’s resolution to get healthy, you better get back on a program to get fit. Just dropping an extra few pounds can ease joint pain, reduce inflammation, lower cholesterol, and reduce your chances of having comorbidities. You might not be fleeing across your country to a safer country as millions have recently done, but your health is your absolute number one prep. While you might lack the funds to build your preps, you don’t need any money for exercising. Increasing your health can reduce your dependency on a health care industry and even over-the-counter medications and prescriptions. You are far better off managing high blood pressure through diet and exercise than paying over $300 for 30 doses of blood pressure medicine which also might become in scarce supply if global supply chains continue to suffer. Most of the Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients (APIs) are manufactured overseas.
This exercise goes hand in hand with diet. If you are cooking for yourself, even with copious amounts of ghee or butter, you will still be far healthier than a fast-food diet of triglycerides, palm oil, sugars, and hundreds of calories you aren’t burning through your daily activities. I approach health like a prep. When we meditate or exercise or run or cycle or go to the gym or work out at home, it’s the equivalent of storing up preps for when the times are leaner. When we eat junk food or sit around on my couch or even sit in my office chair for too long, it’s the equivalent of not doing anything to prep or even eating up my supplies.
You may have heard that only the strong survive, and that’s true for your personal wartime posture. One thing you will find is common to all survivor stories, be they people who faced the elements or fled a war zone for their safety, the people were all of a decent fitness level. It’s the people who could not leave the area or could not make the journey who you only hear about in one way–as a statistic. It sounds harsh, we know, but to survive a global war, you have to also focus on your own health. If you have put off using your insurance for standard health screenings, eyeglasses, dental checkups, or even minor procedures, do those now, before medical services are fully pressed into wartime services and critical care only. Something as simple as a set of glasses can be the first thing unavailable when a large war breaks out, and this is more true today than it was in the last World War. Approximately 95 percent of eyeglass frames are made outside America, with more than 90 percent produced in China. Also, 95 percent of prescription lenses are made from plastic. When those supply chains are further disrupted and plastic is purposed to a war effort, you may find yourself without the ability to obtain glasses.
Tend to the health issues that you can now before doing so is a challenge. Then work a fitness and health-optimizing plan to prep the strength and stamina you will need to overcome the additional physical and mental challenges of a global war.
- KEEP THE LIGHTS ON
Whether the power goes out because of poor maintenance, a cyberattack, natural disaster, or a bomb, you have to be able to supply the energy you need to get by. You won’t be making a smoothie for yourself with the TV, dishwasher, and clothes dryer all running. Still, you will need energy sufficient to replenish devices, cook, obtain news, communicate, and heat or light your environment. Here too, you have to approach energy as a primary prep. If your answer is a gas generator, you may need to reassess. Running a gas-powered generator may be challenging when gasoline is $7.00 a gallon. If you rely on the flow of natural gas or propane deliveries, you may be without those energy resources when these vital resources are allocated to the war effort or larger entities than average consumers.
Take an inventory of your current consumption, then figure out what your bare-bones minimum would be after a disaster that takes out your energy resources. That’s the target you have to meet. Whether that’s through a solar generator that has dropped in price and increased in availability over the last few years or an elaborate smart panel and home battery system, it will depend on your needs. Some people could get by with just a windowsill solar battery pack and a few small electrical items. Your more agrarian and rural ancestors probably got by when there weren’t utilities with a one-lunger, flywheel engine that they moved from one spot of the farm to another. Whether it was pressed into service milking cows, doing laundry, or drilling a well, that single-engine provided all the needs for that rural farm. You have to be just as creative with your power needs.
Do an assessment before you find yourself in a situation where your energy needs are challenged. Then do a drill. Shut the power off to your house and write out your plan there in the dark. What’s your plan to illuminate your home enough to write? What’s your plan for the food in the refrigerator going bad by the second? What is your plan to deal with your home’s temperature that is either dropping or rising by the minute? What’s your plan to cook, and what do those meals look like? After all, you won’t be heating anything in the microwave. Look for any gaps in your plan, and then figure out how to deal with those gaps. Think about your other utilities like water. If you live in a house, your water is probably gravity-fed for a time. Your water is probably electrically pumped up from the basement if you live in a multi-story apartment building. Either way, though, if the water treatment plants go offline, your water won’t be safe to drink from the tap. You need to have your own water stored and the ability to treat and filter water.
Write out a minimum rationing plan for your energy and water. Determine the minimum you need to survive, then make sure you can meet that minimum requirement for 3-days, 3-weeks, then a year. While disruptions from a global war aren’t guaranteed to impact these services, a slight disruption can have a prolonged effect. If the services go out because of a natural disaster at the same time that the markets and municipalities are reeling from inflation, scarcity, high unemployment, and a lack of maintenance parts manufactured overseas, workers or parts may not be on-hand to maintain systems may not be available to restore services. What would be a few hours of an outage could be a few days or a week or more.
- BUILD YOUR BRAND
They talk considerably in the marketing industry about building your brand. You want your product or service to be the go-to entity for whatever it is you are selling. Have you ever done something for a friend or neighbor, and suddenly other people ask if you could help them out? You fix a neighbor’s fence or help them re-screen their window or paint or bake some awesome birthday treats or share with them some homemade soap or eggs from your chickens, and suddenly others are asking if they could get a little something too. That’s an opportunity for income or for bartering goods and services. If your area suffers from the far-reaching effects of a global war, whatever skills or goods you bring to the table are suddenly far more valuable.
That may be just swinging a hammer, baking, or just making soap or gardening now, but when resources are scarce, these become critical skills that have value in exchange. We marvel at the World War II generation and refer to them as the “greatest generation” due to their can-do attitude and resourcefulness. You may have had a grandmother or grandfather who could make something out of nothing, repurpose things, or fix items. They were reluctant to throw things out, and they weren’t afraid of putting in the hours needed to get jobs done. We know a guy whose grandfather sold catfish he had caught out of his garage freezer. That kept him with spending money in his pocket throughout the year and supplied many a fish fry in the area to the extent that people knew where to go to buy fresh catfish in bulk. He had developed his own word-of-mouth brand and a side income.
Start cultivating those connections now. If you have ever made, created, or done anything and thought, “Hey, I could probably sell this,” now is the time to cultivate that. You don’t have to be the next cookie mogul just because baking is your thing, but you could be developing your connections to raw materials and some regular consumers willing to exchange services or pay a little for your extra product. Your wood project doesn’t have to be branded and sold in every store, but can you make more than one, sell the excess, and fund some raw materials or equipment? You might never open your own produce store from your garden, but can you process or unload the extras instead of letting it rot or fall to the ground? Maybe you give it away for free or set up a little honor stand in front of your house for the lemons or apples on your trees, but you are forming the basis of your connections. You are building your own word-of-mouth brand. That will get you a lot further along than your currency will if and when the economy collapses.
Find what value you bring. Find what you can produce or do. When supply-chains fail, it will be those with skills that will be surviving. Find your can-do attitude and your resourcefulness. Realize you are your brand.
- GIVE YOURSELF A TECH CHECKUP
Even if a violent global conflict doesn’t come to your door and your country’s financial markets remain steady and stable enough, you could suffer from the impact of one of the newest weapons in this war–cyberattacks. In my FREE downloadable guide about cyberattacks which I will link to in the comments, there are several steps you can take today to protect yourself and your assets from cyberattacks. You don’t want to wake up to a zero balance in your hard-earned bank or retirement accounts. You don’t want to be the door that foreign, enemy hackers walk through to access other more extensive systems.
Adopting a wartime posture also means defending yourself from the enemy. With cyberattacks, today’s battlefield is everywhere all at once. Review your security. Put 2-layer authentication in place, check your account profiles, use complex passwords that you update on a schedule, print out essential account statements. Assess your technical life and its security. Protect yourself from possible attacks. Download the guide we have made available and work on that plan today. While you are at it, build your skills with any of the hundreds of blogs on this channel. Learn what others are doing with their prepping activities and understand that when you prep for one sort of disaster specifically, you are also preparing for a host of different types of disasters.
CONCLUSION
Your country is bracing for a prolonged global war right now, and you should stay ahead of the herd and adopt your own wartime strategy. What we are seeing out there may worsen before it gets any better. The conflicts could become more significant and more far-reaching. The total impact of this war has yet to be felt. You can address the obvious things like high costs and scarcity, but you should also be building up your personal defenses and level of self-sufficiency. Your preps are more than just food and water. They are also energy, health, cultivating your skills and knowledge, and securing your virtual and physical worlds. Topping off your propane and fuel tanks and stocking up on beans, canned goods, and ammo will only get you so far. You have to build yourself, increase your self-sufficiency, and improve your can-do attitude, skills, and ability to do more with less. We are all far too dependent on a global supply chain and just-in-time or on-call services that will be the first to go when a global war breaks out. The best time to start this work was last year. The next best time is right now.
What do you think? What are you doing to prepare for a potential global conflict? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.
As always, stay safe out there.
LINKS
Basic Dehydrator: https://amzn.to/3trmGy0