I’ve been watching various post apocolyptic movies where society breaks down, which makes me wonder in that situation what kinds of crops or foods are the easiest for a beginner to grow?
Is having a bunch of free range chickens that feed off bugs and then produce eggs the easiest way to get calories?
What plant produces a decent number of calories and is easy to grow? If something like celery is easy to grow that isn’t really important because you can’t live off celery.
What plants or animals can you grow with the least maintenance that can grow the fastest to help in a survival situation?
It depends on what you mean by “easy”. Potatoes are really simple to grow, in that there’s not much you need to know, and not many ways to screw up. But it takes a lot of hard work with a shovel.
Corn needs less exertion, but is a little more complicated.
With rice, you can save yourself a lot of work by flooding the paddies, but then you have to do all of your work in ankle-deep water, which has health risks. And I think you still need to do some sort of threshing at the end.
It depends too much on your location and climate for any real answer I think. Potatoes did the job in several places in the world, but are not fast output if you need calories NOW. Chickens are good also, but it would be very unlikely there would be sufficient food year round for them to just forage. Almost everyone with small chicken flocks feed them grain or chicken chow, food you would rather eat yourself in a real emergency. Of course, that goes for the chickens themselves, ha.
Learning to identify and locate local food by season is a good idea, most places humans hang out still have some wild food available. Nuts, fruit, roots, wildlife may be nearby. If you’re thinking long term, plant some trees. There are people in Syria avoiding starvation just because of fruit trees in their yards.
It would depend upon why society as we know it fell apart. Some reasons (nuclear right of the top of my head, but chemical warfare too) the soil will be unfit to grow things, the bugs and plants that the chickens eat will likely not be there and the food you would use to fatten a pig you’d be eating yourself. Deer, rabbits and wild plants would be destroyed in the initial blast.
If the collapse wasn’t something that destroyed the ability to grow plants, I would begin with corn (maize). IIRC, it is 90-120 days to maturity, so if you’re really serious about surviving the apocolypse, have a stockpile of food to hold you and be prepared to forage. Once you get the corn (and other veggies while you’re at it, because, hey, your full time job now is making sure you have enough food to last until the next growing season) harvested, you can feed it (and other vegetation) to chickens, rabbits and maybe even a pig (the fat in the pig will provide grease for both eating and lubrication of any tools that may need it).
To tide you over, if there is still stuff to be foraged, do it, but plant some lettuce and spinach. They aren’t high calorie, but they have a short growth cycle, can be planted in cooler weather and they can be fed to rabbits. Peas, potatoes and cabbage would be others to start early and the peas and poitatoes have the benefit of being starchy too.
As already mentioned, what you can grow depends on where you are–the length of seasons, the temperature range, the amount of rainfall, the daylight hours, the type of soil, etc. And soil has to be prepared for gardening even if you have the right conditions. If you are expecting to start from scratch after the zombie apocalypse happens without making preparations and without some knowledge of farming, you are pretty much screwed.
Rather than attempt to reinvent the wheel, you really should read the rants by RedWombat (otherwise known as Ursula Vernon, writer, artist, creator of the LOL Wut pear and amateur gardener) in the comment section of this page. (Which is directly about something called “seed bombs” but touches on lots of issues related to survivalists, too.)
Subsistence farming has been going on for thousands of years. What makes the most sense to grow.depends on the exact climate and topography of the patch of dirt you’re trying to scratch a living out of.
Plus your neighbors. Are you going to be left in peace to farm, or are there roving bands of outlaws and tax collectors roaming the countryside?
If you’re happy to eat insects, then probably the most direct way to do this is to feed the grass or leaves to crickets, then eat the crickets. They’re pretty tasty and very energy-dense and nutritious.
You could do this and use the crickets to feed chickens, but it’s less efficient.
Chickens probably aren’t your best source of Calories, but they are a very good, steady source of protein (though you’ll need artificial lighting to keep them laying through the winter). They’re also extremely easy to care for, and you can already start raising them in your backyard in many cities nowadays. Though the good old legume+grain combination might end up being cheaper for protein.
Another question is how big you expect your survivor community to be, because there are a lot of economies of scale available. Slaughtering livestock for meat, for instance, is a lot more practical when you’ve got enough people to eat the whole animal in a few days.
If you are skipping the insects, rabbits are a pretty good fit for that criteria. They grow quickly and can be fed things we can’t eat. They also breed like…errr…rabbits.
You can eat grass and leaves, the nutrition is there, it’s your digestion that isn’t quite made for the task, but if you boil them you can fix that.
In Canada cooked maple leaves are a thing.
Your best meat type food source is probably grasshoppers/locusts
lots of protein, plentiful, safe to eat, and they are fairly large insects, cost of acquisition is low.
You don’t want to make it a staple of the diet, because of a phenomenon called “rabbit starvation”. IIRC, it doesn’t have enough fat calories to enable the body to best use the protein. As an occasional meal, it’s fine.
Goat would be a good option. They eat forage that really isn’t as edible and provide milk and fur as well as meat. Overall if you’ve got terrible conditions they are a great animal option.
Potatos are one of the best bets for vegitables since they have the highest calorie density per acre long term you’ll need crop rotations but you can live on potatos and milk for a fair bit.
I saw video of a pig wagging it tail like a dog while greeting a person , and I am so glad I haven’t eaten any pig in 48 years ! Potatoes are really easy to grow and taste so much better than the store brought one.