Food & Water
The two things a household runs out of first. Long-term food storage, rotating pantries, freeze-dried, canning and mylar — plus water filtration, storage, sourcing and treatment. The ground truth on what actually feeds and hydrates a household when the supply chain stalls. Plain reviews and honest taste tests, no panic.
Top picks in Food & Water
Curated by topic, not commissionAll curated
Why Your Chickens Are Thirsty (And How to Fix It)
45-minute walkthrough on building a reliable water system for chickens, integrating feed and shade into one efficient setup for better resource management.
Which Birch Should You Use? Yellow Birch vs. Paper Birch
Identify yellow and paper birch by bark, twig scent, and peeling style; learn their distinct uses for firewood, fire-starting, and crafting.
Setting Up an Outdoor Canning Kitchen
Why moving canning outdoors keeps your home cool, reduces mess, and lets you enjoy summer while preserving vegetables and fruit.
Bushcraft Camp Life
Learn to brew wintergreen tea over an open fire and repurpose a fire reflector as a cooking pot hanger.
Why I Don't Buy From Grocery Stores Anymore: Food Safety and Home Production
Walkthrough of industrial produce contamination risks, farm safety practices, and how to start growing your own food for supply chain resilience.
Practical Survival Emergency Survival Water Straw
One-minute walkthrough of water straw portable filters for urban and bug-out water filtration scenarios.
Vintage Surplus Survival Fishing Kit: Instructor's Evaluation
David Canterbury evaluates a vintage military survival fishing kit—what works, what's outdated, and how to build a modern version that actually catches food.
What Comes After Your Stockpile Runs Dry
Johnathan Nash on moving beyond storage toward self-sufficient water and food production systems for long-term resilience.
Building a Rainwater Harvesting System: Ditches, Berms, Swales, and Ponds
Walkthrough of an integrated rainwater harvesting system on an off-grid homestead: how ditches, berms, swales, and ponds work together to maximize water infiltration and soil retention in an arid climate.
Plan for a Winter Garden or Indoor Garden
Walkthrough for setting up a winter or indoor garden to extend the growing season and produce food year-round on a homestead.
Cutting Garden Expenses: Strategies for Backyard Food Production
Under one minute on practical ways to reduce costs while growing food at home, from seed to harvest.
Bush Bird Butter Chicken
Forty-four-second catch-and-cook demonstrating how to prepare wild game using foraged ingredients and basic camp cooking.
Meat Chicken Processing Setup Tour
Equipment and setup walkthrough for processing home-raised meat chickens, including scalding, plucking, and containment tools scaled for small operations.
Homesteading Family
Learn freeze-drying, dehydrating, and preserving potato harvests with practical homestead techniques.
Decentralize.TV Episode 145 – Billy Bond Interview: Permaculture Food Production and Off-Grid Living
Billy Bond discusses permaculture principles, biological infrastructure, off-grid systems, and practical skills for food self-sufficiency.
Dad's Potato Crate
Four-minute walkthrough of building wooden crates from pallets and slats for winter vegetable storage.
Cooking and Building in the Forest
Twenty-minute walkthrough of basic bushcraft skills—cooking, shelter building, and wilderness living with simple tools.
Buy Food and Land Now: Economic Decline and Self-Sufficiency
Explores generational wealth erosion and strategies for building food security and land ownership outside traditional economic systems.
No-Cooking Required Survival Foods Every Prepper Should Have
Five categories of no-cook foods for grid-down food storage: foundation foods, canned goods, ready-to-eat meals, and how to build an actual livable emergency menu.
Flock of Kiko/Pygmy Cross Goats: Rotational Pasture and Brush Management in North Missouri
Walk-through of a 56-head mixed-age goat flock on daily rotation using polywires: forage-only diet, parasite resistance, and brush-management strategy for property stewardship.
Food Recalls & FDA Warnings: Check Your Pantry Now
Breakdown of current food recalls (rice, berries, granola, fruit bars) affecting U.S. consumers: which products, where they were sold, and how to check your home inventory.
British Prepping Is Different: What You Actually Need to Prepare For
24 minutes on household preparedness tailored to UK constraints: realistic emergencies, infrastructure disruption, storage in smaller homes, practical skills, and community resilience.
Raccoon Burgers
Forty-one seconds on field dressing and cooking raccoon as a wild-caught protein source.
Growing Free Chicken Feed in a Kiddie Pool: Azolla Experiment
Thirteen-minute walkthrough on growing azolla (an aquatic fern) as supplemental chicken feed, including setup, harvesting, drying results, and honest cost-benefit analysis.
Editor's note
“If you only have a weekend and $200, fix water before anything else — it's the prep with the highest ratio of survival impact per dollar. On food: most $400 emergency kits could be replaced with $120 of supermarket staples plus mylar bags. The expensive part of food prep is the marketing, not the calories.”
— Cockroach editorial
Working on Watering System – Switching to Irrigation Ditch Water
Three-minute walkthrough of upgrading a home watering system to use irrigation ditch water as an alternative to city supply.
Snapping Turtle From Field to Table: Cleaning, Processing & Cooking
Complete walkthrough of harvesting, cleaning, and cooking snapping turtle as a wild food resource, from water's edge to finished meal.
Survival Challenge: 3 Days on Island With Knife Only—Catch and Cook Crab, Bushcraft
Three-day solo island survival demonstration: shelter building, saltwater-to-freshwater conversion via steam method, fishing and foraging for food, and primitive cooking with minimal tools.
Lab-Grown Eggs Are Already Here — And This Is Bigger Than Just Eggs
How precision fermentation is creating egg proteins without chickens, what the FDA approval process means, and implications for American food security and long-term food storage.
2026 Breeding Rams: Never Wormed, 100% Forage Raised, Single-Wire Trained
Four-minute walkthrough of Greg Judy's breeding ram operation, demonstrating parasite-free genetics, forage-based raising, and livestock training methods for regenerative farming.
Should You Grow a Starfruit Tree? Pros & Cons for Zone 10a Homesteads
Fourteen minutes on starfruit cultivation for Florida food forests: growth rates, yields, frost sensitivity, soil needs, and whether the tree earns its place in an off-grid homestead.
I Grow More Food Than We Can Eat — And I Do It on Purpose
How to intentionally grow food surplus in a backyard or container garden and share the abundance with family and community.
Testing America's Emergency Water Sources: Lab Results and Purification Solutions
Lab analysis of 10 common emergency water sources (hot water heater, pool, pond) plus hands-on purification methods from passive filtration to reverse osmosis for household use.
Blue Grama Wins: Six Years of High Desert Cover Crop Experiments
Six-year field trial comparing grasses and cover crops on a high desert homestead; why blue grama outperformed sorghum, wheat, alfalfa, and others with minimal inputs.
Spit roasting an entire deer
Field-to-table walkthrough: hunting, field dressing, and cooking a whole deer over an open fire.
Your Soil Needs More Than NPK | Soil Health Part 2
Learn how to build complete soil fertility by balancing macronutrients, micronutrients, and biology for nutrient-dense food production.
Reclaiming Self-Reliance: Food, Water, Land, and Financial Independence
Explore pathways to self-reliance through food production, water filtration, land ownership, and debt reduction.
Day 17 Egg Candling: Last Check Before Lockdown
Three-minute walkthrough of candling chicken eggs at day 17 of incubation to monitor embryo development and identify non-viable eggs before the final incubation phase.
Assembling & Testing Güde GME 6.5V Tractor & GBM 970 Sickle Bar Mower
Step-by-step assembly, setup, and field testing of a small two-wheel tractor and sickle bar mower for homestead grass and hay management.
Grid-Down: The Simplest No-Cook Emergency Meal
Four-minute walkthrough of buying, storing, and preparing a no-cook emergency meal from shelf-stable pantry staples without electricity or cooking equipment.
Canning Pumpkin – Monday Night Fireside Chat
Live panel discussion on canning pumpkin for storage, hosted with Rebel Canners and ChefTech experts covering techniques for food preservation beginners.
Ripening Produce Before Frost: Topping Tomatoes, Peppers, and Squash in Zone 4A
Step-by-step on pruning growing tips to force fruit ripening before the first frost in cold climates, plus benefits for plant health and disease prevention.
My Favorite Burbot Recipe
Cooking and preparation technique for burbot, a freshwater fish, including identification and kitchen handling.
6 Things to Get Before September 8th
Identify six Canadian trade dependencies that could raise US costs and what supplies to prioritize before new tariffs take effect.
Food Recall Emergency: Building a Year-Long Staple Pantry for Under $300
Calculate the cost and shelf life of a basic long-term food storage system using bulk staples from warehouse clubs.
The 5 Essential Food Types for Starting a Grid-Down Pantry
Breakdown of five foundational food categories—from shelf-stable staples to ready-to-eat options—for building an emergency food system you can actually live from.
Who's Eating Duck
Quick walkthrough of catching and preparing a duck as part of wilderness subsistence food procurement.
How to Get Red Bell Peppers Every Time
Twenty-three minutes on pepper ripening: why green and red bell peppers are the same fruit at different stages, and how timing on the vine affects flavor and yield.
JP Morgan Warning: Global Food Crisis, El Niño Forecast
Analysis of converging El Niño, geopolitical instability, and logistics disruption driving JP Morgan and Oxford Economics food-price forecasts (12%+ into 2027) and regional crop-threat assessment.