spk_0:   0:01
Hello, everybody.

spk_1:   0:03
Hello, everybody. And welcome to the show The Big show. The Dry Show, the largest and most critically acclaimed podcast that is recorded in our old today truck

spk_0:   0:16
dry, dusty truck at the moment.

spk_1:   0:18
Dry, dry, dusty truck. And as we're looking around, we still see some green. But we're also starting to see the brown coming out. We're in a mini drought, which is actually more of a dry spell in the drought. To be honest with you, we've had a very limited rainfall this year. We had a snow in April,

spk_0:   0:39
but it didn't account for much

spk_1:   0:40
April total states. No, no, I didn't count for much moisture, but it was like several inches. It's been a weird year is usual. It's always weird here

spk_0:   0:50
lately. Yeah,

spk_1:   0:51
uh, had a bitterly cold winter, which really helps some of the mosquitoes in the summer. But right now we're in a dry spell, and it's where our corn crops getting hurt. Right now, we're going to need more rain. We got one rain here not too long ago, and where we are, it's for It's not everywhere in the Midwest, just where we are and then west of here. You look at a dryness map and we did a, uh, an article yesterday on Spicer article on trout that we were ready for the drop. There are several things that we did and she could touch on on two or three of those things in this podcast because this kind of companion piece to today is article and yesterday's so we could touch on what we did. But we can also talk about drought and so far, lessons that we've learned from freest droughts and some things that we've observed. So during it.

spk_0:   1:53
Well, one of the things I talked about in the first article was choosing some species that can tolerate drought in your garden so your food supply doesn't completely give up. For example, of this year I tried what I call the turnip experiment because I noticed what? That what they called the hunger winter. Um, when the Germans basically took all the food from the people in Holland during World War Two. The other name, Ford is the turnip winner, and every time famines come up, you start here and people talk about turnips. So I put some turnips in this year to see how they were for a prep food and they tolerated the drought. Ah, lot better than most of the other plants I have. They don't wilt when everybody else is starting to wilt. The roots keep growing. They're nice. Drought tolerant plants. They're not tastiest vegetable in the world. And I'm not gonna grow huge quantities of him. But I'm gonna keep the seeds on hand because even in really bad weather and, uh, bad spring sometimes do cold, sometimes too hot, always too dry. Still got enormous production out of him. So choosing some species that can tolerate drought. So you have some food coming in the letter. What the weather that's valuable.

spk_1:   3:14
As an aside, another part of the reason that they d grew so many turn ups in Holland during the occupation is you know, if you have an apple tree on, army of soldiers can walk by and picked the apples. You have tomato plants, they could pick the tomatoes. It's a lot of work to actually stop and dig up the turn ups and the potatoes. They can force you to do it, but you know it's a lot more work. It's not a sight out of mind on a lot of the stopping. Why? A lot of these people were mechanics. They were from the city. They didn't really realize what turnips even were. So those poor people in the lowlands, turnips or what they had. They really did have a family too.

spk_0:   3:56
I should point out that one does not have to dig turnip skin. One just pulls them out of the ground.

spk_1:   4:02
Well, yes, but yet they're not above the ground.

spk_0:   4:06
And you can leave them in there for a long period of time.

spk_1:   4:09
I think I'm below the ground, but you know, you get well again. But you can dig in on it too. So

spk_0:   4:14
they're out of sight. Out of mind.

spk_1:   4:15
That's right. That was my whole point. They're not above ground crowds.

spk_0:   4:18
The other main thing with drought that I'm facing right now is water supplies are always limited in a drought at home in town, I can use tap water and water everything if I wanted to. Although I don't care to do that at the place. Everything out water means hole in buckets of water up a hill from upon. And when you've got an orchard, that gets to be work, I might point out. So you prioritize. It takes a lot less water to keep a perennial alive than it does to keep a perennial getting a good crop. So I'm not gonna have a good raspberry crop this year because I chose to water them enough to keep the plants reasonably healthy, but not enough to provide a good, very crop

spk_1:   5:05
right now. One of the things that were we heard on this year, certainly with the drought, is we're really reliant on her our rainwater collection. In fact, we're in the process of possibly even expanding that today by adding some more storage. Uh, but it's not raining. You're not getting rain. Wire connects that we can't use quote. There's a rural term. Here comes a rural term. We can use city water.

spk_0:   5:36
That means the stuff that comes out of the tap.

spk_1:   5:38
Some of the stuff that comes out of a tagger. Your rural You know what city water is. We can use city water, but you have to pay for city water. And frankly, city water isn't the best stuff to put on plants. It has additives and stuff like that. You really don't plans. It's not gonna hurt him as much is not having any water, but it's not the best to water with. You're much better off watering out of a rain barrel or pond or something like that.

spk_0:   6:06
Also, in RealD droughts, you have water restrictions on using city water for those

spk_1:   6:11
right? We're gonna come back to that later because we we have lived through well, I've gotta go get several drought stories, so go right ahead. Let's talk about the other things that we recommended doing to ameliorate, or at least moderate the drought. Things like mulching

spk_0:   6:31
mulch garden reduced the water evaporation from it, so it requires a heck of a lot less water to keep the plants healthy.

spk_1:   6:40
It's hard Thio understate how much water that stays. This saves a ton of water, putting us this delay of mull China. Ah, lot of people don't like to do it because it's ugly. It makes your garden look ugly.

spk_0:   6:55
I don't want your hardly at all if it's if you use straw,

spk_1:   6:58
but once your gardens up, no big deal.

spk_0:   7:02
Yeah, and the green spreads out anyway, but it root. You also have to weed a lot less, and you get less diseases because, especially of tomatoes, because when water drops land on the soil and a hard rain, they splash up dirt on to the underside of leaves. And that's how a lot of plants get infected with fungal spores that have been dormant in the soil for a while. So mulching out actually reduces the disease burden on some species of plants and makes it much nicer when you're picking greens because you don't have nearly as much grit on the greens from splash ups.

spk_1:   7:37
What else have yet

spk_0:   7:39
Where do you go with one?

spk_1:   7:40
Okay, well, I'm gonna talk about some strange and unusual things that people don't think about, uh, when it comes to drop. But I want you to start thinking about it because even in a even in a normal non stuff, it's the fanny year. It will affect you. For example right now, if if we have a widespread drought in the Midwest, the corn crop doesn't do well. Corn crop. You know people. Most people don't really think much about corn. They think about corn is like, Oh, that's the stuff we buy in the can and that's the stuff we buy on the ear. Maybe go to the farmer's market and buy some from the farmers. Know that sweet corn? And that's only a very, very small percentage of what is grown in America. Most corn in America, by far the vast majority. I'm talking. I don't know the exact percentage, but well over 90%

spk_0:   8:35
on

spk_1:   8:35
his life's

spk_0:   8:36
over 97.

spk_1:   8:37
Is his livestock

spk_0:   8:38
well over 97? It's field corn,

spk_1:   8:41
right? It's livestock feed. Yeah, the vast majority now around here, they also make ethanol out of the stuff. That's but that's not a huge percentage. Livestock feed is what the cornice. So if you have a drought year and if you have a lot less corn, well, we all know the market is when you have less of something, the price goes up. So the price of corn, which is pretty good already, will probably be going up a little this year Now, fortunately for the whole country, this isn't a huge widespread across the entire Corn belt crowd.

spk_0:   9:23
But there will be those droughts again. So we got us. We'll think about him.

spk_1:   9:26
Yeah, and so basically, what happens is the feed price goes up, which means you're gonna pay a lot more for meat. So this will hit you in the pocketbook. It's not a big deal. If you think about it, had a time and plan for it. Because you're like, OK, maybe right now I want to go ahead and buy that side of beef and put it in the freezer right now because, you know, there's probably a good chance that is gonna go up. I mean, I'm looking at the corn right now. We're driving through past cornfields and this is Missouri. We have a good year. Corn's 110 120 bushels. Frank. Good. You're not a great year, but a good year.

spk_0:   10:10
This is stressed corn.

spk_1:   10:12
Yeah, this stuff is not gonna not gonna make that already. It's that's already cooked. I mean, this stuff Well, maybe make 90. If it goes well from here on out,

spk_0:   10:22
the beans are looking even worse

spk_1:   10:24
now in Iowa, southern Iowa, the lands that they have and they're Southern. I was in the same pattern as we are the land that way.

spk_0:   10:34
They have. You

spk_1:   10:35
are a rotten, terrible, horrible farmer. If you can't get in a normal year. 225 bushels per acre because the land is just that good.

spk_0:   10:45
It is where the tall corn grows,

spk_1:   10:47
Iowa and and Illinois in the main areas are you can't if you can't grow 225 bushel corn in the Illinois river bottom or up in southern Iowa that you're just not a very good farmer.

spk_0:   11:02
So when you get droughts in that part of the country and across Nebraska,

spk_1:   11:05
you said the biggest it gets franks and other pricing. Okay, there's that. Now, what else does this

spk_0:   11:13
affect? Their dairy and eggs? Yes, during eggs. Okay,

spk_1:   11:17
um, when we have drought like we're having here, we are a big hey producing area right here. We export from North Missouri, and we also feed a lot of Hey, that's what a lot of our cattle in livestock E. Okay, But right now, our 1st 1st cutting was very bad. We're getting about half the amount of grass, and it's not nearly as good. Quality. High nutrition grass is what usually would come into a, um hey, cutting. You see, I'm looking at the bales and we're driving past Ah, hey, Feel right now spaced out. Those veils are,

spk_0:   11:56
well, those they probably don't. But I do. Maybe like I'm talking to them that they

spk_1:   12:01
were the person looking out the window today, but yeah, they're very spread out, much more so than usual. What that means is there's a good chance that we are going to be importing hey, this winter or this fall or even the summer. And one of the problems that we have with imported hey is we have very limited amount of places we can import it from basically the places that are getting right right now, the places that are getting rain or south of us. So Okay, fine. Bring up pay from Arkansas, bringing up a from northern Texas. But there's a problem with that. Hey, you bring that hey up! And those hayfields are infested with fire ants, and that's a problem. We don't have fire ants here in Missouri, and unfortunately, we're not gonna have a fire ant problem here in Missouri. Winters get too cold. It kills them. But you have cattle eating hay with fire. Absalom, That's not good, you know. So this is the kind of thing.

spk_0:   13:22
Tell him what it means from a prepping point of view, please,

spk_1:   13:24
when you move stuff from one part of the country to another and that's what we do a lot of in America, we move stuff from one part of the country to another. You're also moving whatever's hitchhiking on them. This is why we say never moved firewood. Because especially around here, where you want to keep the emerald ash bores out of our state for as long as possible. Because animal ash borers are an invasive, terribly destructive to the ash trees. There's deer all over there. Yeah. Um, so will the firing. Its Yeah, they We don't want Arkansas fire ants. Justin example. Okay. You were

spk_0:   14:10
saying I was inviting you to tell them why the fire ant thing is a prepping problem.

spk_1:   14:19
Oh, well, this is just a general problem of you're always better off as a community prepping and not prepping. Buying local, producing local Okay, self sufficiency is this is we're all about self sufficiency. We want to keep self sufficiency in our region. In our area, when you're importing critical products from outside that you could well be growing yourself. This is a problem. We don't want to be importing. Hey, we don't want to, You know, Hey, self sufficient. We want to be corn self sufficient. We want to export our crops to those people who live in the cities who can't grow their stock.

spk_0:   15:04
Most particularly if we have a grid failure or a major transportation disruption or transportation just gets really more expensive. Thes economic patterns that rely on lots of imports are going to break down and cause trouble for people who are relying on those patterns. If you have local sources of production, then you're going to suffer a lot less when transportation becomes more difficult or more expensive in a crisis.

spk_1:   15:36
Right now, let's say Let's go ahead and say the stuff hits the fan. I don't think this will happen. It's not guessing it won't happen, but that's a guess. But let's say the Milwaukee it's the end of the world as we know it hits for some reason, you know, we're gonna it will be a come as you are come where you are crisis and I want to be an area that's a self sufficient as possible. I want to be in an area that has big tall elevators full of grain already. I don't. You know, this is what I want. This is my goal is to not be in an area. Turns into an instant war zone.

spk_0:   16:18
Fruit orchards all over the place,

spk_1:   16:19
fruit orchards all over the place,

spk_0:   16:21
People who know how to grow food and have seed and have the ability to grow food

spk_1:   16:26
and who have been growing. So this is this is the whole thing. Um, I know a lot of people are shelter in place, Stay in the suburbs kind of people. And I got to be honest with you for some kinds of crisis is I just don't see how that's gonna work

spk_0:   16:46
for long term crisis. Long

spk_1:   16:48
term cry. I just don't see how that's gonna work. That's your deal. That's that's your thing. If you look like you want to live. But I personally don't see. I don't plan my prepping around what those problems are. I'm staying away from those problems. That's part of my profit. But that's also part of the drought we come back to. The drought is yes. This really does effect us this year now where this really will hurt in spice wrote about this in her article yesterday. Yeah, it hurts now that we're gonna have spent extra money on water. But let's see that water is running. Our water comes 65 miles away, and I'm not in favor of this. I did not support shutting down our local water plant. I did not support that at all, but they did it. Our water comes from 65 miles away. All right, we have an earthquake. There's a exceedingly good chance our water will be disrupted for a very long time. A fact of life. We're prepped for it. We understand this, and this isn't even a national grid down disaster, but it's it's a fact of life. But in that sort of situation will be depending on our garden to get a lot of our food. And then our garden is struggling because of the water. So this is why we're expanding our rain barrel system. This is why we're buying a big tank for the back of the pickup truck so that we could pump water out of a lake if we have to. This is why we're doing what we're doing. Um, let's talk about what it's like to live without water for a while.

spk_0:   18:40
It's miserable,

spk_1:   18:41
is miserable. Well, we she has has different experiences that I do. First of all, I lived on an island in the early seventies. I grew up on Pacific Islands. I was a culture of rat and one of the places that we had lived with a certain little garden spot called Okinawa. Now, a lot of military people liked to be stationed in Okinawa. And I'm not gonna go into the reasons why they really like to be stationed in Okinawa, other than to say they don't apply to a 12 year old. Yeah, this'll is nothing that would be of interest to a 12 year old, Certainly not a 12 year old in the culture of the 19 seventies. Today, I who knows, But we didn't have water. The reservoirs ran dry. And when I mean we didn't have water. We didn't have water. The drinking water we had We had to get on base and it was shipped in from Japan, literally shipped in from Japan. There was no large desalinization plant. Heck, this island hadn't even been completely cleaned up from World War Two. They're still bombs going all our bling and their major parts of the island that we're still off limits because I hadn't been, uh, demilitarized. This is back in the early seventies is only 15 20 years after the end of the war. So we got water turned on. They would collect up enough to give us water every two weeks. We got water turned on for two hours, and we were able to Philip like the bathtub and Philip every non potable water container that we owned. But these pipes, they were old, they were rusty, and the water coming out of there was bright orange. But this is what we had to wash our closing. And by the time we left okey, every piece of clothing we owned was colored bright orange because that's what you had to wash it.

spk_0:   21:06
Whereas we had a well, and when the well pump broke and we couldn't afford to get it fixed for a number of weeks. At one point my mom was stuck carrying buckets of water up the hill from the spring, which was technically not potable water either. But given the state of the aquifer at that time, we said heck with it and drank it, and it was fine. But if there is a what's one of the Achilles heels of large cities, particularly large cities in the desert, places like Las Vegas just creeped me the heck out as a proper because that many people, so far from the natural water supply, I would expect if government service is get disrupted, there's going to be very serious problems very quickly in having enough water to sustain the population. Frankly,

spk_1:   22:06
was. So that

spk_0:   22:06
should be a part of your planning,

spk_1:   22:07
right with us. It okey we literally which my dad got several big containers and we literally went to the ocean and filled up the containers and brought them back in the car. And that's what we flushed with. You know, we would flush with a bucket of ocean water, and I'm gonna be a little little of what's the word I'm looking for, um, a little adult here and just say we followed the motto. If it's yellow, it's mellow. If it's brown, it goes down and you just put a little ammonia in it. Thio, take away the odor and there you go. That's what we did That's how we lived now during our married life. We also lived in a community during the late eighties that made its home water out of two city legs to very not very big city like. But we had a several year trout where it was just a absolute drought, and we basically drained the lakes. Now most of the water in a lake you have to do this just doesn't seem like it makes sense. But it does. The vast majority of the water that is in a legacy is in the top foot

spk_0:   23:37
because it has the greatest area guys,

spk_1:   23:39
right lakes, you know they ve down, and the steeper and deeper the lake, the Maur. The percentage of the water is in the top because it's got a big, fat wide bottom. There's more water, you know, further down. But if it's a shape, a very steep lake in a deep V, you know most that water right there at the top. So as the water level drops in a normal everyday lake, you're using up a lot of the water the Senate will. Our lake dropped and dropped. Dropping litter started dropping really fast, and most of the water that was that went away was not from consumption. It was from evaporation because it was very dry. It was very windy, very, very hot. It was very sunny in the years of just aton of your operation that summer. So our water not only do we have to get back on the use of our water, but it just absolutely evaporated. We got to the point we didn't quite run out of water like they're looking at in South Africa. We didn't quite run out of water, but we got to the point where we have a There's a massive rock quarry and the bottom part of the rock quarry has several springs in it, and they literally pump the rock quarry. Dr. They run the pump every day because they have to. They want the bottom of the pit. The bottom of it probably has, oh, about 80 100 feet of water in it. They just leave it with water in it. But you know that quarry will fill into a lake fairly quickly if it's not used. So this rock quarry, it's

spk_0:   25:34
a mile south of town. Something like that. Yeah, it's a mile south of the lake there, pump it back into

spk_1:   25:39
Yeah, well, actually a couple miles. So they really literally ran a pipe from the rock quarry up over a hill, down to an area where they could pump it into the lake. And they added, Oh, I forget how many hundreds of thousands of gallons water made millions of gallons alive, just a ton of water. They were literally filling the lake out of the rock quarry. And that gave us a month worth of water just a

spk_0:   26:13
month we needed

spk_1:   26:14
as as the drought worsens and worsened and worsen the guy who was in charge of the rock quarry who came up with this idea. I got to thinking, you know, we can Cory this other wall and just let that water Phil and not pump because we may need that water. It's actually very smart, very smart

spk_0:   26:36
and very community minded, I might add.

spk_1:   26:38
Yeah, and of course, you know, I don't know that that was a very good Um, okay, this is kind of hard to describe, because the way it was done, it was actually pumped into the lake. It was pumped into the place that the pumps for the lake are located.

spk_0:   26:58
The water inlet at the lake?

spk_1:   26:59
Yeah, it was pumped in the water and they didn't want actually pump the water into the leg would evaporate, and it would kill a bunch of wild life again. This is Rock quarry. Not

spk_0:   27:10
hard as heck

spk_1:   27:11
Lake Water. So yeah, but anyway, that was just These are the kind of things that you go through, you know, this is the kind of stuff they're trying to figure out South Africa. My prepping point is, when all this is going on to be prepared, you don't want any of any of this. You wanna have the water in your house already.

spk_0:   27:30
And during these crises, Note you were not watering your garden either.

spk_1:   27:34
No, no, Joe, no. They would They would arrested well addressed you by.

spk_0:   27:41
We managed to keep ours alive, but we have a sister and on property. Yes, and I get that at the time. It since failed because it's ancient. You know, at the time the hand pump still worked and I kept stuff alive by hand, pumping it.

spk_1:   27:59
The big D says he can fix that. Cool. So we need to get that fixed. We could still pump out of the system using electric. It's right there. It's full of water. Um, I would drink It really knows what if

spk_0:   28:15
we got desperate, we could get out. Now, I know of a method that would do it right now. It would be a pain in

spk_1:   28:20
the system we're talking about. Is Blakely usedto have for old houses? They would drain the drain pipes into the cistern, and then you'd use the sister, Uh, you know, every kitchen, water and stuff like that. That's how they did it. So we have one of those. And, uh, we thought about filling it in at one point in time because they're taking me kind of dangerous virus has a really good cap on it. So we did. Okay. You just want to add

spk_0:   28:53
That'll do it. All right. It's supposed to rain. This week, we're open.

spk_1:   28:57
We're hoping our whole point to take away. I want you think. Think about drought. Now, Whether it's you made Mimi, you may be flooded, but think about trout because droughts are coming no matter where you are,

spk_0:   29:08
and water service is can fail in big water

spk_1:   29:11
service is can fail. And for a long

spk_0:   29:12
time you live trouble in a hurry without good water. Right?

spk_1:   29:17
So there we are. Thank you for listening, and we'll catch you next time.