Beans, Bullets, Bandages & You
Beans, Bullets, Bandages & You
Episode 227: Thinking Generational Preps
Salty & Spice think in terms of generations and the future in this episode of the 3BY podcast. Are do they present compelling ideas?
Let's find out!
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Hello, everybody.
Salty:Hello, everybody. Welcome to the show the big show the most important and critically acclaimed podcast that is recorded in our giant press here. Car. Welcome to the show. And today we have a mystery podcast for you today. What is the mystery podcast is neither one of those knows the topic and the other one does not. And so she just bothered her. She knew what she was talking about,
Spice:as usually I am the coolest party in this equation. That's right.
Salty:And today is the topic of today's podcast is something she's very, very up on. Even though she doesn't know the subject of the podcast. She knows the subject quite well. And I'll tell you what got me to thinking about it. We were talking about doing a podcast but really hadn't decided we got some ideas kind of vague ones. And I, we were driving along and we drove over troublesome Creek. And troublesome Creek is known as troublesome Creek for a good reason. It is a exceedingly prone to flash flooding. It's a very dangerous little creek, because it flash floods a lot. Well, at least it used to not giving away too many secrets. When I tell you about in the mid 80s. I graduated from college and became the editor of a small town newspaper. That's right, I was the editor of a small town newspaper for many years. And one of the very first things that I covered was a new government program called the troublesome Creek watershed project done, basically what it was it was building structures, dams, and ponds, if you will, that are designed to catch water and slow down the rise of troublesome Creek. And they built this these things all over North Missouri. I mean, they're all over the place he structures in what they are, they're basically ponds with very high dams. So they can grow during a rainstorm, you know, we get a five inch rain, if they can fill almost all the way up to the top of the dam, but they have a discharge pipe a little more than half the way down the dam. So the water goes up, but it instantly starts to discharge. And it will discharge down to that 12 inch drainage pipe. And then after that it'll sit there in a pond and we can be used as just a regular everyday pond. And they build these structures all over the place, with the overall goal of reducing the flash flooding and the massive damage of erosion that was happening in the troublesome Creek watershed. Now, part two of this was a huge plan by the USDA in two parts. One was to do soil conservation to the Soil Conservation Service, by changing people's minds about how you plant how you prepare your fields, by helping them switch over to no till planting, by helping them put in grass waterways, to reduce the amount of erosion by helping them learn how to better use contour farming so that your your rows weren't running up and down the slope, but rather across the slope, which again reduces soil erosion,
Spice:then being the farmers by the
Salty:big farmers. Yes. So what's my point? My point was, when all this started in the mid 80s. And I personally know a lot of the men who were and they were men who were involved in this project have already passed. I mean, they were this was a senior job as a senior engineer job. This was a big job. This is 10s of millions of dollars project that were overseen by guys at the top of the top of the food chain in their departments. Okay. And I know one of the ones a good friend of mine who passed several years ago. What was my point? My point is the troublesome Creek watershed project, the structures in the fields. The fact that we no longer have drill far or have a plow farming, it's all drill in this area, every bit of its drill. The only people who don't use drill farming are literally the Amish and they don't do that big of a plot.
Spice:sidebar plow forming is when you take a plow and you turn over all the soil to four to six inches down. usually do it twice a year. And it exposes a hole it turns soil over well and at AIR rates and it helps it warm up and it makes it loose for the roots but it also has a whole lot of basically unattached soil on the top. First rain comes along. Your valuable topsoil goes downstream and ends up clogging up the waterways in Louisiana. Executives sorry, drill farming is instead of a plow the implements have these Little drills spaced as far apart as you want the rows to be. And as you drive slowly down the field, they basically do hypodermic jabs and just stamp holes in the soil and inject seeds down.
Salty:Sorry, in there, I assume people love this.
Spice:Pretty sure not everybody knows this stuff. So if you did great if you didn't, now we're on the same page. Sorry about that in sidebar.
Salty:Okay, now, that doesn't count as our unofficial side, or unofficial. We did a digression, we haven't made it yet. So all of this stuff that I'm talking about. And I also just saw a bunch of other structures in fields that they use to do swales with drain pipes in them and all kinds of stuff, you know, I mean, really, technically, you can
Spice:tour the ground a little bit, catch the water, slow it down, everything's about slowing down the water. So it has more time to soak into the soil. And so it doesn't just cause floods for a day and then be gone forever. It soaks in more gradually.
Salty:All of this stuff is generational stuff. It's all generational. The people who did this, we're doing it for the next 2345 generations. This is building generational infrastructure. And, oh, this was a government project to be fair, as a lot of the really big ones are, and I'm not really gonna go into the whole government aspect of it is, a lot of times you can have generational things in private life. Let me let me let me share one, okay, I went to high school with I was in my 20s. And I saw him and he was I mean, he was dirty, filthy. And he was, I saw him in a town about halfway between the two of us. I mean, he just, just sweat was caked on him. You could tell you've been working his tail off all day long. I mean, man, what are you doing? You don't you work at a bank? say, Yeah, but I was not working on my land. Is it what's Landsat said? Well, you know, I got a project set of bought 40 acres got bought really well. They're just junk acres. There wasn't anything on them. They've been clear cut. So not cheap. So I bought 40 acres. And that 40 acres is my retirement. Like, yeah, your retirement house. So is like I'm taking that 40 acres, and I'm planting it in walnut trees, while a tree or what now? Yeah, I'm planting that 40 acres in walnut trees, so that by the time I retire, I'm going to have 40 acres of walnut lumber, and that's going to be my retirement.
Spice:Mature walnut trees that provide good lumber are really valuable.
Salty:And I like okay, Bo, couldn't you, you know what?
Spice:he's retiring.
Salty:He's not quite retired yet. But he now has 40 acres of mature lumber planted walnut trees to retire on worth millions, just because he spent a summer of spare time planting trees. And he's, instead of buying a fancy car, he bought land on the cheap, because he was thinking ahead. Now his children have generational wealth. And it's as wealth in a form that can be cashed in at any time it need or left be to still continue to grow. Because the trees get bigger, they're still gonna be you know, until they get to that age when walnut trees start to deteriorate. And they're nowhere near that.
Spice:And they can start taking them out selectively then and report what they take out and continue to have that resource there in terms long as they care to take care of it. And it's liable to stay valuable.
Salty:And the whole deal is, you know, since they were lumber planted from the start, they were designed, they are far enough apart. He controlled all the junk species in between them. So they grew well. Yeah, it took some work.
Spice:And he planted him in a way where there'll be harvestable without undue expense, because that's part of the value of lumber land when you get to use it. Yeah, this
Salty:this dad's kid was a lumbermen. Or this kid's dad was an all American. So this was something that was in his family and he enjoys the work. But it's generational. He was thinking not only of himself, but of his children and his grandchildren. It's generational. A lot of the farmers around here. You know, farmers have been in the family for 100 years. They think generationally you put up a barn is a barn isn't for them. The barn is for their son's use and their use. It's a way of thinking and why what does all this have to do with profit was I don't see many things in prepper world considering generational stuff.
Spice:It's not much of a long term plan in many cases.
Salty:And so I just tried Trying to bring this thought into people's heads a little bit. Hey, how can I make what I'm doing generational?
Spice:How can I play the long game?
Salty:How can I How can I play the long game? I think some of the stuff is obvious. One, the most important thing you can do is to teach your children the skills, teach your children the skills. And this is where I'm going to turn it over to spice for a bit because her parents, while not preppers were really big into teaching. All nine, have their children the skills,
Spice:and it wasn't, it didn't feel like school, it didn't feel like training, it felt like we're a family. And these are the things we have to do to take care of our stuff, and to keep things running. And you're going to help because that's what family members do. And along the way, I'm not just going to give you junk jobs where you carry stuff around and things like that you're actually going to learn to do the things my dad had been. When he was young. He had been a carpenter. His dad was a carpenter. His dad immigrated. He worked with his dad a little bit when he was very young. And then he moved on to other jobs. But he still had some carpentry kinds of skills. And when it came time to move out of the very badly adapted log cabin, literally log cabin, that we had much overgrown by the time I came around. We had a boy's dormitory upstairs, it
Salty:would have been a comfortable house for a parents and a couple of children that night. Yeah. So.
Spice:So when the time came to replace the house, it was a family project. And we all learned to do things. As a matter of fact, when my dad passed some years ago, one of my older brothers was handling the estate. And he made sure to keep for me this tiny little hammer. It's really a finishing hammer for finishing nails. Because that was what he remembered me habitually using when we were building the house, I would get the jobs where you have somebody little and agile, who can climb out on things and do the stuff that the big heavy people don't want to get out there and do better, perfectly easy. for somebody like me, I had those kind of jobs.
Salty:To be fair, you were seven, eight. Yeah,
Spice:no, take my little finishing hammer. And we had a garden. And it's not like we had a garden so I can teach you to grow food. We had a garden because eating is cool. And we have a whole lot of kids and they can put away a whole lot of food. And this is how we can afford to live reasonably well on one income with nine kids.
Salty:Even though you didn't garden for many years, because it just didn't.
Spice:Yeah, I didn't garden through my 20s and my 30s. And then into my 30s I
Salty:start coming back to mom drooling to you.
Spice:I was clueless about how to do things.
Salty:And if she's in doubt, she can call her sister, her sister can can help her out, you know, saying
Spice:cooking things from scratch, same sort of skill. I have always hated actual sewing. But I was made to learn a little bit. And that was obviously being taught as an intentional skill. Mom was like, no isn't anybody leaving this house, male or female, who can't put their own buttons back on clothes when they fall out. That's, that's not how we roll. You're going to learn some of this stuff. So I learned some of the easy stuff. And it saved me quite a lot, actually, to be honest, given the expenses of making fresh clothing from scratch, which is actually fairly expensive. Honestly, compared to the cheap, mass produced stuff you can buy in stores, there's not much of a economic benefit to making a lot of your own clothing from scratch. But repairing stuff. And especially repairing outerwear is an extremely important skill to extend the value of things you've got. And if things do get hard to get, it's going to be an even more important skill. I didn't stock up six pairs of insulated coveralls. I have one good pair of insulated coveralls and some extra zippers for it. Because we know what goes out. And all I got to do is be able to replace the zippers. It's not like the whole piece of clothing is going to spontaneously fall apart. So it's life skills. And many times now, people do not consider those kinds of life skills worth the time either for themselves to learn or to do and then they get stuck when they're in a situation where the usual supports aren't handy. I was talking to one of my students last semester, who had this Ultra drama, go on with a flat tire, when for whatever reason, the usual help is just a phone call away method did not serve to get their tire quickly and efficiently replaced with one they could run on. And they ran into a lot of trouble because of that, because they had no clue how to do that. Yeah, the part they didn't even get to the part of changing the tire, which since my students are smart people, they probably could have managed, but they're also smart enough to know that if you don't know how the heck to jack up a car, you probably don't want to make a random guess and then stick your body parts under the car.
Salty:First of all, you never stick your body parts under cartilage or changing a tire on because that would be dumb. But
Spice:I know that you know that this person had never even seen a tire changed.
Salty:That's true. Just in case as an aside not this is not our official aside as an aside, you never put your your your any of your actual self underneath a car that's up on a tire jack even scissor jack doesn't matter. That thing had better have good solid jackstands under the axles. Before you stick a body part under their little shacks. Hands need to be cheapo Harbor Freight ones. They need to be the good ones. Preferably the Made in America ones. Okay. In the preaching,
Spice:that whole feet sticking out from underneath is only cool when it's Wicked Witch of the West. Yeah, in The Wizard of Oz. It's not nearly so cool. I was being russain
Salty:she's just hanging out being wicked and stuff because that's what she you are what you are. And then we dropped a house on it and boom, like boom, like,
Spice:but if you're gonna be wicked, sometimes your neighbors just have to splat you for their own self protection.
Salty:being vulnerable to having a house dropped on you, personally, would be a lot better core weakness than being doing melting if you get wet.
Spice:Yeah, because you can
Salty:be that can be bad. It's fun. I spilled my water. How did the Wicked Witch of the West or the east west? I don't drink through a straw.
Spice:I think if it was coffee, she was all right. Or, you know Monster Energy drinks or something something nice
Salty:to drink. That's what she is a monster. Alright, to this day, flying monkeys.
Spice:No. creeps up right out, reaps
Salty:me out flying monkeys are just wrong.
Spice:Fortunately, we don't run into that often.
Salty:Back to the topic. You know what we're going I'm gonna go out and try and find some some birds to take pictures of today. And she was telling me that she had seen some at a fabulous ruber access. Last week. She and her brother, her oldest brother, who is a generation older than she is 13 years now almost a generation. And kids 13 years should tell you everything you need to know and not a set of twins among them.
Spice:Is the prompt woman my mother?
Salty:Yes. Anywho her oldest brother said call her up and says hey, you know when we drive halfway across the state? Let's go. Let's go kayaking. Yeah, last week, okay.
Spice:It's in December
Salty:in Mississippi, Missouri and North Missouri,
Spice:December 20
Salty:December. And I'm like girds people. So anyway that he comes up with just cool. They go out and get the kayaks and loaded with the truck to go to the and the water is all frozen
Spice:is not as stupid as it sounds. He had checked that very stream the same morning. And they did not be nice choked in the morning when he came to pick me up. By the time we got back there. It was cold day. That's the day I choked up. Here's the reason why
Salty:I'm not buying a lot of stupid sounds like that just sounds like there are such things as called April and June.
Spice:Okay, I've been trying to get it together for six months, but because of the COVID thing, I wasn't free. It came the literally the first was not overbooked with work.
Salty:By the way. I don't know where the turnoff is.
Spice:We're going ahead to Taylor. Okay. So we went out to kayak and we found some ice on the stream and a little bit of ice was not a problem. He knows what he's doing. He's been a lot of places and a lot of different weathers and he's a very capable outdoorsman. And I am not as capable, but I know his judgment is good. And I know how to pull the plug myself if I get uncomfortable. So we went ahead and we went out for a bit and we had to break small bits of ice and that was okay. And we went until we saw that it was too jammed up to be able to reliably get to where we needed to take out. And then we aboard the situation came back up and just enjoy the eagles and the swans and other things on the river that day, it was actually a very lovely day. But think about what's going on here.
Salty:We've got a 50 something and a 70, something probably 70 ish, almost 70, almost 70 year old brother and sister out in the frigid cold kayaking, woods smart, completely safe doing this because they know what they're doing. Their parents helped instill in them the love of outdoors, activities and adventures. This this comes not from an adult onset mania. This is not buying a red Corvette, okay? This is something that their parents helped them develop. Back when they were kids. This was a generational gift from her mom and dad.
Spice:And a lot of it was mental approaches. It was pre planning. It was thinking about what you'll need to things go right, it was thinking about what you'll need to things go wrong. And my brother and I have lived far apart from each other for many years now. So he was gently and under the radar checking me out before we went and was wanting to hear what I told him that Yeah, I do have these, this gear that plans to keep me dry. But in case I do get wet plan B's, I've got a bunch of wool layers underneath so I don't you know, get hypothermic if we accidentally do end up getting wet. I'm still covered. And then when as we were going out, I pointed out that hey, you know if your hands or feet get too cold, I've got some emergency warmers in my kit here and he says, Yeah, I got some too. He had some fire starting stuff. I had some fire starting stuff. So yeah, we were going kayaking, when there was ice on the river, the very slow river, by the way. Very slow and fairly. Yeah, always wadeable River is just a river. But it's something that was not necessarily in my comfort zone to do. But we had the skills to do it and do it safely and do it without stress. And if something went wrong, we wouldn't have been stuffed because we had three backup plans that also would have prevented tragedy, if life didn't go as we expected it to go. And that is part of it. And understanding of what you how you can push your boundaries. And when you should not push your boundaries. We had a firm rule for when we were going to turn back and abort if we needed to. And when that situation came up, okay, we're not going to try it and talk ourselves around it even though we're having fun, we're gonna abort.
Salty:Whereas if I had gone along, I would have been I would have put everybody at risk. First of all, I don't kayak have no interest in it. Second of all, I am not I don't possess the same skills they do. Okay. Third, their level of fitness is higher than mine. I'm not a complete couch potato, but I'll be honest with you
Spice:scrambling up mud,
Salty:you know, with this foot of mine is not really much of an option. It just isn't. And fourth, I don't enjoy that sort of thing. So I would have been a drain in every way you could have been a drain, but I recognize that and that's okay, because I can do other things. I have other skills. I have other uses. I have other, you know, and that's okay, you don't i don't have to be these woodsmen kayaker, you know, and that's fine. But my point is the generational stuff, if that makes sense. Not you don't have to everybody doesn't have to be everything. But you should be some things. And you should give what you are to the next generation if you can.
Spice:But since that monster has died, let's roll the credits and wish everybody a good day.
Salty:Thank you. If you enjoyed the podcast, please share it with your friends. If you enjoy the podcast, please go on to whichever distributor that you use. amalgam eater, whichever you use, go on and leave us a five star review or good review. If you don't enjoy the podcast at don't leave us a review. And thank you and we'll see you next time. Bye.