 My name is Michael Her. I'm actually a surgeon with the Third Battalion Second Brigade of Missouri Militia. I've been with them for about three years. Been prepping, if you will, longer than that. It's going on probably seven or eight years now. I've done this presentation a couple of times for the old keepers and for the Missouri Militia. Again, judging by show of hands, a lot of people are priority to this, so we'll kind of go through this a little bit quicker. But some of the questions that come up for this actual subject is where should I begin? How much food should I have? How do I store food long-term? What's the financial impact on your finances on how to get started? And then I don't know how to grow a garden. And what is the ability to cook when you don't have electricity? We talked a lot about how to store water, how to keep yourself clean. And we're going in this order because we feel those are more important. Does everybody know the rule of threes? Three minutes without air, three days without water, three weeks without food. So keep yourself clean, hydrate yourself, and then food becomes the next thing on the list. Because once you're healthy, which are hydrated, the next thing is to make sure that you're well fed, because you're no good to any of us if you're starving in the corner, but you're nice and clean. So you got to make sure that everybody's fit because you're going to be burning a lot of calories. You're not going to have the luxuries of air conditioning, of heating. So your body's going to be working a lot differently than what it would do if you come home from work and you got to sit on your nice air conditioned couch and watch TV. You're actually going to be working 10, 12 hours a day in a grid down situation. And this is any type of emergency disaster situation. The Missouri militia has been down to Joplin after the disaster down there. There was no electricity, no running water. We had a set of camps, busing in water, busing in medical supplies, food. So I mean, there's, you know, you take that from a grand scale and you have to kind of put it down into your own situation, what your home situation looks like, you know, how many people do you have. So this is kind of the quick overview of what we've been working on as an organization, both with the both keepers and with the Missouri militia. So step one, determine how many people you have in your family, kind of map it out on a piece of paper and really figure out what the essential items that you're going to need just to survive and then start working your way up to what are you going to need to actually live comfortably during some type of emergency situation because if, you know, I think the reason that you're here is we don't want to be dependent on the government coming in and feeding us, you know, rations that they have from the Red Cross. We're here because we're, you know, we want to be self-sustaining and we want to be individuals and take care of ourselves. Cost is a pretty important thing, you know, this is not cheap to get into, but it is something that is viable over time. Start slowly and work your way up and build your way up and we'll go through kind of some of these different steps that you get to. And the easy thing to do is to start out with the canned goods. So that's kind of why I have it on step three. That's a pretty easy thing to do when you're going to the grocery store. You get what you're normally getting each week, toss in a couple of extra of what you actually like because that's one thing, too. You don't want to buy a number 10 can of green beans if nobody in your house likes green beans because then it's going to create psychological chaos for you when you're going to have to get into that food storage. And then, again, step four, repeat the process. You know, nobody knows when this is going to happen. You know, whether it's going to be 70 degrees in the middle of December, not very traditional for what our December's could be. This could lead to a severe weather pattern. We could have electricity grids knocked out tomorrow. So this is, you know, just small steps to get us to a much more prepared situation. So recommendations of how much food that you should have. Again, we reference FEMA, we reference SEMA, and SEMA is our state emergency management association or agency depending on, you know, what acronym you're going to be using. But they have different recommendations and you can find all of these on the government website. And so we lean on them because they've done all the research. Now it's taking that research and applying it to the actual situation. So the recommendation is to have four for you to have one year of food supply per person per household. That's their minimum. That's what you're going to need. FEMA and SEMA recommend three to seven days. And that's their disaster window that allows them time to come in, get Red Cross set up, establish water, tense food, tense to take care of the masses. We don't want to be part of the masses. It's actually better for us to not be involved with the masses. Because again, that's where the sanitation issues happen. That's where the lack of water happens. We want to make sure that we have all of ourselves taken care of. And we're kind of out of the way of the masses because there's other things that happen when you look at stories from Katrina, when you have multiple people in a distress situation, how quick three to seven days can turn into three to seven days of chaos. But if you actually dig into FEMA's website, which it took about a half an hour or so digging through all of what FEMA has to say that they recommend the further you get into it, they go from three to seven days to three months. And if you keep going down, if they consider something an act of God, which is something that affects more than 50% of the population, that isn't the certain range of where the disaster happens. So something like a job when it's considered an act of God, they actually recommend that you have two to four years. And this is their agency. So they're telling their support agencies that they should have two to four years of food on hand for an act of God situation. And they have all this. They've used your tax dollars to buy all this stuff for other people. So they are set up to take care of their emergency staff to come in and take care of a disaster scenario. It doesn't mean that you're going to have access to that food. You pay for it, but you're not going to have access to it. They will control who they give the food to, at what time they give the food. And again, that's not conducive to what we are trying to accomplish. Long-term storage, there's a lot of different methods. These are some of the easier ways to get into when you're going to the grocery store and you're buying your canned goods or, you know, some things that, you know, I started out with rice and beans. You know, those two combined properly, it's considered a complete protein. A complete protein, I believe, is all essential nine amino acids that takes place during it. It's a chemical reaction between when rice and beans are cooked together. So those are two great essentials that you can keep in your stores that in a grid down situation, it's easy to cook. You can get mass quantities. You can feed your family pretty healthily for pretty cheap. Storing these five gallon buckets, get those at Home Depot. If you really want to get into it, you can go to some storage supplies and get food-grade buckets. But a cheap way around that is buying Mylar bags on Amazon. I think they're about a dollar bag that will fit into a five-gallon bucket. Line your bucket, put your store food in there, seal your bucket last year, anywhere from one to five years if stored properly. Reusable sort of sealable bags. Those, if you have the money to do it, they make those air-tight bags. You put them in the machine, sucks all the air out. That actually gives you one to two years of good storage. I mean, those are, that's great equipment, but those commercial ones are two to three hundred dollars to get into. These bags, cycle bags, I think they come in ten, they're about thirty dollars each. So, I mean, if you have the funds to do something like that, it's very conducive. Suck all the air out. You can stack that in your basement and your pantry. It helps reduce a lot of space. Mason jars canning. That's a little bit more on the advanced side. Canning is not an easy thing to do unless you've been practicing doing it, where you grew up on the farm and mom and grandma did it all the time. You kind of understand because there is another chemical reaction that happens when you can. So improper canning can lead to food for an illness. So you want to make sure there's a lot of books out there that can walk you through it. But today is the day to practice. And you want to practice, put it away for three months, pull it out, make sure that it's edible in six months, then nine months. You want to start teaching yourself how to get through something like this. And again, we're getting into the long-term food storage. So this kind of follows peer rotation. Get your bulk storage for the two weeks. Mid-range is kind of some of that. What can you do with, you know, that three to six month window? This is more long-term stuff. When you're growing your own food, you're canning your own food, you're raising your own food, that's really the, yeah, the long-term. I mean, that's kind of the best goal that you want to shoot for is to be able to do this by yourself without having to rely on anybody else. Advanced food storage, which is why I put dehydrated food in here. Dehydrated food is an extremely efficient way of feeding yourself and your family. They last a long time, 10 to 25 years of store properly, but now you're increasing your water levels. So I would probably add an extra one and a half to two and a half gallons, because for every one cup of dehydrated product, you need two cups of water to bring that back to an edible state. So you're doing a one for two scenario here. So you're going to need a lot more water than what you would normally need if you're just cooking with your normal one and a half gallon of water stores. It's expensive to get into, but once you start getting into it, you have a good sufficient amount of stores that, I mean, I haven't had food for 25 years, but I'm going to guess that, you know, they could probably go longer than 25 years. That's almost like a sell by date. They say with the story methods that they use, they can last up to 25 years, but the good thing about food is, you know, you open it up and eat it. You know, you're not really out the money if you look at it that way, because you can always tap into your food source and rotate it in and out. Another good long-term storage is MREs. Been around for a long time. We use them out in the field quite often. I mean, we're out in the woods and we're three days out with all we have is MREs and enough water or water purification equipment to take care of us. We kind of rely on MREs. It's high calories, I think 3,000 and 3,500 calories in an MRE and a fully equipped military grade MRE. You're going to be burning probably that amount of calories, if not more, because you're going to be doing a lot more physical labor. Good shelf life. I just don't recommend that you live off of MREs because if any of you have been out for three or four days and ate nothing but MREs, you're going to realize what it does to the inside of your body and you're really not going to be appreciative of it. So gardening, that again goes into advanced storage. I've now several years doing a garden and every year it gets a little better and we try everything. These survival seat packs, I'm sure that you've all seen them, they come in little tins or mylar storage bags. Buy an extra one. They're cheap. It's 25 bucks for a one acre survival garden. Buy two of them and practice with the seeds that are in there. Some seeds don't germinate like the seeds that you buy at the store because some of the seeds that you buy at the store have been bred to germinate that quick. So you need to practice with what you plan to survive on that you have in your storage bank and it's not as easy as it sounds just throw a bunch of seeds in the ground and get a garden going. It's kind of a little bit more labor intensive than doing that and that's where it comes back to the water for gardening. You need to have sufficient amount of water supplies. You can't grow a garden without water and you've been in St. Louis area, the Missouri area long enough. Sometimes we have a very mild wet summer like we had this year. Sometimes it's 105 degrees for four months straight and we get one day of rain. So you're going to have to really figure out what you need to continue that garden survival scenario. Canning, we've kind of already talked about. Again I would highly recommend buying a book and teaching yourself start in the spring, grow some product, try to can it. You can needs, vegetables, fruits and each one of those items requires a different way of canning. So you need to really research that yourself and that's kind of stuff that we talked about when we do our trainings. So you know this is again a quick overview of what we've been working on the past several years and you know the cooking without electricity. You're going to have to figure out what's best for your situation. Short-term, get those one pound propane tanks, camping stove, probably going to be good for a week or two. If you know the electricity is coming back on in a week or two, pretty simple solution. But what are you going to do after two weeks? What are you going to do after two months? Do you have methods inside your house to have an indoor wood burning stove? Are you going to be relying on a solar stove? What are you going to do in the winter when we get these steel gray days out where you don't really get solar? So it's again putting yourself in a survival situation practicing and then using the product that you're actually buying for your food storage. You can buy a palette of freeze-dried food but if you wait until the day that the switch gets flipped off and you try to tap into it, it may not be the easiest thing for you guys to get through and manage unless you practice a little bit with it. So kind of sped through that because at 11 o'clock we want to take a quick break because we have a couple more slides to go through with you guys. Okay. Thank you.