Hello Plauntie, what would you do in case of a disaster situation without expecting a lot of gov help. Like how to provide for a small community, a lot of people are going to be out of work (non US) so small incomes might disappear. To be able to sustain a smallish community and depending how the pandemic goes, we are thinking of agriculture, animal husbandry, resources handling, the security for it, fuel reserves and energy alternatives when the grid is down. We might have 1 month or 2.

I’m in perhaps a better place than many for this, because I live in a place with very rich agricultural land, regular rain, and plenty of springs and rivers for water. People who live in cities or in more arid areas with poor soil would be harder hit. I can just plow some ground, and there’s deep rich black topsoil, five to six feet of it, the legacy of the tallgrass prairie that built some of the richest land on the planet. 

What I’d do? I’d plant wheat and corn and oats and beans and squash and vegetables. I’d keep maintaining a compost heap to give back to the soil what I took out of it. I’d get my water from springs or a sand point pump, and boil it before drinking it. I already grow soapwort, which you can clean yourself with, and I’d make soap with wood ash and whatever fat was to hand. 

This area is also rich with cattails and oak trees. Cattails provide more carbohydrate starch calories per acre than wheat. I’d dig and process the rhizomes into cattail flour, which is incidentally gluten free and safe for anyone with gluten intolerance. The river nearby is filled with water lilies; the tubers and seeds are edible and choice. Acorns are produced in massive abundance in the fall, and after processing to remove tannins are delicious. Acorn meal makes excellent crackers and porridge. 

Nettles grow rampant here. Nettle leaves, cooked, are delicious and nutritious. There’s a multitude of edible plants here; dandelion, lamb’s quarter, wild asparagus, wild blackberries and raspberries, mulberry, gooseberry, garlic mustard, wild horseradish, pepperweed (good pepper substitute if you can’t get it), chicory, wild grapes, wild rose hips, wild carrot…the list goes on. Walnut and hickory trees grow everywhere, and the nuts are oily and rich and delicious. 

Mushrooms! Morels in spring, oyster mushrooms on dead wood in summer, puffballs, honey mushrooms, chicken of the woods, chanterelles (uncommon but I’ve found them few rare times), lion’s mane, coral mushrooms. 

For livestock; chickens chickens CHICKENS. Chickens can be fed food scraps and can forage for themselves, and are fantastic for pest control. (Watch them around gardens; they’ll eat your vegetables as readily as weeds. They in turn provide on average an egg a day, and when you clean their coop compost their bedding and droppings into lovely rich compost that will go back onto the garden. When they stop laying, you get chicken for dinner, and stock from the bones. Save the feathers; they make good stuffing, and the flight feathers make good dusters. 

Goats are also good; they give milk and will eat almost anything, and take less room than, say, cows. Goats can be trained to pull carts. Their bedding and droppings also goes on the compost heap. Also, of course, if you have some males and females, you’ll get more goats, and goat is tasty. 

Bees. They’ll pollinate your crops, and produce honey and wax and propolis. 

Fuel reserves; to be honest, this is a trickier thing. If you’re thinking petrochemical fuel, it might be harder to get. In my area, weedy trees grow everywhere, and when it comes to fuel I’d go for wood. It can easily be gathered, stacked, and stored. 

I’d invest in a still, too. Hell, I already have. Anything with sugar in it or any sort of grain can be brewed into alcohol, which can be used to fuel engines converted to run on it, can be used to sterilize hands and instruments as needed, and of course can be drunk. 

Solar and wind and water are all good options. We’ve got an abundance of all three here. The most difficult thing would be the initial cost and batteries to store the power generated. 

Security? I’m honestly less worried about that, and I speak as someone who is a pro security person there. If people showed up desperate, I’d feed them, give them drink, give them a safe place if they needed it, and even welcome them to stay so long as they pitched in.