The first places that are going to be bombed would be DC, New York, the major metropolitan areas. Those people are going to flood out of the city, like smashing a beehive. They’re going to flood it on the interstate highways and they’re going to consume resources. If you’re anywhere near any of those highways, forget about it. It’s going to be the first thing to go. People make critical, bad mistakes. If the goal is to homestead or be a prepper and live off grid, that’s the one thing that can screw everything up on a property. Dead end roads are good.

Multiple turns from any other major highway or major road. The best place to be for prepping and off grid living is in the trees, on the high ground. I prefer rural, but there definitely is too rural in a grid down scenario, you’re screwed. If we think about a real SHTF scenario, seeds are going to have value, food’s going to have value. Probably 99% of people in the world today have zero agency over those things. If you don’t have these things, you die. Okay, so I want to go off grid, but there’s certain things that I need to know.

What are the eleven scales of permanence? So the eleven scales of permanence are a way of looking at the land in the big picture and accounting everything that’s there. And it came from a guy named Pa Yeoman who’s an australian farmer. And he really kind of created a lot of the principal ideas that people know about in permaculture. And he created eight scales of permanence. And some other guys named Dave, Jackie and Eric Townsmere came along and added some more things to it, added a bit more detail. But basically the idea of it is you look at everything on the property, on the things that are hardest to change and easiest to change.

So you start with climate number one, because climate is the most difficult thing to change. You can change the climate in a way by using greenhouses, having topography and such, wind breaks and things like this. But you start at climate, then you go to land form, then you go to water, then you go to invisible structures like the socio economics. Then you look at access and circulation, soil, vegetation and wildlife, basically all the way down to aesthetics and experience, which is at the bottom, because that’s the easiest thing to change. So we look at the property from what’s hardest to change to what’s easiest to change.

And you know, these things are usually very, very helpful when you’re analyzing a property because the first thing you want to consider is the climate. What is the climate, what’s your average wind speed? You know, what’s your average rainfall? What’s your average snowfall? Looking at those things, because you can’t really change those things. So if you’re not used to the climate that you’re in and you don’t understand the climate, you probably don’t want to be there. But because, say, for you, getting on the land out here, you’re used to the Saskatchewan climate and so you’re not really going to get anything.

That’s a wild card. But there are probably parts of this area that we live in, or even thinking about Alberta, going closer to the Rocky mountains where the climate’s really volatile. You know, in Calgary they get those chinooks that would score low. And so what I do with my property assessments is that I look at the eleven scales of permanence and I assign a number score to each one. And the objective is to have a property score really low. So, you know, climate, I assign more weight to a climate. So if the climate’s sketchy, is in, there’s a high average wind speed, volatile weather, you know, things that are going to make living there unpleasant, that’s probably a property that’s going to, you’re not going to look at.

So you give that a high score? I give it a high score if the climate’s bad, right. And then, and then, so we go through everything else and we look at Landform and water. Those two things are critical. And so, you know, a good land form is a bit of dynamic shape to a property. You know, just to go and buy a big, flat piece of land in Saskatchewan with no trees or no topography, you’re really exposed because all of the scales of permanence intersect with one another. So, for example, property that has good topography, meaning that’s got some variation to it, that will also create a better climate for you.

The amount of vegetation and wildlife on a property can affect the climate because if you don’t have any trees on your property, you’re going to be more exposed to the winds. So having this picture of all these eleven scales of permanence, and we go through each one, one by one, and analyze a property based on that, it really gives you a good sense of what’s there, what you can use, and what life is going to be like. And so when we do our property reviews every week, we publish a list that’s called the homestead accelerator. People can go to freedomfarmers.com to check it out.

We analyze property based on these things, and it’s something that nobody else does, because realtors don’t do this. You know, when you go look at a rural piece of property, the realtor understands the house and the driveway. Yeah. You know, and maybe a little bit about some of the trees. But they’re not looking at topography, they’re not looking at water, they’re not looking at access and circulation and zones of use. These are all things that are in the eleven scales of permits that are critical to your life on that property. And so it’s basically like a scorecard, if you will.

Most people, when they go to buy a property, the first thing they’re looking at is the thing that can be most easily changed. Which is the aesthetic. Yes. Which is, you know, so people tend to have things backwards. They have backwards. Even when you’re shopping as a aspiring homesteader, you know, the tendency is to get hung up on what does the house look like? That’s right. And, you know, I had this experience buying this acreage. I really, you know, I didn’t want to get into somebody’s old underwear. That’s kind of how I talk about it. You know, living in somebody’s house who they’ve lived in for 30 years, it’s like getting into somebody’s old underwear.

So I would be content with something newer. Doesn’t matter what the square footage was, you know, we just happened to get one that was somewhat above average square footage. But it was amazing to me how little the realtor knew about the land. And, you know, from our point of view, from our perspective, what we would want it for, there was really no appreciation other than, well, this is recreational land. But yeah, if you really want to know about those things, I think it’s great that you’ve broken it down in such a comprehensive way that people can check those, see if those boxes are checked, get a score.

So at your website, you rank these properties using this system? Yeah. So I created a course last year called finding the perfect homestead property, which basically gives people all the tools that I’ve been doing in consulting for years and kind of consolidate it down to a bunch of steps on how you analyze a property. Because there’s more than the eleven scales of permanence, there’s other things to factor in before you even get there. We built that out and then had a bit of success with it, and then we just had a lot of people reach out to us, be like, hey, well, you know, because in the course we do 54 property reviews in zones three through nine, USDA zones, climate zones, and analyze properties across North America.

But then we had a bunch of people reach out to us to be like, why don’t you just publish listings? And we thought, well, that’s a great idea. Let’s see if we can do it and maybe make some money at it. And so we have a directory that it’s, it’s almost like realtor.com. you go on. And it’s all homestead properties that my team and myself have evaluated for the food, water, energy, shelter, basically. And so we don’t really care so much about the house. Like, yeah, we don’t want to tear down, but we want to look at all those fundamentals first, because if the goal is to homestead or be a prepper and live off grid, these things are more important than, you know, the siding on the house.

Right. And so that’s what we do. And so we publish ten to 30 properties a week around North America on that list. And so people can basically sign up for our service on freedomfarmers.com and just get those listings. And we do monthly coaching calls where people come in and they’ll throw properties at me and I’ll evaluate them in real time. I’ll have my team pull up some statistics or data. We’ll get in on Google Earth and we’ll evaluate it. And, I mean, we’re saving people probably 90 or more percent of the time that they would spend visiting properties by doing this analysis.

Because we go through the analysis, it’s a full spectrum. We’re looking at everything. And I mean, if you ever looked for rural properties, it’s a lot of driving around. It is. Right. It’s time consuming. You got to schedule it, you got to coordinate it. And really, like you’re saying, all the data is there, all the information, you really don’t have to go. I mean, you might want to go just to see, you know, how the trees look or whatever before you buy. You want to go, yeah, but what we do is we eliminate 90 or more percent of the time you’re going to spend driving around to look at properties.

Because what our objective is is to eliminate properties immediately. So the first thing I do when I look for properties is I look for threats. Number one, I look for environmental threats, industrial threats, climate threats, water threats, you know, things like erosion, flooding. We look at the FEMA map, we reference the FEMA map for United States properties. Looking at, we don’t want to be in tornado zones, we don’t want to be in hurricane zones. We don’t want to be in tsunami zones. We’re evaluating all that stuff first, because if I find a threat, it’s off the list.

It’s done. And in my private consulting, I did that for years. It’s just looking at the threats, not just on the property, but around the property. So pulling out the lens, zooming out to, say, a 200, 300 square mile area and what’s around us, because if there’s some industrial agriculture going on, you know, just a couple kilometers from you, and they’re spraying glyphosate on that property and you’re downwind or downstream, you don’t want that. Yeah, and so generally speaking, I prefer properties that are rural because there’s. There’s sort of four. There’s four. Four types of land as we understand it in the western world is there’s urban land, which is, you know, downtown Saskatoon, it’s concrete buildings, what have you.

Then there’s suburban land, which is the suburbs. We all understand that. There’s peri urban land, which is where all the main commercial farming occurs. Straight roads, quarter sections, you name it. And then there’s rural land, which is trees. And, you know, I say the best type, the best place to be for prepping and off grid living is in the trees on the high ground. That’s where you want to be, and it’s difficult for a lot of people to achieve that. But becoming increasingly easier with remote work. Yes, there’s definitely a benefit to finding that peri urban sweet spot where you’re.

You’re close enough to a major center that you can still indulge in some of the amenities of the city from time to time and still have a convenient access to that. So you really have to. To make a choice at some point. I suppose, if you’re going to want to go off grid permanently, especially if you want to live there, and you don’t want just one of these turnkey agrarian bunker solutions where you only visit it twice a year. You really have to make that commitment. Yeah. And proximity to a town is an important piece of it because I prefer rural, but there definitely is too rural because let’s face it, you’re not going to just buy a property that’s turnkey, even if it’s got a nice house and a bunch, like it’s got a shop and a bunch of things that you want.

Maybe it’s got a pond or something like that. If you’re 4 hours from the nearest town, that’s a real pain, because when you go to develop that property, you’re just spending a lot of time in your truck going back and forth. So there is a sweet spot of, like you said, kind of on the edge of Perry urban, maybe at maybe an hour or two from a major town or maybe just 20 minutes from a small town, because if you can get, say, 80% of the things that you need from the town, that’s 30 to 20 minutes away, that’s okay.

If you got to go. If you got to commute to a bigger town once or twice a week, that’s not that bad. But if you happen to do it all the time, it’s a real drag in the building process. And the building process takes longer than most people think. It’s not just, hey, get out there, throw up some solar panels and put up a chicken shack, and you’re ready to go. Yeah, there’s a lot of work that goes into developing a homestead, and it’s a big investment, especially if you. I mean, there’s a sense of urgency right now.

And I’m not going to lie, that’s what’s motivating me. I’m. I’m in a mode where I see that, okay, even my best case projection is five years to things just falling apart. But worst case is much sooner than that. Maybe not falling apart completely, but to the point where it’s going to be very difficult. I mean, once the war with China starts, getting all of this stuff is going to be next to impossible. China’s a big linchpin. Years, if not decades, before those industrial systems come back online. Time. And so to get what you need now, even if you don’t plan on, like this guy was telling you about, who’s, he’s hoarding solar panels.

Like, he’s buying as many as he’s been buying them for years. Yeah. And it was, you know, lo and behold, here we go. Now we have this new tariff on green tech, which is just insane. Makes no sense. It’s total contradiction. Exactly. But they’re doing it. And so now it’s going to be more costly to get that stuff, at least in the short term, to get a solar system. And so the solar companies are happy because, you know, they’re going to make more money. Well, maybe they won’t, because people, the bar for entry is going to be much higher.

Yeah, but, yeah, I mean, for me, there’s a sense of urgency there. And I suppose if you want, you can expedite the process by paying people to do stuff. But then you, depending on what your purpose is, you forfeit some of your privacy because you got more contractors coming onto your property, you got more people who kind of know where you’re at and that you have these self sustaining systems in place. And I’ve never been somebody who has been overly paranoid about people knowing what I’m doing from a prepping point of view. But then again, I haven’t always been a public figure.

Now that I am one, I have to be exceptionally careful about that. Yeah, but I think for the average person, you know, even now, I would say that, you know, you have to be careful with who you allowed to do this type of work. And so. But you can’t expedite it. You can fast track it. Like you’re saying, it takes a long time. If you’re just gonna do it, do it right. And if you’re going to find the right people to do it, if you want to throw money at the problem, maybe you could do it a bit faster.

Yeah. Kind of the risk you run. There’s a couple things you said there that I experienced the hard way in the beginning of my journey, building my off grid property, is that, you know, you talk about that sense of urgency. The flip side of that is, if you buy too much stuff too early, you end up sitting on it, and sometimes you pay the wrong price. Like, you know, I started mine during the COVID show, and I was buying two by four by eights for $12 a piece. If I would have waited six months on some of my construction build, I would have saved, like, a significant amount of money, because I.

When the whole thing was starting, I was going, this is it. You know, because I’ve been a truther and been aware of the all this stuff for 20 years. And it was always five second to midnight with my dad growing up. And so when that whole thing started, I was like, this is the last opportunity. And so I was buying all this stuff. Buying all this stuff, got hosed on prices, made some, made some, you know, irrational decisions on things that I needed and deployed resources kind of ineffectively, actually. And so I think there’s. There’s. It’s important to be.

Have a sense of urgency, but more of a long and steady game than just, like, run to the gate to get everything going. Also, in the design, if you’re not thinking about the design of the homestead enough and how you interact with that land, sometimes you’ll go and make rash decisions and put things in places that you regret. And having to tear up concrete sucks. And I haven’t had to do that, but I’ve seen people do that. And so, yeah, that’s what I would say to that is be steady, be consistent, try not to make too many rash decisions too quickly, because it might come back to haunt you a little bit.

What I would say to that, and the silver lining with your experience buying two x four s is while it might be true that relative to the price now, they were much more expensive, one could potentially argue that at some point they’re going to be far more expensive. And what is the true value of that thing? We had a guy on the podcast, Nate Haggins, who’s a natural resource expert, and he talks about how in every barrel of oil there’s something like, what was it, five years worth of human labor? So you think about how much it costs for a barrel of oil now.

And he said that it’s nowhere near priced where it actually should be 100%. So in the future, we might be talking about $100 for a two x four. So you might look at this time and say, well, okay, maybe I got stealing. So I guess. But I see what you’re saying in terms of. There’s that old saying, if you want to do something right, slow down. Or if you want to do something fast, slow down. Yeah. And so there’s definitely. You want to plan. Yeah, prudent planning. I can’t remember what they’re saying. You know, there’s certainly a sense of urgency that has to be accounted for, which is not to say that I don’t think you have to cut corners per se, but maybe you end up having to just deal.

It’s like the guy who never wants to buy a computer because he’s always saying, well, then there’s going to be a cheaper one next. Exactly. Yes. But you kind of have to just accept, you have to just get the ring. You just have to go at it. But yeah, decisions in haste were some of the worst decisions I made on my property. An ideal scenario is if you get a property and everybody’s not going to have this way to do it. I think you do is that you get a property that you’re not living on just yet, and you have an opportunity to spend a bit of time there in every season of the year and witness the way things move around and change.

Definitely in regards to water. Like, one of the first things that I look for when I step on site on a property is I immediately look around to see where does the water go? Because that’s the one thing that can screw everything up on a property. If you don’t think about your road accesses, even your foot access. And what happens when large amounts of water come down unpredictably. Whether it’s snow melt that happens every year, or it’s that rain event that you get every ten years, where does the water move? You really need to think about that, because that’s the thing that people always screw up.

And that all comes down to access. And access in circulation, as we say in the eleven scales of permanence, is where are the things, where are the buildings, where are the structures, and how do they interact when the unpredictable happens with the weather, is that people make critical, bad mistakes on water. Where they put culverts, they didn’t think about how much water came through at the maximum amount that they didn’t put enough culverts in. And then the big suit, the biblical rain event happened, and the culverts are maxed out, and now they’re overflowing, and now your roads washing out, now you can’t even get off your property because you’ve screwed up your access.

That kind of thinking, that if you can, if you can witness the seasonal changes on your property, the things you learn just by observing where it goes, the water moves on your property is huge. Interesting. So what are, maybe you could expand a bit on some of these other scales. Permanence, we talked about, the cosmetic is obviously not that pertinent to preppers. No. But going up the scale, what are some other common mistakes that people tend to make? Yeah, so we talked about climate at the beginning. The shape of the land is number two, because the shape of the land pretty much dictates everything you can do on there.

And so there’s something to be said about, you know, a good topography and bad topography. And, you know, the topography here in Saskatchewan is radically different than it is in the mountains of British Columbia, where I live. But good topography does a lot of things for you. One is it gives you privacy, it gives you a bit of security in the sense that if you’re not visible from the road, it also creates opportunities. Opportunities to put in ponds, opportunities to divert water one way or the other. So much of it all comes back to water. It can create microclimates on the property, which are important, gives you shelter from extreme wind.

So topography is extraordinarily important. And I always like properties that have a varying topography. So you got some level of, you got low points, you’ve got high points, you’ve got peaks, valleys, ridges, things like that. Then, you know, I already talked about water, so there’s not much else to say about that. But in your access is critically important. But then also just the flora and fauna, the vegetation and wildlife on the property. You want to have trees. I mean, trees do so much for us. They shade us from the sun during the summer. They create shelter belts from the wind.

They give us resources. You know, the trees could give you firewood. There’s a certain level of medicinal components to trees and the natural flora and fauna on a property. Super, super important. But microclimates is one that’s, that’s often overlooked. People just think, okay, well, this, this property is just, it’s one type of experience. It’s, let’s just compare an extreme, an open prairie. Yeah, there’s no microclimate. It’s all one climate. But microclimate occurs when you have. And this is where topography. Perfect for mass agriculture. Exactly. Perfect. Not good for mass agriculture. Not good horticulture. Yeah. What is a good concept, what constitutes a good property for mass agriculture doesn’t constitute a good property for homesteading.

And so microclimates are, you might have a part on your property that is sort of low and wet in the valley in the summer. It’s a great place to hang out. You know, it’s cool, it’s shaded. It also might be a place that you could grow certain things that you couldn’t grow in the open areas. Maybe you can do shiitake mushrooms on, on logs in an area like that. But then you want some areas that are exposed because, you know, you got some crops that need to have light, as much light as possible. And so you want to think about a property in, in many different ways is this type of activity happens here and this type of activity happens in here and everything in between.

So that’s another one. Zones of use is another big one in the scales of permanence where you want to think about what happens where on the property. So in your, I say for pretty much every property, you want to think about your inner zones. So in permaculture, this is the zones of use. So your zones one, two and three, your zones one are the areas that call it 90% of the activity you do on the homes that’s going to happen on a day to day basis. So whether it’s collecting the eggs from the chicken coop, going and, you know, turning on the sprinklers in the garden, opening up the greenhouses, the things that you’re going to do as just a quick shot from the house, maybe harvesting some herbs from the kitchen garden to bring into the kitchen for your wife or whatever it is that’s going to happen there.

Your zone two is the things that you do less often, but things that, you know, maybe it’s the food forest, you know, going to manage some trees, maybe you’re moving some sheep around would happen in the zone, too. The zone three is the stuff that is further out. So maybe you’ve got some cows on your property and you go move them once a day or once every couple days. It all comes down to the zones, the intensity of the activities happening. And so you want to think about your property in those zones of use, and you want to categorize the things that happen according to that, because it’s going to make it easier for you.

If you’re having to walk 300ft to go and collect eggs once or twice a day, that doesn’t necessarily have to happen. Perhaps having that closer to the house would be something to consider, you know, and you can even divide your gardens up that way. Like, for example, my food forest on my property, we planted about 450 trees a couple weeks ago. That is in my zone too, where I only need, I don’t even need to go there every day, but on my chore path. You know, we talked about in the first segment of this podcast, like, what do you got to do when you walk out of your home to manage the homestead? You want to do the things that are happening all the time, being closest to you, so that most of the time you’re just accomplishing everything you need to do on the homestead in within an acre.

Really? Yeah. And then, you know, putting the things that don’t need to happen all the time a bit further out, and then it helps you plan and design the land better. You could do a lot like your first video. I think the video that has the most views is about your suburban farm layout. And you do a lot. I don’t know how much property that was, but it couldn’t be much more than an acre. Oh, that property, the home, my urban homestead was a third of an acre. Yeah, tiny, but that’s literally, you can, you could take that and put that onto 160 acres and it’s the exact same thing.

And then. Because now you’re just adding elements that I couldn’t had there anyways, right. Add some perennials and some trees, but not a lot. And so you could take all of my early market gardening content and apply it to a large scale homestead is because all those things are going to happen in the zone one, and then you’re adding other pieces that I wouldn’t have had space for in that context. And it’s practicality to, you know, when I’m designing this current homestead, I always use air quotes, because for me, when I think homestead, I think, you know, everything I think of the Amish.

Right. Yeah. But, yeah, as close as I’m gonna get, at least right now. You know, I originally had these big aspirations to put things maybe further away, you know, not thinking about that. Yeah. But, yeah, you know, my buddy dean over at Arcopia came by and he’s like, you want everything tight. You know, you want to try to keep everything tight. Even my shelter belt that I planted was way too far out. And I don’t even know how many of those trees are going to survive anyways. They were younger trees, so I’m not too concerned if I screwed up on that, then.

Big deal. Yeah. Yeah. I originally had these. This grander vision, and then realizing just from day to day what’s easiest and designing it around that. Yeah. Because it’s kind of like a big, cool EDC tool, like a big hefty leatherman that has all the. Or the swiss army champ or whatever, that has 100 different tools. Well, it’s great. But if it’s too heavy to carry, you’re never going to carry. You’re never going to use it. Exactly. So, you know, you have to kind of pare things down a little bit and also think about what is going to be used most of the time, you know, and that’s a good analogy to the multi tool is.

Yeah, the multi tool is great when you need something like that, but you might just use the knife 90% of the time. All I use is the pliers. Yeah, 90% of the time. So maybe the screwdriver. Exactly. So what? So what’s the point of having that whole thing and. Yeah, and. And that. But that’s actually where I start. When it comes to homestead design, the first place I start with everybody is your context. What suits your lifestyle, what do you want to do that’s number one. And then coming up with a list of negotiables and non negotiables.

So what are the things that you know you need and that you’re not willing to negotiate on? And so for you, it was like you wanted the privacy, you wanted large acreage because you wanted to have the space. Right. Those are probably non negotiable. Yeah. But, you know, probably the exact length of the driveway or whether. How big the shop was, things like that. Those might have been negotiable for you because you knew you could build them. And so that’s the biggest thing a lot of people think that there’s sort of a boilerplate homestead property, and there is to some degree, because if you just ask me, you know, what are the main things that make a good homestead property? I could tell you, but at the end of the day, it’s the end user that matters the most.

And what’s your context? Because if you’re not going to do certain things, why deploy resources into setting them up that you’re never going to use them? So you really want to understand what you want. And this is why I tell people all the time, make a list of negotiables and non negotiables. It’s a great thing. Think about what you want the most, what you’re not willing to negotiate on, and then what are the things you’re flexible on? Because then you can come up with a realistic picture that when you start getting out in the field and looking at places you can go, okay, well, I wanted this, but I’m flexible on that thing, but this thing I’m not.

And so if you’re really clear on that, it’s going to make your search so much easier. And it’s often sitting down with your spouse or whoever it is you’re going to do this with and making that list and spending some time to kind of iron it out because you’re going to have, your spouse and yourself are going to have different needs. Right. But go through that, because if you don’t have that, you’re going to waste so much time when realtors start showing you stuff because you’re just going to be arguing in front of the realtor, which is a waste of time and it’s a waste of their time.

So if you know that list, when you go to look, it’s going to be a lot easier. So moving up the scales then, what’s next on the scales of prize? Okay, well, let’s consult my list. So we talked about access and circulation. We talked about vegetation, wildlife. We talked about microclimate. Buildings and infrastructure are number eight. And so, you know, for most people looking for homes, that’s number one. But for us, it’s number eight. So looking at the condition of the house, the fencing, the shop, the infrastructure there, it could be the. Well, the infrastructure, the power system, all that.

The buildings and infrastructure next from there is zones of use. I talked about that a little bit, thinking about how things are zoned and how that’s laid out. Number ten is soil, and it’s number ten because you can fix the soil like a lot of people get hung up on the soil and on my property, I have no soil. I had to mine it from riparian water collected areas that I turned into ponds that I repurposed that soil and moved it into my growing areas. And then lastly, it’s aesthetics and experience. And often, you know, as you pointed out, that’s the first thing that people are thinking about, oh, how nice is it when I pull up and see this fence and, and this little area of trees, like you can fix all those things.

You can renovate the house. And so, you know, climate, landform, water, socioeconomics. And we didn’t, we didn’t actually talk about that. I could circle back to it, access, circulation, vegetation, wildlife, microclimate buildings and infrastructure, zones of use, soil, anesthetics and experience. But going back to number four, which is the socio economics, this is a thing that a lot of people don’t think about is they don’t think about. We talked about it a little bit when we’re talking about proximity to a town. Yeah. You know, and what, what does your daily or weekly commute look like if you have to do that? But also, what is the general socioeconomics of an area? And I’ve ruled out properties for years based on that alone.

In that, you know, there’s some parts of the United States that are extraordinarily undervalued. So you might look at a state like Tennessee in the US right now, which is really hot. That’s a hot market. There’s a lot of people expatriating from California and New York going to Tennessee. They want a bit of the freedom, they want a bit of the space, but there’s, everybody else is wanting to go there. So the values are just through the roof. You can go to a place like northwest Arkansas and find properties of the same size. It’s the same climate region, really, at a quarter to a third to half the price.

But some of those places, the socioeconomics are pretty gnarly in that all your neighbors are really poor. It’s like an episode of deliverance. And so you might say, well, how are we going to fit in in this neighborhood? You know, it’s really rough. It’s really depressed. Sometimes that’s not going to work out for you if times you stand out like a sore thumb. Especially you’re coming from some of these better states, wealthier states like New York and California. You might go in and put in this really awesome looking turnkey homestead, but it just doesn’t fit in.

You’re going to be a target also thinking about the socioeconomics in the sense that, okay, where’s the biggest town closest to me? What’s the biggest city? What happens in an SHTF scenario? Those people are going to flutter to the city, like smashing a hive, a beehive. They’re going to flood it on the interstate highways, and they’re going to basically consume resources in the easiest areas possible. So you want to be, you don’t want to be on any interstate highways. You want to be preferably a dirt road. You want to be hidden from any viewpoint that if people were to flutter to the cities, you just want to think about where they’re going to go.

I often think about, okay, so you have, you know, a lot of these inner city regions that, you know, people have a high degree of street smarts, there’s a lot of crime. But I often wonder, okay, what happens when the suburbs run out of food? What do people turn into then, because they’re as dependent? Is it going to be people more cooperative? We don’t know. It could even be worse in some respects, maybe not so much in the country, because people are in the rural environments. People are maybe more willing to work together. Universally, they’re just used to having to figure things out.

I think you’ve even said this before that, you know, universally, it doesn’t matter where you go, whether you’re in BC or rural. Everybody’s kind of the same whether you go to BC or Texas. But, you know, I often wonder what it’s going to look like. We talk about Black Friday in different regions, but even though the well to do who are very, you know, as technologically dependent on the grid as everybody else in the city, you know, I’m skeptical of how well they’re going to cooperate. But, you know, interestingly, you talked about being too close to, like, major highways and stuff.

Yeah. And there was this story I just heard in Quebec. I think this guy had all his cows stolen. So, like, this is where we are. And I’ve talked about this in my videos. I’m like one of the first things to go in SHTF. People always talk about, well, the deer are going to be hunted to extinction. They’re going to be rustling the cattle. Absolutely. This guy had 80 head of cattle stolen. Yes. I don’t even know how they did it. They haven’t been found. So these guys were sizing up his property and they knew when he was going to leave.

They, I guess they’ve had big enough trucks that they could bring in. They stole all 80 cattle, and that was like $200,000 worth of meat. That’s insane. I’ve never heard of that. Yeah, so that’s kind of where we’re at now, right? It’s like exactly what you’re saying. Like, you know, if you’re that close, you know, even in a less than SHTF or SHTF light scenario, you know, you’re at, you’re vulnerable. Your cows aren’t even. This is why I say get to the high ground where there’s lots of trees and a lot of that comes down to just visibility.

And so imagine, you know, imagine a geographical area we’re probably both familiar with, like the lower mainland of Vancouver or the GTA, you know, the Toronto Southern Ontario concrete jungle. If you’re anywhere near any of those highways, forget about it. It’s going to be the first thing to go. But the, but the good thing is most people aren’t going to get any further than a tank of gas. And so the good thing is for us out of the country is that when that if, when and if that moment happens, you’re not going to get any further than the tank of gas.

And if you’re wanting to get out of the city when everybody else is, you’re not getting anywhere. And it’s the same sort of proverbial scene you see in every zombie apocalypse movie where you see miles and miles of cars in gridlock and nobody’s going everywhere anywhere. And there’s going to be this really brutal phase where when people start to mobilize, well, they’re first going to chew up resources that are closest to them. I mean, that’s just. People are going to be. That’s what they’re going to do. Field dressing cows. Exactly. So this is where farmland is not really good for prepping.

You want to be in rural areas, at least on the cusp of a rural area. Dead end roads are good, you know, multiple turns from any other major highway or major road. You know, you really want to think about traffic. Like when you’re buying an off grid property and you want to do the agrarian bunker, as we’ve been calling it, you want to think about how many cars are driving down that road on a day to day basis. And what is the traffic? Is it flow through traffic? Is it traffic? That’s commuter traffic. What is it? And you can often tell that just by looking on Google Earth and just getting a sense of it.

But the way you get in on your property is extraordinarily important and having multiple ways out is also good. One of the benefits of mass agriculture. Is that a lot of, unfortunately, a benefit for preppers who don’t like high population densities is that a lot of people who used to live on these family farms are now being taken over by these larger commercial enterprises. So what was a sparsely populated area is now becoming even more sparsely populated because there’s no, you know, like the town where I live in. You know, it’s a dying town, like most Saskatchewan towns are dying because basically corporations are taking over.

Everything’s becoming automated. Yep. And so maybe at once there was a higher amount of traffic in a certain region. But I agree, ideally you would find a situation where you’re down a few tertiary roads, cordonary roads even. And I guess the only downside of that is that if you do work in a city or if you do, if you kind of have 1ft in the door, then that’s a lot more turns you have to take on a daily basis. So there we go back to, you can’t kind of have the best of both worlds. You have to sort of make an exception.

But yeah, well, there’s no question about that. It’s all about exceptions. It’s all about compromises. There is no perfect case scenario. So you have to factor those things in and I would say put those on the front end of your search. When you’re put, when you’re thinking about your negotiables and non negotiables, that’s, that’s got to be front and center because it’s not just about where you want to be once the homestead’s done. It’s about where you’re going to be for the whole journey. And that’s where most people miss out, is they, they just think about, they dream up this perfect case scenario and what it’s going to look like.

Little house on the prairie. But they don’t think that it’s going to take three to ten years to do this. And what does your life look like in between? And they perhaps aren’t thinking about all of the contingencies that are going to be required if things go awry and society deteriorates further. Yeah, it’s already deteriorating, but deteriorates further. So you also talk about different climate regions. And I’m actually curious to see if we do make it out to my property today. What, what you think about it, because there is some benefits to flat land. Yes, but there’s also, like you say, a lot of drawbacks.

What do you think of in terms of climate region? How, how important is that? Because obviously we’re in pretty much, you know, as close as you can get to. To it not being a viable option possible. We’re in zone three b now. It’s been reclassed due to things heating up around the planet. It used to be three a, now we’re three b, so we can have a slightly longer growing season, I guess. Yeah. What is your assessment of the importance of climate regions? I think what it really comes down to is what you’re used to, because, you know, some people get into these debates of, you know, what is the ideal climate to live in? And then, you know, probably most people’s gut reaction is, say, well, tropical would be sweet, but tropical regions aren’t really that easy to grow in if you’re.

If you’re a canadian and you’re used to a certain diet you got out of the tropics, man, and a lot of the stuff you’re used to growing here just doesn’t work down there. The pests don’t go away. Like, what are you referring to? Well, like, try growing carrots and lettuce. You know, in Mexico, root veg is very difficult. Soil nematodes, the bad ones. The diseases don’t go away. The aphids don’t go away. There’s actually something to be said that’s great about a reset in the winter. I actually like it. So you know what your preference is.

Like, there’s five types of climates, right? There’s. There’s Arctic, which is. Forget about it. There’s tropical, there’s. There’s desert, there’s boreal, and there’s temperate. So if you look at a map of North America, where do the prairie or grasslands fall on that? They’re classified as boreal. And that’s a broad term, because, you know, you pointed out a little bit when we’ve been talking about your property, you’re on the edge of the boreal region. What you’re referring to there is where the boreal trees start, right in the softwood trees. But we are technically in the climate classification system.

We are in the boreal regions, which essentially means boreal is classified as cold winters, hot, dry summers, broadly. And of course, there’s a, you know, myriad of exceptions and details in all that, but most people in North America live in the boreal and temperate regions. If you look at a map of North America, everything basically west of Texas up until the Rocky Mountains is arid and dry. So those are the. We call them the BSK climates. They’re the steppe and cold and hot desert regions. And then you get into the west coast, and then you’re in the coastal temperate regions.

And then coming into North America. The temperate region that exists where most Americans live is that green zone. Basically going from south of Pennsylvania down to sort of eastern Texas and then all the way down to Florida. That green zone is the temperate region. And temperate is wet, basically, but you get, you know, a mild winter with rain. But you also get rain during the summer, which lends itself well to agriculture. It’s why there’s so much food production and agriculture out there. It’s the same as the central Valley of California. It’s this sort of unique temperate region.

Low elevation. It’s warm year round and it actually gets some amount of rain. For the rain you can’t get. There’s tons of ground water and they irrigate everything. But I think the boreal regions are great. I would cut it off at zone three. You know, zone two is pretty rough and pretty, pretty difficult to. It’s doable. You know, the pioneers did it, but yeah, I think boreal and the temperature. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So let’s. I have a question for. I come with, I’m a billionaire and I say, Curtis, money is no option. Where do I build my doomsday bunker, my agrarian bunker in North America? Anywhere.

Well, let’s just focus on North America. I would say west of the Mississippi in general, if you can just choose. And if you’ve got limitless resources, you don’t really need to worry about people being resources. So you could be far away from people. I mean, a lot of the elites are hunkering down in Denver and a lot, a lot of the. A lot of the bunkers are actually in Colorado. Colorado is not that great of a climate. Like it’s. It’s harsh, it’s a step climate. It’s. It’s dry, elevated, it’s high elevation, it’s cold. But if, you know, limitless resources, well, but there is like, do this and plane there, isn’t it? Yeah.

Yep. Yep. And Colorado is very different, just like Alberta. I mean, and it’s very similar because it all follows that same region of mountains that go down. Why are the elites buying stuff there? Because there’s low population. And I think their rationale is that in nuclear holocaust, the first places that are gonna be bombed would be DC, New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, Detroit. You know, the major metropolitan areas, Miami, whatnot. I mean, you look at a population map of the United States or North America in general. 80% of the population is on east, the Mississippi. Very few people up to the coast and then the rest of the population centers are on the coastal regions of North America.

So, I mean, it’s a mixed bag. Like, there’s good places everywhere. I think, you know, some of the best states right now in the US are northwest Arkansas, one of my favorite zones, southwest Missouri in the Ozark region. Really nice in Canada, but I’m of course biased to the west coast because I like the mountains, I like the privacy and the balanced climate that we get. It’s a little bit warmer in the prairies. There’s lots of good spots in Saskatchewan and Alberta. I look at good properties in these regions all the time. You want to be out of the ag land and be closer to more rural areas, more trees, high ground, but you also want to be close to water, right? You need to have water, and so you want to have a mix of water from weather, from rain, but also groundwater.

And so I’d say like an ideal homestead is you want to have at least two sources of water. Maybe you’ve got some seasonal snow melt that you can capture through ponds or pit wells, but then also having a drilled well where you get access to some kind of artesian or primary water that’s in the earth that is, that that doesn’t fluctuate from the seasons. That’s key because in a grid down scenario, if you can’t pump water, I mean, you’re screwed. Without water, there’s nothing. So water is, you know, we could put water at the top of the eleven scales of permanence.

But the reason we don’t is that we can drill wells, we can do earthworks that can get us water from the surface. And we might look, be able to look at some of that on your property. Um, but yeah, this is some food for thought. I mean, where is the ideal spot? I don’t know. There’s a lot of variables, and people are the ultimate variable because you can make the case that, well, if you have limited resources, who cares about people? Just go hunker down in some area where there’s nothing and just dump as much resources as you want to make up all the shortfalls.

But that’s not the reality for most people. And how are you going to get there and this access and who’s going to do the work and all that stuff? Right. And so, and even when you look at. Sorry to cut you off, but even where a lot of people would think would be the ideal place, that’s where all the missile silos are. Exactly. So that’s where like people would think, oh, well, I’ll just go into the flyover states. Well, that’s where they have all the missile silos because nobody lives there. Yeah, exactly. And so there’s a lot of variables.

And you know, when, when I’m doing this stuff, this work for people, I have to factor in their context and their negotiables and non negotiables. That’s so that basically crafts where we go. So what you’re saying is there’s many suitable places that you would direct people. It does become a matter of preference, but there’s several ten out of tens out there. Yeah. And I would probably say there’s a stronger list of places that I wouldn’t go than places I would go. Right. So I would avoid. As far as the US is concerned, I would avoid Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, because they’re just barren, there’s just nothing there.

I would avoid western Texas, I would avoid southern California just because of the volatility of the population and how many people there are. Population, welfare dependency. I would actually avoid Florida. I know a lot of freedom minded people want to move to Florida, but there’s so many people in Florida. It’s in a, in a se level too. Well, that’s just it, too. It’s, it’s, it’s incredibly vulnerable with climate. And so that rules it out for our eleven scales of permanence. So I would avoid the dead zones. I like, look at the trees, you know, look at areas that are green.

That should be obvious. But I hear so many people moving into the desert. I’m like, there’s nothing in the desert. You can’t grow the marsh. Yeah. Unless you have like endless. I guess if you have energy and a water source, you could irrigate, but that requires energy. It’s like in the Middle east right now. Like they’re being held together by energy. Limitless energy. Exactly. If it wasn’t for that, Dubai wouldn’t exist without limitless energy. No, nobody would live there. So when I think about homesteaded, at least in my case, I’m designing my homestead around the ultimate redundancy, and that by the time I’m finished my home, I will be able to survive without electricity or pumped water.

I’ll be able to run everything off wood stoves. I’ll be able to heat my home, cook and heat water with a wood stove alone. I’ll be able to pump water manually and I’m setting everything up to that ultimate resonance. Yeah, I’ve got, I’ve got a great off grid power system. It works good. It’s got some good redundancies built into it. I’ve got multiple sources of power. But what about an EMP? What if an EMP knocks your whole off grid system out? You can only prepare so far for that. So I want to be able to get through a canadian winter with one wood stove, and I’m designing everything based around that.

So you would leverage things like passive solar, geothermal. What other sort of ways would you mitigate weather and climate and temperature? Yeah, so you mean, you said it, greenhouses number one for us in Canada, and actually most places in the world, you got to have greenhouses because even if you’re in the tropics, greenhouses keep the water during the wet season off your crops. You can’t grow in soggy soil. So greenhouses are universally important in a real off grid, prepper, homestead type scenario. So multiple greenhouses, different types of greenhouses, passive soil greenhouses, I love, especially in these climates where you get sun in the winter, it might be -30 or 40 celsius, but it’s sunny.

You know, you go and Dean from Arcopius greenhouses, and he’s got a hot tub in there. You know, it’s a nice, it’s nice. It’s a nice place to be. So I like that for the lifestyle component, also growing some of the things that you just couldn’t grow in any other situation. But then I like to think about greenhouses is in, I have scales of inputs into these greenhouses. So the pasta solar greenhouse requires inputs. It’s also expensive to build. It’s a lifestyle piece. It’s a food growing piece. But then you want to go, okay, what’s my next step down in a greenhouse? Maybe it’s a simple high tunnel with two layers of poly.

You blow air between it, run a low voltage fan. I can do that in off grid, no problem. And I can really extend my season. I mean, I can grow in this greenhouse, call it ten months of the year. Then I’ve got high tunnels, which are just unheated, that just extend the season. So I’m not growing them in them during the winter. But if I have a cold march, it doesn’t matter. I can start seeding crops in there. So I’m kind of thinking about three types of greenhouses, really, in terms of that, and then other types of infrastructure.

You want to have a shop where you can build and fix things. You want to have a food processing area where you can do your freeze drying, you can do your, you know, your preparing your food, your canning, your processing and stuff like that. You want to think about all the things you need to do on that homestead and then having that infrastructure to accommodate each of those tasks. Yeah, that’s a lot. It’s definitely. It is a lot to think about. You talk about dump load power, and this is something I didn’t think about getting a solar system is you’re going to have an excess amount of energy that unless you’re pumping it back to the grid, you’ll have to do something where you don’t have to, I guess.

But what sort of uses could a person have for this dump load power aside? Mining bitcoin. Yeah, exactly. That’s what everybody. Oh, go my bitcoin. But it’s actually, as far as setting off grid, it’s hardly worth it just because your system’s gonna seasonally produce. Right. So if you’re in Canada or any relative cold climate, your solar system is gonna overproduce for six months and it’s gonna relatively under produce for the other six months. So if you don’t have a place to dump excess electricity when you have it, you’re losing on an ROI on your system. Right.

Because my. My whole off grid system cost me $130,000 canadian setup. That’s all the labor, all the wire, all the batteries, everything all. I don’t feel so bad now deal that I’m getting so. But I mean, 20 solar, 100 kilowatt hours of batteries, a 13 kilowatt diesel generator, all that stuff. And if only Tesla would allow you to use that power in your Model X, you’d have the batteries taken care of. Exactly. If I could tie it in and there’s something that I’ve done, Ford, is that they actually allow you to use that power. It’s a pretty cool thing.

And I wish Tesla did that because both you and I drive Teslas partly. So where you do half the audience. Yeah, yeah. Everybody’s like, you’re a sellout. Totally. But regardless, you need to be able to use, if you’re not using the electricity, your solar system, when you max out your batteries, it goes into what’s called a float state, which means that it just turns off the panels because there’s nowhere for electricity to go. So if you. If you pulled in 80 kilowatt hours of electricity during a day and then it went in a float, but you could have produced another 30 or 40, you’re literally losing out on your ROI.

So you want to dump that electricity somewhere. So electric vehicles are great for that. Electric tools are great for that. Pumping water uphill to cisterns, to gravity feed down to your system is a great way. Dumping it, pumping to ponds, what have you, heating things. So in the summertime, you know, turn all your electric, turn all your water heating to electric because you’re going to have excess electricity. So just run an electric hot water tank. That’s what I do. So in the winter I either heating it by wood or heating it by gas. But in the other, for me it’s the other ten months of the year I just do electric hot water.

So for you it also could be putting in a heat pump into your house and have heating and cooling. If you’ve got a big enough solar system, you can heat and cool for at least eight months of the year so that you don’t have to do less firewood in the winter. I do have geothermal, which is. Yeah, you know, and that’s a lot of energy. Another one that’s worth looking into is sand batteries really cool off grid tech, which is still kind of in this development developmental state. But the idea is you take excess kilowatt hours from your solar, you put it into resisting electricity, just like the cook stove, the, the, you know, the, the coils on a stove, and you heat sand.

And so you dump heat into sand and then you pack sand in some kind of container and then you run a heat coil through that, either a water, oil or air. You, you dump electricity into the sand, it heats the sand, it can, sand can hold heat for months. And they’re using this, this stuff in Holland and other parts of Europe where in the summer you’re dumping heat, dumping electricity, just boom boom, boom, boom, boom. This thing heats up and you’re just pushing air. Water is difficult because water has a, as a, is a pretty low boiling point, but oil and, and air, you push through this thing and then you get heat out of it for months.

So I’m looking at putting these into my pasta solar greenhouse, so that say on the shoulder season, when I’ve got lots of excess electricity going into the fall and winter, I’m just dumping excess kilowatt hours into that. And then in the wintertime, a fan just turns on and it blows air through this thing and radiates it into the greenhouse. Or maybe it goes to boil glycol water for your boiler loop. So is it just the sun’s light heating up the sand? No, no, it’s the sun. The sun’s light heating up or changing solar electricity, and then you’re taking all the excess energy and just heating resistor coils, basically sand batteries.

Check them out. It’s a bit of a rabbit hole on YouTube, but it’s cool. Now, what are your thoughts on bunkers? Because I think a lot of people think, well, a bunker is just for, you know, running and hiding from nuclear fallout. But one of the great things about these bunkers that are built usually well below the frost line is the temperature regulation is very stable, and it’s a way, you know, if everything else were to fail in the dead of -40 winter in Saskatchewan, you know, a person could take refuge knowing that the temperature, it’s still probably going to be cold, but it’ll be survivable.

It’ll be survivable. Exactly. No, I think it’s great. And I would say take the idea of a bunker and just build a really good root cellar. And it’s dual purpose, so that’s what I did. I built a really sweet root cellar. And is it below grade? It’s below grade. It’s partially the door. It’s below grade on three sides, and then the door is at a lower grade. But I could. This. This root cellar stays at a stable temperature in summer and winter, so it could potentially be. And I’ve got a big concrete wall in front of it, so I’m not, frankly, worried about nuclear fallout.

But. But it’s, you know, as you said, it’s. It’s something that you could. If everything else failed and it was freezing dead of winter, you could just go in there and survive. Yeah. For me, I think the idea of a bunker becomes more and more practical the more I think about it. And. And indeed, nuclear fallout, depending on where you live, might not even be a factor. And if it is, it’s only going to be for a limited period of time. But as a place to store things, as a place to store food, as a place to have a constant climate control for tornadoes.

Exactly. Even a basement might not be sufficient. You know, we’re living in a day and age where there was funnel clouds just, you know, not too far from where we are right now. Exactly. Recently. And so even way up north here, there’s tornadoes, there’s, you know, so there’s a lot of practical aspects to it. So I think the bunker market has unfortunately been cornered just by the doomsday crowd, but. Which, of course, I’m part of. Yeah, yeah. But, you know, I think there’s a lot of more practical users. It is. And I think if you just changing the terminology, it’s just.

It’s just a really good root cellar. It functions in the same way. Yeah. Because it needs the same conditions. Right. If you’re going to keep food somewhat shelf stable and what, for a long period of time, you need to have that stable climate with. With it, you know, bit of fresh air intake and. And all of that. So it’s. It’s more or less the same thing. A really good root cellar is going to function as a bunker. Absolutely. Well, I think we’ve covered a lot of different aspects of this. I mean, we could go into great detail about security and, you know, different ways to get water, heat your home, things like that.

But I’m more interested in doing some hands on stuff. Yeah. So I’m hoping that we can head out to the homestead today and not get rained on too much. Where can people find more information on what you do follow. Go. Go to freedomfarmers.com is where we have all of our courses. If they want to check out that homestead accelerator program we have where we list properties, freedomfarmers.com is the place you want to follow me on YouTube. I’m still there. Been somewhat censored, but I’m still there. YouTube and Rumble and odyssey, it’s all off grid with Curtis Stone.

And I’m on Twitter. The gridstone on Twitter. And I post a telegram, too. Sh. TF farmer on Telegram. And, yeah, that’s the way people. That’s right up our viewers alley. Yeah. And I will say that your YouTube channel is a wealth of information, and it’s very well presented and easy to understand. You have the kind of videos that I can actually watch. Well, you know, I try to just give people value. That’s always where I’ve been at, is like, I don’t want to waste people’s time and entertain people. I just want to help people get things that they need to get something done.

And that’s been the biggest part of my. My ten year journey doing this has been having people say to me, man, you showed me some stuff that totally changed my life. Yeah, it’s. That means a lot to me. And you’re doing a series where you go over all the states and provinces and provinces, and you talk about the pros and cons of buying property in each. And I encourage people to just, you know, it’s one of those things, too. You kind of have to watch the video, but it’s one of those things I find I can put on in the background and still, yeah, get stuff out of it.

Just as I would like a podcast total. Even now that I have property. I’m still looking for property. Yeah, I’m still always, you know, it’s. I would like to find one place to live and die in, but I know five years is gonna go by if the world doesn’t end, then, you know, maybe I’ll be greener pastures, so to speak. Yep. Thanks for coming out, man. Yeah, brother. Now let’s get out to the field. Right on. I actually think you have enough on this land to have a sustainable firewood supply for the rest of your life.

Seven acres is all you need, and you got way more than seven acres of timber here. The best way to support this channel is to support yourself by gearing up@Canadianpreparedness.com. where where you’ll find high quality survival gear at the best prices. No junk and no gimmicks. Use discount code prepping gear for 10% off. Don’t forget, the strong survive, but the prepared thrive. Stay safe.
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