I can blow up Tannerite pretty much any time of day if I wanted to and nobody would complain because my nearest neighbors are miles away. You can’t do that pretty much anywhere else in Canada. You can do it in BC, but you’ll be paying a lot of money and you’d have to go way deep in the sticks and you’re not going to have access to as many amenities. It’s one thing to be remote, but to be remote and to still have the ability to have contractors come on site to do work is something else.

So in a lot of those places in BC, yeah, you can buy a quarter section. It’s going to be fully treed. There’s going to be almost no access and nobody’s going to want to come and build anything there for you unless they are paid an arm and a leg. One of the other benefits is low population density. That’s part of the reason why land is so cheap because nobody really wants to live here. You can find various parts of the plains that have more detail in the topography. So they’re hillier, they have a few trees on them.

That’s kind of what you want to go for. You don’t want a flat piece of bare land where you’re fully exposed. The land is such that you can design it and customize it. It’ll take a lot of work, but it’s a nice place to build on. You don’t have to worry about removing trees. If anything, your biggest challenge is going to be planting trees. One of the other benefits is, like I said, low population density. That’s going to be a benefit if there ever was competition for resources post-grid down. The carrying capacity of the land can sustain the population we have here, even in a grid down situation.

Because of the sheer volume of land and it’s pliable enough that you can grow crops needed to subsist. You’re not going to be able to grow apricots and peaches and things like that. You might be able to pull that off in a greenhouse. One of the great things about the flat topography is that you can build as many greenhouses as you want. I think just the lack of biodiversity is a big problem for some people. There’s just not a lot of different types of plants. You go to BC and on every street there’s 50 different species of flora.

In terms of economic growth potential, I would say there’s some, but unfortunately there’s a small town mentality in most of the prairies that doesn’t want to grow. People are kind of content where they’re at, which is fine, but that doesn’t make for a lot of rapid growth that you would see in a place like Calgary or other places where they’re just going balls to the wall building. While there is still a lot of government regulation in the urban districts and around the small towns, you’ll find the least amount of hassle and government oversight and regulation in the rural areas.

So you’re pretty much free to do what you want with the land for the most part. There are restrictions, don’t get me wrong, there’s building codes and all that, but not nearly as much as you would find in a place that was more strictly regulated where there was less land to go around and there was just more of a population density issue. That’s one good thing about living out here is you could do a lot in the name of agriculture. If you’re building something and you say it’s for agricultural purposes, then you can pretty much do what you want without a lot of permits and all that stuff.

Water is incredibly easy because you could dig a proper well or you could just dig a hole deep enough and it’ll eventually start filling up with water. Depending on where the water table is, you’ll never run out of water here per se. In addition to abundant groundwater throughout most of the province, you also have very fertile soils. So a lot of the soil is really black down to like a foot, probably two feet in some places of topsoil and a lot of it has been not really messed with too much. So you can find patches of land that have just been used by cattle for cattle feed.

So they haven’t had a lot of chemicals sprayed on them. They haven’t had a lot of hard pack due to tractors. You can find a lot of that land and usually it’s in the places where you want to go as a prepper, which is kind of the transition zone in between the boreal forest and the prairies, which is like an aspen parkland biome where you have poplar bluffs and short deciduous trees, not quite getting into the evergreen trees quite yet. So there’s an abundant amount of soil. It’s perfect for grazing animals. You can grow a lot of meat out here.

The hunting is pretty good. There’s a good line of sight. The animals love it, especially in the transition zone because they have their bluffs that they can use for security and then they have their virtually infinite fields to graze. So there’s lots of benefits in that respect. You also have a lot of waterfowl hunting. While we have a lot of lakes, most of them are out of accessible range. Whereas if you go to Ontario, you throw a stone and you’re going to hit a lake. So even though they may not have as many lakes, you don’t have to fly a plane to them.

One of the other benefits of the prairie provinces is the ability to harvest the maximal amount of solar power. So because of the lack of cloud cover and we have the most sunny days of any province and possibly any state, but don’t quote me on that. We are able to maximize efficiency on photovoltaic harvesting. We’re able to get a lot of harvesting in the summer where our days get as long as sun coming up at 4.30 in the morning and going down at 10 at night. In the winter time, you have shorter days, but the colder weather actually leads to enhanced efficiency of the solar panel functioning themselves, which doesn’t fully compensate for the short days, which are almost twice as short in winter as they are in summer.

They still are going to be bringing in more than they typically would on a very hot day. And it’s also very windy too. If you wanted to get a wind turbine, there’s many options. There’s vertical wind turbines. There’s the standard propeller looking ones that most people are familiar with. This is a great place to do that. So you have your groundwater, you have your energy, you have endless stretches of land. You just have to put the work in to put it all together. So you’re going to need solar to power your greenhouse, perhaps for three or four seasons.

If you wanted to, if you wanted to put lights in a greenhouse, you can use passive solar greenhouse technology in order to grow crops year round. A friend of the channel, Arcopia, has been doing that with very good success growing banana trees even in the wintertime. Operational security wise, like I said, it’s probably not going to afford as many options as would the more varied terrain that you’ll find in British Columbia. But again, because it’s a blank canvas, you can do a lot more. And I would venture to say that if you had to get heavy equipment in to do work, it would be a lot more accessible.

So you could build your own fortifications and you could terraform the landscape to your desire if you just have the right equipment. You’re not going to have those advantages as you might find in British Columbia that you can have concealment, you can have high ground, you can have choke points. Then again, that also has its drawbacks too. One of those drawbacks is forest fires. While it’s great to be surrounded by trees and hidden in the woods, pretty much everybody in the last 10 years has been in some way, shape or form in the west of Canada, touched by a forest fire, whether it’s just being smoked out or having the fire actually come to you.

And if you’re fully surrounded by trees, there’s nothing you can do about that. Even if you’re a mile away from the fire and you know, you’ve completely cleared all the land out all around you, there’s still a very high risk forest fires. So you don’t have to worry about that here. It’s a never ending war against insects. You probably have about a month in spring where there really isn’t any bucks. But one of the good things is with growing crops in the province we live in is that if there ever is a blight or a pestilence, the winter will kill it off.

It’s going to be more cyclical in that respect. It’s not going to be like a permanent situation where you might find in California where there’s no winter to kill off all the bacteria or the parasites or whatever that are affecting the crops. So winter is difficult because not only does it get really cold, but there’s also not a lot of wood. And the wood that you can get is not really the best firewood in most parts of the province. Poplar and Aspen are really shitty firewoods. So that means that the only real way to survive a winter is with some sort of natural gas or geothermal or off grid heating.

However, you can design a home to have passive solar so that you combine with your passive solar with a wood stove and then you’re using a lot less wood to have to keep the house warm. Those would be the only renewable methods. Geothermal is a possibility, but it’s not the thing that it’s been romanticized to me because it’s so technical in a lot of respects. That doesn’t have to be, but most modern geothermal furnaces are, I mean, you need to understand rocket science to understand how these things work. There’s just so many moving parts, so much that can go wrong.

If you just have your own primitive system, which I’ve seen people do, you can greatly reduce your dependence on other sources of heat. Praxis Prepper designed something in his home where he has ground air, which is a constant temperature flowing into his home all the time. Just through a series of PVC pipe tubes that are in the floor, he’s able to somewhat self-regulate. Of course, that’s not going to work in very cold conditions, but it will tend to keep things cooler in the summer and warmer in the winter because it’s a constant temperature below a certain level.

So there’s always a way to escape that. If you dug deep enough below the frost line and you put a structure down there, it would be pretty much a constant temperature all year. So even if it was plus 40 on the top, it wouldn’t necessarily be that cold down below. So there’s ways around it, but that’s one of the greatest limiting factors out here is the dependency on natural gas. And unlike forested regions in the north, you’re not going to have access to abundant amounts of good firewood. One thing worthy of note is that the winters, in fact, are less of a factor than they used to be because it’s getting warmer.

So last year, for example, we didn’t have snow until January, which was unprecedented. And this year, today, towards the end of September already, we’re still seeing plus 30 temps. The winter is getting shorter and shorter, and that would mean that the growing season is getting longer and longer. So I guess there’s some benefits to this global warming thing for northern places, particularly in Saskatchewan. And that’s seeing different migration patterns of animals, which can be beneficial for hunting. The best way to support this channel is to support yourself by gearing up at CanadianPreparedness.com, where you’ll find high quality survival gear at the best prices, no junk and no gimmicks.

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