Long Term Food Storage Calculator Q&A and Video Tutorial

Alright, alright we’ve had enough requests, so here you go:

We updated the calculator to allow you to define the number of months of food you wish to store. It now not only includes # of adults and # of kids, but it also includes # of months desired.

Julie also tells you how to use, and now alter the spreadsheet. In the training tutorial, she goes through how to:

-Add foods
-Change foods
-Delete foods
-Change quantities
-How to use the cost/unit field
-General tips on the NEW spreadsheet

So if you have had a question about any of those things, go ahead and watch the tutorial.

Milk Recommendations:

Many of you have asked about why we recommend storing so much milk. There are basically two schools of thought on long term food storage. One recommends a 2300 calorie diet with 300 lbs of grains and 75 lbs of powdered milk. A more recent recommendation has been to increase the calories to 2400, raise the grains to 400 lbs, and lower powdered milk to just 16 lbs.

Either way you go will provide enough nutrition for you to sustain life. However, for families with nursing mothers or small children it is important to use the higher recommendation for milk in order to provide adequate nutrition. If you only store 16 lbs that is only enough for one cup of milk per day. Another reason we use the higher milk recommendation by default is because if you were unable to find ways to cook your food, you can actually sustain life by ONLY drinking powdered milk for quite some time. So all you would need is to add water and you could survive.

Feel free to modify the calculator to fit your family’s needs, but that is the reasoning behind our recommendation in comparison to some other calculators you might see. For more details on this topic click here.