We spent a year stockpiling a year's worth of food

We spent a year stockpiling a year's worth of food, and in this video we lay the whole lot out on the table and talk through exactly how we did it. This is bulk food buying and long term food storage on an Australian homestead, driven by a simple reality: the cost of living keeps climbing faster than wages, food prices keep rising, and food shortages keep turning up in the news. Our approach to food security has never been about doomsday or panic. It's about building a deep buffer that gives you options in any scenario, from a tight grocery week to a genuine supply disruption. If you've been thinking about emergency preparedness, prepper pantry basics, or simply getting ahead on your grocery budget, this is the practical, real-numbers walkthrough we wish we'd had when we started. We cover what actually makes the cut for long term food storage (and what doesn't), our decision framework for what to buy in bulk, where we shop here in Australia (Honest to Goodness, Costco, our local wholesaler, and yes, sometimes just Coles and Woolworths), what it really cost us per 100g compared to supermarket prices, and how we store it all in drums, Mylar bags and our pantry system so it actually gets used. This is part of our ongoing series on self sufficiency, homesteading and practical independence for Australian families, so check the playlist for the full bulk food storage setup that came before this one, and grab our free downloadable bulk food guide (linked below) with everything we bought, where we bought it, and the storage method we use. Australian homesteading, real budgets, no bunkers. Just buffers. Get our Bulk Food Storage Guide Download: https://rusticspirits.me/bulk-food-st... Kirsty's Guide to Bulk Food Storage Systems:    • Don't Start Bulk Food Storage Until You Wa...   Feed a family of 6, four times with one rump! (Andy Cooks)    • Feed a family of 6, four times with one rump!   A.I Prompt for Helping you plan your buffer Copy & Paste everything below (between the hashes, but don't include the hashes) into your chosen AI (Claude, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, etc) and make sure you fill in the gaps. Start of Prompt ########## You are my household food security planner. Your job is to work out how long my current food stores would actually last, find the gaps, and build a practical plan to reach my target buffer. Here is my situation: Household: [number] adults and [number] children (ages: [...]) Eating pattern: [e.g. two substantial meals a day per person] Target buffer: [e.g. 12 months] Location and climate: [e.g. Southern Queensland, frosty winters, hot summers] (this matters for both storage and what I can grow) Storage I have: [e.g. chest freezer 500L, pantry, cool room, etc.] Vegetable growing space: [e.g. 50 square metres of beds] What I currently grow: [list] Protein and other inputs from our property: [e.g. one pig every 6 months at approx X kg dressed, eggs from X hens, etc., with rough intervals] Dietary needs or things we will not eat: [...] Rough monthly budget for building the buffer: [optional] Here is my current inventory, grouped by category. Quantities are in [kg / cans / jars / etc.]: [Paste your spreadsheet here, for example: Grains: rice 20kg, rolled oats 10kg, flour 15kg Legumes: dried chickpeas 5kg, lentils 4kg Tinned: tomatoes 24 cans, corn 12 cans Preserves: passata 30 jars, jam 12 jars Fats and oils: olive oil 4L, butter 2kg Dairy: ... etc.] Before you give me any analysis, ask me every clarifying question you need to do this well. Do not guess at anything you can simply ask me. Wait for my answers. Once I have answered, do the following: 1. Estimate how long my current stores would feed my household at the eating pattern above. Give an approximate total in months, then break it down by food group so I can see which groups run out first. 2. Factor in what my garden and property can realistically produce over a year. State the yield assumptions you made so I can correct them. 3. Tell me exactly where my gaps are, by food group, and roughly how much of each I am short to hit my target buffer. 4. Build a prioritised buying plan to close those gaps. Order it by nutritional importance and by what is cheapest to fix first. Note where bulk buying makes sense. 5. Flag any storage or preservation changes I should consider, including foods that keep better in a form I might not have thought of (freezing, dehydrating, bulk dry storage), and any quirks I should know about. Keep your numbers transparent so I can sanity check them. If something is a rough estimate, say so. ########## End of Prompt