by
New Ordnance

Copyright © 2012 New Ordnance

A secret weapon has emerged from deep in the American Redoubt and the wild mountains of Montana. The word is slowly spreading through local gun shows and in certain circles on the Internet. This new development has ancient roots that augur well for the ultimate security and independence of the Redoubt. It is a vital key on the road to freedom for individuals and families.

There is a critical time-line to deploy this weapon to the lovers of freedom throughout the Redoubt. The time-line terminates in the spring of 2012.

I am writing to enlist your assistance in spreading this weapon throughout the valleys, nooks and crannies of the American Redoubt over the next few months. After the deadline, the die will be cast for the year 2012.

Folks, by now you might suspect that I am not writing about some new ordnance to be propelled down range in a novel fashion. Rather, I am going to share with you the details of the revolution in small agriculture that is brewing with Painted Mountain Corn in what I call the “true grain” for the American Redoubt.

For perhaps a thousand years or longer, before the introduction of wheat and barley to the inter-mountain west and the northern plains, Native Americans grew corn. This corn was different from the eastern corn that the Pilgrim Fathers survived on. The western corn was bred to survive the rigors of the western environment. With the western expansion of the nineteenth century and the Indian wars and ensuing resettlements, these ancient seed stocks were almost lost.

Almost forty years ago, one person from Big Timber, Montana set out to recover these lost corn strains. From the high plains of Canada to the southern Rockies he scoured the tribes and descendants of early settlers to recover the lost strains of over sixty genetic lines of com. Dave Christensen’s patient life’s work was growing and selecting the best survivors of this diverse gene pool, year after year, at elevations over 5,000 feet in the extreme Montana mountain climate east of the divide where short 90 day growing seasons are the norm. Epic wind, hail and violent storms are routine during the growing season.

What Dave ended up with was an extraordinary, open-pollinated, non-hybrid corn that thrives in conditions where wheat does not produce reliably and barley struggles, and where no other corn will grow. He named this brilliantly colored grain Painted Mountain Corn. One ear can manifest every color under the sun-every rainbow-ray combination in the visible light spectrum-from violet and deep purple to ruby red.

THE VISION

Food is the sine qua non of all weapons, for he who controls the food supply controls the fate of nations and individuals. A stratagem old as war itself, food has been used to manipulate populations from the time of Joseph in Egypt to Sherman’s march through Georgia to Stalin’s purge of the Kulaks to Monsanto’s war on seed-growers and the never-ending regulatory squeeze on farmers.

Our mission is to turn the tables on the perpetrators and develop our own food supplies that are independent of the system. Come what may, a long-term food supply allows the development of the resistance and foments new strategies that are outside the control mechanism. We play our own game, not the adversary’s game. We are not bowed down by a bare toil of subsistence with no energy left over to escape an inexorable slide back into feudal serfdom.

Forget those romantic notions of a nineteenth century life illumined by the cozy glow of the family circle around the fireplace at night. Been there – done that. It’s OK for a time and a season but I don’t want to repeat it unnecessarily as long as I have a choice. You don’t have to spend all your time and energy scrambling in bare subsistence. In that state, you have no time or energy for anything else, such as forming a resistance. You are effectively neutralized as any force opposing tyranny.

I want to turn the lights back on. As I see it, we are here not only to survive the approaching vicissitudes but to preserve the “arts of civilization” and pass the torch to the next generation so that a new civilization can emerge from the detritus of the old to fulfill the original promise and destiny of America.

WHEN THEY COME FOR YOUR FOOD

When they come for your food and guns, you want to have choices beyond that line in the sand. If you have a well-developed plan B, you will have the option of surrendering that rusty 30-30 and your obviously stored food, while living to fight another day at the time and place of your own choosing.

Having your independent source of food allows you to step outside the boundaries of “the game” and stop dancing to the tune of the Hegelian Dialectic. You need enough stores and caches to survive the initial die-off and the means to grow your own food afterwards. Have a bug-out plan B with multiple caches of H20 purification equipment, food, guns and ammunition, and seed. Step outside the game itself by having the means to start over.

BEARS AND BLIZZARDS

If you have your own food supply you can’t be controlled by outside forces—you have independence of action. But “moth and rust doth corrupt, and…thieves break through and steal”[1] as the scripture says. Schumer happens. Your food can be improperly stored, ruined by rodents and vermin or mold and mildew, destroyed by fire or flood, or confiscated by the authorities. Mildewed grain can be a serious health hazard. Moldy rye and peanuts can contain ergot, the strains of mold that killed all those people in the Middle Ages. But most significantly, people change. You will change. Now or years down the road you may discover that your body can no longer digest the food you have stored.

Back in the 1990s when my children were younger, we had the occasion to retrieve the remnants of a food cache. We were amazed to discover how thoroughly the bears had shredded 5 gallon buckets of dry garbanzo beans. They had chawed down on those polyethylene buckets like they were the crispy crust of a chimichanga.

The Thanksgiving Day blizzard of 2010 blocked roads with six foot drifts and clogged engine blocks, as the howling winds blew snow into every crack and crevice. That spring I checked on some grain stored outside in 30 gallon galvanized garbage cans with an inner liner that had worked perfectly well protecting my stores from the elements for the past 25 years, and I discovered heaps of moldy grain. The blowing snow at 60 miles an hour had worked its way under the lids. I dumped it out on the ground, but before I could get it into the compost pile the next day, the deer swooped in and ate all of it. I don’t know the fate of those deer, but I might have harvested some of the survivors the next fall after they plagued my garden all summer.

WHY PAINTED MOUNTAIN CORN?

In order to not only survive but thrive, the true survivor knows that they must grow food to supplement and eventually replace their stores. However, even when times stabilize, seed will be scarce or unavailable. You need seed stored for those times, not only for yourself, but for your community. In case of crop failures or other unforeseen events that could wipe out your seed supplies for one year, have enough seed stored to plant crops for several years.

Those canned stored survival seed solutions that clog the airwaves don’t cut it for the American Redoubt. One size does not fit all. You have to use intelligence to select the best crops for your micro-climate and environment.

I believe Painted Mountain Corn is the perfect do-it-yourself crop for the independent small-farmer. It is the foundation for a self-reliant future.

PAINTED MOUNTAIN CORN IS HIGH IN ANTIOXIDANTS

Painted Mountain corn exhibits every color of the rainbow. The intense pigmentation is due to high concentrations of powerful antioxidants known as anthocyanins—the same family of compounds that are found in blueberries. Antioxidants scavenge the brain and artery destroying free-radicals. Antioxidants are known to reduce the risk of and prevent health problems ranging from heart disease and macular degeneration to diabetes and cancer.

PAINTED MOUNTAIN CORN IS NON-GMO

Corn pollen travels on the wind and can easily cross pollinate with nearby varieties. Right now there are numbers of lawsuits against farmers who have supposedly violated Monsanto’s patents on GMO corn, because the genetically manipulated strains have shown up in their crops. The farmers are being accused of intentionally cross pollinating, when in reality they are only guilty of trying to grow their corn too near Monsanto fields. Repeated tests with animals have clearly shown that a GMO diet results in total sterility by the third generation. A cursory search of the literature will reveal the perils and unintended consequences of horizontal gene transfer and transgenic mutations.[2] Why take a chance with these Franken-foods?

PAINTED MOUNTAIN CORN IS HIGH PROTEIN

Painted Mountain corn protein content has tested as high as 13 percent whereas regular dent corn is typically in the single digits. At the 2006 Organic Seed Grower’s Conference, Dave Christensen announced the results of nutrition testing on the corn.

“Commercial dent hybrids are largely bred for yield of calories. We tested commercial corns for protein and only got around 8%. They were also low in minerals and micronutrients. They were not created to be a significant part of the human diet.

“Painted Mountain protein tested 13% in the same test, and had a little higher lysine. Trace minerals test high too. Painted Mountain has soft flour starch that is the easiest to grind for food processing, and has a significantly higher digestibility and nutrient absorption for human and animal consumption.”[3]

PAINTED MOUNTAIN CORN IS GLUTEN-FREE

Increasingly large segments of the population are being diagnosed as gluten intolerant. Alarming numbers of people are developing gluten intolerance in mid- or late-life and their gluten intolerance becomes worse with time developing into celiac disease, Crohn’s disease, irritable bowel syndrome and other serious medical conditions with terminal health effects.[4] A physician friend who has done countless autopsies describes patients that have expired from the ravages of gluten intolerance as having the appearance of an acute case of poison ivy—inside the lower intestine.

I am not a physician or medical practitioner and am not giving out medical advice. I can only speak for myself. I have been on a gluten-free diet for almost a year, post the 70-year milestone, and I feel like a new man, ready to tackle projects I could only contemplate a year ago. Of course, now I’ve got to figure out what to do with that 3 tons of wheat I laid down in storage 23 years ago.

The deadly gluten in question is from the Triticeae tribe of the Poeceae family, which includes wheat, rye and barley. Oats must also be avoided by the gluten intolerant, the seed being impossible to completely segregate from wheat, rye and barley. Some individual sensitivities are so intense, they require a kitchen and household completely free of all Triticeae products, which are legion and ubiquitous.

Painted Mountain Corn is not even in the same subfamily, and is free of the harmful Triticeae gluten.

PAINTED MOUNTAIN CORN IS THE ONLY GRAIN THAT IS PRACTICAL TO GROW BY HAND

I bought a copy of Gene Logsdon’s Small-Scale Grain Raising back in the 1970s when it first came out and have tried many of his suggestions through the years. He’s been my grain guru. I’m sure Gene would still agree that corn is by far the easiest grain to grow by hand. I have found through my own experience that this is true.

THE GRAIN GURU

“Corn is my grain of first choice for all purposes because, first of all, it is tough stuff. It will survive adversity better than other grains. Also it can be planted and harvested on a few acres with mostly hand labor. Ears of corn are much larger than grains of wheat, oats, barley, rye, or the other “small grains” as they are called. A hundred years ago, it was not uncommon for a farmer to plant and harvest ten to fifteen acres of corn with hand planters or horse planters and hand husking. So one acre, which is about all I need on my small pasture farm, is easy enough to produce. I put two one-row garden planters together to make a two-row planter. Pushed by any healthy human from age fourteen to seventy or older, it’s possible to plant half an acre a day easily enough. Our whole family—grandchildren included—harvests the field corn in a couple of weekends”[5]

All the vegetables and greens that many gardeners today focus on are nice and good to eat in the summer months, but they cannot sustain you. There are not enough calories. In the future, your gardening and small scale farming must produce food that will sustain you and store well through the winter months.

GROWING WHEAT WITH THE KIDS

When my children were young we attempted to grow a small plot of dry land hard red spring wheat. We are east of the divide in the Northern Rockies with 12 to 14 inches of precipitation a year. Most of the precipitation is snow pack which melts through the spring and into the June rainy season. The summer months are hot, dry and sunny, creating the perfect environment for growing cereal grains.

We were successful in growing and harvesting our wheat crop, but several delicious batches of waffles and pancakes later, our harvest was used up. It was an insignificant quantity of grain for the labor involved. At the end of a long, cold day of reaping, threshing and winnowing, we had what seemed like mere handfuls of grain.

All romantic ideas of hand-tools and 19th century implements must be set aside. It takes years to develop the expertise to make these tools practical and efficient. For the small-landowner it is extremely difficult to plant, tend, and harvest enough cereal grain to sustain yourself and your family through the winter.

From my direct experience, and the experience of my family, growing and harvesting Painted Mountain Corn is a thousand time easier and more effective that trying to grow wheat on a small scale. It is practical to plant, tend and harvest by hand enough grain to see you through the winter with seed left over for next spring. You do not need the benefit of modern big-ag equipment. Neither do you need big-ag pesticides and spraying equipment. There were no insect pests on our corn crop, probably because it grows where no corn has ever been grown before. As you may know, regular corn is heavily afflicted with countless pests and insects.

WHEN SHOULD I BUY PAINTED MOUNTAIN CORN SEED?

In my experience, timing is everything when you only have a 90 day growing season. For a corn crop to be viable as seed for next year, it is essential that the corn have enough time to dry in the field before the first hard frost. If the corn is not dry, then freezing temperatures will damage the germ and the seed you save for next spring may not sprout. If the corn is dry, freezing temperatures will not damage the seed at all.

Painted Mountain Corn seed will sprout when soil temperatures are still in the low 50s giving you at least a two week head-start on most corn, which will not germinate until the soil temperatures are in the 60s.

For those of us living in the American Redoubt, the time to buy seed is now. I am going to be planting May 20^th and recommend that you plant your corn seed as soon as your elevation and micro-climate allow.

In these uncertain times, we must also lay seed by while it is still available, in case any unforeseen, catastrophic circumstances might occur before this year’s crop can come in. Seed is already in short supply and if some event happens, it will likely disappear.

The true survivor must also plan ahead for those post-collapse years. Even when times stabilize, seed will be scarce or unavailable. You need seed stored for those times, not only for yourself, but for your community. In case of crop failures or other unforeseen events that could wipe out your seed supplies for one year, have enough seed stored to plant crops for at least 3 years.

Seed storage is another topic itself, so I will only touch on it briefly. Seed is a living organism and must be stored correctly to keep it alive. Your storage grains that you’ve kept for food may not be viable seed when you reach the end of your stores and start thinking about growing more. Seed may die in closed containers with no oxygen. It must be stored in a cool, dry place where the seed can breathe. There is a lot of conflicting information out there, and complicated advice and measures to take to preserve seed. But in my experience, grain seed will keep for decades in a cool, dry, dark environment in a paper bag.

FOOD SECURITY AND THE ROCKY MOUNTAIN CORN PROJECT

For all who are called to the American Redoubt: Secure your food and preserve your freedom of action!

If you don’t have a place to grow your own healthy food, support those who do. Go in for shares. Help them every way you can. Growing all your own food now may not be economically viable, but secure sources of food are your lifeline in the future.

The Rocky Mountain Corn Project has two goals. First, to spread Painted Mountain Corn across the inter-mountain west. Second, to feed the American Redoubt.

Grow your own organic GMO-free corn as a basic component of your food storage program, an annual component of your daily food consumption plan and as a source of income in sharing the seed with your neighbors and community.

To be continued…