In the final month of your preparedness journey, Month 12: Advanced Preparedness & Homestead Setup. Now you are reaching the pinnacle of advanced preparedness. This phase is all about securing full systems that can sustain you and your group indefinitely, as well as creating a secondary location for your homestead.
Please note, this is general information. It is for information, education, and entertainment only. Whether it is gardening, farming, animal care, survival, emergency, self-sufficient lifestyle, DIY projects, or herbal preparations this is for info-sharing only. It is not meant to replace urgent medical care. As we have said, we are not doctors, vets, or professionals of any kind. This info is not meant for medical diagnosis or as treatment advice. We do not guarantee any results that we have gotten for any of the projects that we share with you. We share info that has worked for us. For more info, please see the Out Standing in the Field disclaimer page.
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With 12 months of steady progress, you now have the foundation to thrive during long-term disruptions. The focus in Month 12 shifts toward multi-year planning, setting up redundant systems, and ensuring that you have a secure, sustainable backup location. The goal is to ensure that no matter what happens, you are ready for most anything, whether it is maintaining your primary homestead or relocating to a more remote site.
Month 12: Advanced Preparedness & Homestead Setup will, of course, start with upgrading your water systems to be sustainable for long-term use.
1. Water: Setting Up a Sustainable Water Source at a Secondary Location
By now, your primary residence should have multiple water sources, but long-term preparedness means having redundant water systems at a secondary location. Whether you’re setting up an off-grid homestead in the wilderness or simply preparing a secondary bug-out site, ensuring access to clean, sustainable water is essential.
If the location has access to natural water sources like rivers, lakes, or streams, install filtration systems and pumps to bring water into your shelter. If the site doesn’t have natural water, consider drilling a well or installing large-scale rainwater collection systems.
Plan for redundancy in your purification methods by having manual pumps, gravity-fed filters, and solar-powered filtration units at the ready. As always, store water treatment chemicals in case of contamination and have enough to support long-term use.
Avoid assuming your current water solutions are enough. A backup location must be fully self-sufficient with water sources that ensure long-term sustainability, no matter how remote it is.
Always be on the lookout, no matter what your goal currently is, keep an eye open for future possible sites. You can keep a new place in mind on the “maybe someday” list. It never hurts to have multiple options.
The second part of Month 12: Advanced Preparedness & Homestead Setup is long-term, sustainable food production.
2. Food: Planning Food Production and Storage for Multiple Years
You have likely achieved short- and medium-term food production, but Month 12 is about planning for multi-year food sustainability. To do this, you need to ensure that your food production systems, whether through gardening, livestock, or hunting, are designed to last for years, if not decades.
At this stage, you should focus on crop rotation plans, maintaining heirloom seeds, and expanding your garden with perennial crops that provide food with minimal effort. When it comes to livestock, focus on maintaining breeding pairs or systems that allow for continuous reproduction.
If you have not already, look into beekeeping. A bee colony will help keep your plants pollinated and supply you with honey. Honey is a great super food, cooking ingredient, flavoring, and has many medical uses. The wax from the bee hives will also allow you to make candles, medical salves, and self-care products.
Ensure you have proper feed stored for at least two years or the ability to grow your own animal feed. This will prevent you from needing external supplies and keep your livestock healthy.
In addition to food production, increase your food storage capabilities by building dedicated root cellars or cool storage rooms to extend the life of dried, canned, and preserved food for multiple years.
Avoid relying on short-term harvests or minimal stockpiling. Planning for multi-year food production and storage ensures long-term survival and reduces dependence on external resources.
We have put together a group of checklists and tips pages to help you on your on going journey to self-sufficiency. These are general checklists and tips that you may need to tweak to fit your exact needs. Keep in mind every situation will be different so the needs may be a bit different as well. Feel free to download the PDF, print out, and use these pages for yourself.
This is a three-page of tips for Basic Orchard and Berry Bush Care.
This is a three-page of tips for Beekeeping to Ensure Proper Pollination.
This is a three-page of tips for Constructing a Root Cellar.
In Month 12: Advanced Preparedness & Homestead Setup, you should have all the basic medical covered and move on to permanent, full medical facilities.
3. First Aid: Establishing a Robust Medical Treatment Plan for Extended Survival
Having first aid supplies is important, but by Month 12, you need to move beyond basic kits and establish a robust medical treatment plan that can last through extended survival scenarios.
This plan should include regular health assessments for you and your group, preventive care to reduce the risk of disease, and emergency protocols for handling major injuries or illnesses when professional medical help is unavailable.
Do not forget to include pets and stock animals in this. It is critical for pets and animals to have the same preventative medical care as people in your group do. Poor, sickly, unhealthy animals will not only be a health risk to others, but they will be a drain on medical resources to get them healthy again. As they say, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of treatment. Not really sure how one measures ounces and pounds of treatments, but you get the idea.
Ensure that your home medical center is stocked with long-term medications, surgical tools, IV fluids, antibiotics, and trauma supplies. It’s also crucial to have backup power for any medical devices that need electricity, such as oxygen concentrators or refrigeration for certain medications.
Additionally, plan to integrate natural remedies and herbal medicine into your plan to supplement your stockpile of pharmaceuticals.
It would be best to start early on natural remedies and herbal medicine training. Herbs, spices, and plants offer a world of treatments for all kinds of ailments, but you must know what you are doing. Learning plant medicine takes time, patience, and practice. There are some very simple recipes for things like cough syrup, wound wash, burn salve, and so much more. But there are also herbal recipes that can be both helpful and dangerous, and you need to know which is which and how to properly handle each kind.
Along with knowledge, there are supplies that you will need to stock up on to be able to make your own herbal medicines and remedies. Again, this takes time and planning. Even though we talk about this again in month 12, we have mentioned herbal medicines several times before. If you have not already started your journey into plant medicine, get to it right away.
Not every member of your family or group will be comfortable with herbal and plant medicine, so it may be best to have one or two people go deep into it. Then others can be eased into it as they become more comfortable with its uses.
Avoid waiting for a medical crisis to test your plan. A robust treatment plan ensures that you’re ready to handle long-term health care without reliance on hospitals or pharmacies.
Month 12: Advanced Preparedness & Homestead Setup will also need you to scale up your shelter provisions.
4. Shelter: Identifying or Setting Up a Secondary, More Remote Survival Location
At this stage, you should either have identified or be in the process of setting up a secondary survival location. This backup location should be more remote and secure than your primary home, allowing you to bug out in case your first site becomes compromised. Location two will be your emergency go-to location in case your primary shelter is not an option anymore. Here, you start at the beginning with “right now” emergency supplies, like you did in the first months of this series.
A second location is not just a “why not have one thing”. It is an important part of being self-sufficient. Having a backup shelter ensures that if something or someone comes along and takes your primary location, you and your family will have somewhere stocked and ready to fall back to.
Ideally, this location will have natural defenses, such as being hidden by terrain or surrounded by dense forests, hills, or rivers, making it more difficult to access by potential threats.
Build or prepare a secondary shelter at this site, whether it’s a cabin, bunker, or reinforced structure. Stock it with the essentials—food, water, medical supplies, and tools—but also include enough comfort items to sustain mental and emotional well-being.
Ensure that this backup location has multiple escape routes in case you need to leave quickly, and make sure it’s well-stocked with supplies that can support you and your group for an extended period.
Avoid relying solely on your primary home. Having a secondary, more remote shelter ensures you always have a safe place to go, no matter what happens.
We have put together a group of checklists and tips pages to help you on your on going journey to self-sufficiency. These are general checklists and tips that you may need to tweak to fit your exact needs. Keep in mind every situation will be different so the needs may be a bit different as well. Feel free to download the PDF, print out, and use these pages for yourself.
This is a three-page Local Area Resource Guide Checklist.
This is a three-page Simple Ways to Farm Your Land for Self-Sufficiency.
For Month 12: Advanced Preparedness & Homestead Setup, you will take it to the top of your game in defense and community safety.
5. Defense: Securing Advanced Defense Systems and Community Safety Measures
By Month 12, your defense systems should be as advanced as possible. This includes setting up high-tech surveillance equipment, automated alarms, and even drone systems for patrolling large areas.
Make sure you have redundant power sources like solar or wind-powered systems to keep these tools operational.
Additionally, consider installing electric fences or trap systems that can deter or slow down intruders before they reach your main living area.
If you are part of a larger community, implement community safety measures such as shared watch towers, community patrols, and a centralized alarm system that alerts everyone in case of danger.
Regularly run tactical drills with your group or neighbors to ensure everyone is prepared to defend the area, and distribute defense responsibilities to trusted individuals.
Do not think only in terms of personal defense. Securing advanced systems and integrating community safety measures ensures comprehensive protection for everyone in your group or area.
Month 12: Advanced Preparedness & Homestead Setup continues with communications upgrades as well. You now have all you can at your level, now you need to expand to country-wide or even world-wide contacts.
6. Communication: Building a Regional Communication Network for Disaster Coordination
Month 12 is also the time to expand your communication strategy to a regional level. This means creating a regional communication network that connects you with other survival groups or homesteads within a large geographical area.
Set up long-range HAM radios and satellite phones that can reach beyond your immediate vicinity, allowing you to communicate with others for mutual support or coordination during larger-scale disasters.
Consider joining or forming disaster coordination networks that share information about weather events, security threats, or resource availability. If you’re working with neighboring communities or survival groups, establish emergency response protocols so that everyone knows how to assist one another in case of a widespread emergency.
Limiting communication to just your immediate group is a mistake and will leave you in the dark as to what is happening on a country or worldwide level. A regional network ensures that you are connected to vital resources, information, and assistance during large-scale disruptions.
Of course, these things are good to have in normal times as well, so you are ready for when times get weird.
And lastly, in Month 12: Advanced Preparedness & Homestead Setup will be planning and setting up long-term transport and bug-out options.
7. Transportation: Creating a Long-Term Transportation Strategy for Bugging Out to Remote Areas
Lastly, it is crucial to create a long-term transportation strategy that ensures you can bug out to remote areas or travel over difficult terrain for extended periods. Prepare multiple modes of transportation, including all-terrain vehicles (ATVs), horses, bicycles, and even boats if you’re near a water source.
Each vehicle or method should be off-grid capable, relying on renewable fuel sources or no fuel at all, like bicycles or horses. Ensure that your vehicles are well-maintained and equipped with spare parts, tools, and repair kits to handle long journeys without access to repair shops.
Additionally, map out several evacuation routes from both your primary and secondary locations, accounting for different scenarios where roads might be blocked or unsafe. Avoid relying on just one transportation method.
A diversified strategy ensures that you can travel safely and efficiently to your secondary location or elsewhere, even in the most challenging circumstances.
In this series, the theme has been: not just surviving but thriving. It is easy to get caught up in all the details and plans to keep everyone safe, fed, and sheltered, but do not forget about mental wellness. You can have all the stuff you can collect, but if you lose the will to live, you will just be tired and miserable with a lot of stuff.
Remember to add some fun stuff to your plans and prepping gear. It is not frivolous, it is necessary for proper mental health.
We have put together a Mental Stimulus Entertainment Checklist to help you with this. This is a general checklist and tips that you may need to tweak to fit your exact needs. Keep in mind every situation will be different so the needs may be a bit different as well. Feel free to download the PDF, print out, and use these pages for yourself.
This is a three-page Mental Stimulus Entertainment Checklist.
In Month 12, you should have reached the pinnacle of preparedness. By establishing a sustainable water source at a secondary location, ensuring long-term food production, setting up a fully stocked home medical center, and creating a secure secondary shelter, you are positioning yourself for long-term survival.
Integrating advanced defense systems, communication networks, and transportation strategies completes your journey to full self-sufficiency, giving you the tools and knowledge to thrive in any scenario.
If you are not at this level of preparedness and self-sufficiency just yet, do not worry over it. Everyone has to go at their own pace and use the resources that they have. Keep moving forward, stay disciplined, and continue refining your plans.
Preparedness is an ongoing journey, and the more you invest in it, the more peace of mind you will have when the time comes to rely on everything you have built.
We hope that you have both learned from and enjoyed this year’s series. Please stay with us for the last few weeks to finish out this series. These topics can be very intense, so we wanted to add some fun and color to them. We do hope you liked the graphics that we made for you.
In case you missed any of them or just want to go back to refresh things in your mind, you can start at Month 1: The Essentials here.
If you are interested in other talks similar to this, please check out the ones below.
Making Products for a Self-Sufficient Life Style- Part Two
Practical and Unusual Uses for Styrofoam Coolers
How to Sharpen your Decision-Making Skills for Self-sufficiency
Thank you for visiting, and please come again for another edition of Out Standing in the Field.
Appreciate all the thought that went into this and the helpful information.
Thank you for visiting and all comments are welcome.
Really good information in a creative form. Thanks.