A MEAL prepping pro has enough food in her pantry to feed her family for two and a half years.
Only hitting the grocery store once a month, she saves $12k a year by growing and preserving food for her family on her property.
Though the 43-year-old Sarah Thrush grew up raising animals and growing crops, she took on the ultimate homesteading challenge when she moved to Escanaba, Michigan, in July of 2021 – a remote location which has a seven-month winter.
With her 48-year-old supervisor husband Clayton, she cares for two of her five children – aged 17 and 19 – on 20 acres of land.
The family runs their homestead "like a business" – raising chickens for eggs and meat, growing vegetables and herbs, and hunting and fishing for food.
Sarah preserves the food in two pantries and said she has enough of it to last 18 months in case of an emergency.
Perhaps the most impressive part of it all is that she visits the supermarket only once a month to buy essentials – and their self-sufficiency saves the family a decent chunk of cash per year.
“I’m call myself a home economist,” Sarah explained.
“I try to provide for our family without using the grocery store and we save $8k to $12k-a-year on food.
“We live by the mantra – we want to utilize what Mother Nature is giving us.”
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A homesteader for years, Sarah recently had to adjust how she grows her produce given the unfamiliar climate in Michigan – with snow falling from October through June.
“I have been fishing since I could walk, but I have had to relearn homesteading in a different climate.
“The winters are incredibly brutal.”
Tapping on her local resources, Sarah grows all the crops she can but sometimes uses vegetables from other farmers in the area – such as potatoes and corn – as well as milk from another farmer’s herd.
After carefully planning how much of each vegetable she needs for her family, she then goes on to barter and trade crops if they have surplus.
She also gives spare crops to her food bank to give back to her community.
“We try to grow one season to the next,” the farming expert explained.
As for how she organizes all her food, Sarah has two pantries and always uses the oldest cans first – putting her freshest preserves to the back of the pantry.
“One pantry we call our ‘cantry’ for longer term food. It is usually canned and freeze-dried foods.
“One can lasts one to three years, while freeze-dried foods can be up to 25 years.
“We rotate this food into our daily pantry, so we are eating fresh.”
In an emergency, Sarah believes she has enough food to feed four people for 18 months and says if it was rationed it could stretch to two-and-a-half years.
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The meal prepping guru wants to help others learn about homesteading to help stop people from going hungry.
“My goal is to feed the world. I believe food is a basic human right.”
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