Preppers who live in the U.S. are very lucky because they have access to clean running water. But you will need more water when SHTF because it will eventually run out, even with careful rationing. (h/t to PreppersWill.com)
Technology has made it easier to forget crucial prepping skills
Even if you live in an area where many people have wells on their property, not everyone may know how to hand-dig a well.
There are many drilling tools available for your use, but when SHTF you might not have access to those tools, especially if you don’t have the fuel or electricity necessary to power them.
With picks, shovels and some elbow grease, you can dig a well on your homestead. Before SHTF, you can use this information to dig a well, so you have access to clean water. (Related: Water supply and prepping: A beginner’s guide to rainwater collection.)
Where to dig a well on your homestead
If you want to dig a well on your homestead, you can’t just dig a hole in the ground and hope that you locate water.
You need proper information to ensure that water will be found where you intend to dig. Study the land’s topography to get this crucial information.
Water flows downhill, including subsurface water. If you’re not sure where to dig, look for plants that require a steady supply of water.
If there is no visible surface water, the trees on your property may rely on groundwater to survive.
Similarly, a vanished brook or stream may have gone underground. Both of these regions are worth considering as potential well locations.
Tips for digging a well
Before you start digging, inspect the soil. What is the soil made of?
Is it mostly clay, gravel, sand, or rock and boulders?
Hand-excavated wells are often limited to soils that you can easily dig by hand. If there are a lot of large boulders, look for another location.
While a place full of rocks may be out of the question, you should also look for another location if the area contains soil that is very sandy since these types of soils can make your well collapse.
Now, how do you dig for water once you’ve decided to do so?
First, secure water for your household using only shovels, picks and other manual tools.
Don’t wait until it’s too late to dig a well. Plan for your well while you still have water in your stockpile so you don’t have the added stress of finding water because your supplies have already run out.
If the dirt is too dry, the hole for your well may collapse. The same thing might happen if it’s too wet. Worse, it may quickly fill with water while you are still digging into it.
Cave-ins are another thing to consider while digging a well. To avoid this, the sides of the hole should be strengthened using the right materials.
You can do this by gathering as many boards as you can before you begin excavating. It’s better to use longer boards.
You can also install special concrete sleeves in the hole. More sleeves added will help prevent cave-ins as you go deeper. If you don’t have access to concrete sleeves, you can make do with boards.
Alternatively, you can secure the hole with a metal or plastic culvert. If you can get culverts, these are a better option compared to boards. Culverts can also be left in the hole to serve as the well’s liner.
When choosing the location for your well, avoid septic systems or areas where there have been outhouses or latrines in recent times. The odds of contamination are higher close to septic fields or any area previously used for human waste.
Digging too close can mean that you get water that is high in fecal coliform and can make you very sick.
To start digging a well, measure a circle at least five feet in diameter. Begin digging with your shovel and pick and make sure you dig evenly around the full circle.
After digging a few feet, begin lining the hole with boards. Insert them vertically or place the first length of the culvert.
Make sure the boards are close fitting and use cross members to keep the boards tight against the hole’s sides. As you dig deeper, keep hammering the boards down. This may be time-consuming, but these additional steps will help protect you from cave-ins.
Hand-dug wells are often shallow, ranging in depth from five to 65 feet. To dig a well that deep will require a lot of effort and energy that you might not be able to afford in a survival scenario. Calculate the risks and the rewards before starting a labor-intensive activity like digging a well.
If you want to get the well done faster, you can ask your neighbors to help you dig the well and share it with them.
Before you start digging, make sure you also have a reliable path out of the well’s hole. If and when you hit water, the hole might quickly fill up so a ladder will help you get out alive.
You already have the material to line the well hole if you’re using a metal or plastic culvert. If not, you can line the sides of the well with masonry or stones. This will help stabilize the well and avoid further cave-ins.
Backfill the gap between the liner and the walls with crushed stone, gravel or tiny rocks once the well is established. This will help keep silt out of the well water.
Cap the well to prevent objects from falling into it and contaminating the water.
When SHTF, a working well may be your only source of drinking water. Choose the right spot on your homestead to dig a well, so you have access to clean water when disaster strikes.
Visit Preparedness.news for more tips on how to prepare before SHTF.
Watch this video to learn about 10 ways to clean drinking water after a disaster.
This video is from the Truth or Consequences channel on Brighteon.com.
More related stories:
- Homesteading 101: How to purify dirty well water.
- Prepping 101: How to store water for emergency preparedness.
- Prepping 101: Emergency water storage for beginners.
Sources include:
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
