Can You Live Off the Land and Survive?

When planning for survival, many people think that they will be able to live off the land and survive. Whether this is possible or not is both location and skill dependent – are there plenty of wild edibles at your location and do you have the skill (and knowledge) to gather that food. The bottom line however is one of calories. Can you take in more calories than you burn? If the answer to that question is yes, then you will be able to live off the land. If the answer to that question is no, then there will come a time when you will have to obtain an alternate food source or starve to death.

How many calories do you need to survive? To just survive you need to take in enough calories to meet your Basal Metabolic Rate. This is the number of calories that your body needs when you are remaining still and resting (i.e. no activity). There are various ways to calculate your Basal Metabolic Rate, but one of the most common and accepted methods is the Mifflin-St. Jeor Equation. This equation takes into count your weight, height, age, and gender. The formulas for men and women are:

Men
BMR = 10 x weight (in kilograms) + 6.25 x height (in centimeters) - 5 x age (in years) + 5

Women
BMR = 10 x weight (in kilograms) + 6.25 x height (in centimeters) - 5 x age (in years) – 161

Add to your Basal Metabolic Rate the calories needed to replace those burned based on your level of physical activity. There is a calculator here that can help you with these calculations: http://www.calculator.net/calorie-calculator.html. Because you must work to gather food in a survival situation, you should set the activity level on the calculator to "Very Active" or "Extra Active", depending on how you envision your survival activity. The calculator will return a different number of calories based on goals for either weight loss or weight gain, but the result that is important for survival is “Calories/day to maintain your weight.” Using this calculator, we see that a 35-year-old man, 5’ 10” tall, weighing 180 pounds, who was very active in a survival situation would need 3,032 calories per day to maintain his body weight.

The number of calories will vary somewhat from one person to the next, but 3000 calories per day is a good estimate of what you will need to survive long-term in the wilderness while living off the land.

Here are the calories you will gain from a serving (80 – 100 grams / 3 - 4 ounces) of game that you might be able to trap or hunt in a survival situation:

• Rabbit – 175 calories
• Squirrel – 102 calories
• Woodrat / Packrat – 195 calories
• Racoon – 1017 calories
• Duck – 109 calories
• Frog (legs) – 73 calories
• Rainbow Trout – 111 calories
• Crayfish – 74 calories

As you can see, with the exception of racoon meat, most survival type game and fish will return very few calories. Plant food returns even fewer calories.

• Cattail provides only 7 calories per ounce. 
• Apple provides 14 calories per ounce.
• The inner bark of the Pine tree provides just 31 calories per ounce. 
• Acorns however provide 142 calories per ounce, but remember this is per ounce of the meat of the nut, not including the shells and caps.  

Generally speaking, you will burn more calories than you will gain while hunting and gathering wild foods. In any bug-out situation you must have a supply of food to sustain yourself while supplementing that food supply with wild edibles. In addition to calories, the human body requires proteins, fats, and carbohydrates. These are all provided in wild foods to one degree or another, but again in far smaller amounts than one might hope for when trying to live off the land.

Mors Kochanski in his book Basic Safe Travel and Boreal Survival Handbook wrote:

"In attempting to live off the land, it is more preferable to only drink water, than to eat less than the minimum number of calories required each day. In not meeting the basal metabolic rate, which may be from 1,100 to 1,700 calories per day, there is such a disproportionate use of protein reserves in comparison to fat reserves that one may die of protein depletion in at least a quarter of the time compared to fasting. In fasting there is a more balanced use of proteins and fats so that a healthy person of normal weight of 65 kilograms (143 pounds) will not begin to suffer any irreversible deficiencies for at least six weeks. Overweight persons may get by longer than this. The record stands at over a year."

So, can you live off the land and survive?  For an extended period of time I would say no, at least not in a survival situation where you are attempting to either remain undetected and hidden in a specific area, or where you are travelling across the land from one place to another. This of course does not mean that you should totally ignore hunting, trapping, and gather of wild plants. These things all supplement your diet; but when preparing for a survival situation it is essential that you have a good supply of food to sustain yourself before you begin your hunting and gathering efforts.