I get this question more than almost any other: “Megan, should I get Pocket Farm or The Lost SuperFoods?” And my honest answer is always the same — it depends on where your gap is, because these two guides are not actually competing for the same job.
Pocket Farm is a food production system. It teaches you how to grow calorie-dense food in compact spaces — containers, vertical beds, raised plots — using high-yield companion planting and small-space techniques. If you don’t currently have a way to produce fresh food in a crisis, this is the guide that builds that capability from scratch.
The Lost SuperFoods is a food knowledge system. Art Rude compiled 126 forgotten superfoods and preservation methods sourced from US Army survival manuals, pioneer traditions, and indigenous food practices. If you already have food or access to ingredients but want to know how to preserve, ferment, smoke, cure, and extend it using techniques that predate the grocery store — this is that guide.
The short answer: if you want to grow food, get Pocket Farm. If you want to store and preserve food using forgotten methods, get The Lost SuperFoods. If you’re serious about total food preparedness, both are worth having — and I’ll explain exactly why below.
At a Glance: Pocket Farm vs The Lost SuperFoods
| Pocket Farm | The Lost SuperFoods | |
|---|---|---|
| Core Focus | Food production — growing in small spaces | Food knowledge — 126 forgotten preservation methods |
| Format | Digital guide + system | Physical/digital book by Art Rude |
| Best For | People who want to actively grow food | People who want to store, preserve, and identify high-value foods |
| Content Depth | Practical growing system with companion planting, container gardening, vertical gardens | Historical deep-dive into US Army survival manuals, pioneer techniques, traditional preservation |
| Space Requirements | Requires some outdoor or indoor growing space | No space required — knowledge-based |
| Implementation Timeline | First harvest possible in weeks (depending on crops) | Immediate — knowledge applicable to any existing food stock |
| Official Site | backyardliberty.org | thelostsurvivalfoods.com |
| Guarantee | 60-day money-back | 60-day money-back |
Quick verdict:
- Choose Pocket Farm if your primary gap is food production capacity.
- Choose The Lost SuperFoods if your primary gap is preservation knowledge and calorie-dense forgotten food identification.
- Choose both if you want a complete food preparedness system.
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What Is Pocket Farm?
Pocket Farm is a compact survival food production system hosted at backyardliberty.org. The core premise is straightforward: you don’t need acreage to grow meaningful amounts of food. The guide is built around the idea that a small, well-planned growing space — even a balcony, a side yard, or a series of containers — can produce enough food to meaningfully supplement or sustain a household in an extended emergency.
The guide covers high-yield crops that perform well in confined spaces, companion planting combinations that increase output per square foot, vertical gardening techniques that multiply your growing surface, and container setups that work even on concrete or hard surfaces. The philosophy is borrowed partly from intensive market gardening traditions — the kind of approach professional small-plot growers have used for generations to produce commercial yields from residential footprints.
For preppers, the appeal is clear: you’re not just storing food someone else grew — you’re building an active, renewable food production system. That distinction matters in a long-duration scenario. Stored food has a ceiling. A functioning garden doesn’t.
I’ve reviewed the guide in detail in my full Pocket Farm review, and if you want to dig into specifics before buying, that’s the place to start. There’s also a separate piece addressing is Pocket Farm a scam? — short answer: no, but I understand the skepticism around digital survival guides.
What Is The Lost SuperFoods?
The Lost SuperFoods is a book by Art Rude that digs into 126 forgotten foods and preservation methods — many of them sourced from declassified US Army survival manuals, traditional American pioneer cooking, and historical food practices that predate industrial refrigeration. The official site is thelostsurvivalfoods.com.
The premise here is different from most food storage guides. Rather than telling you which brand of freeze-dried packets to stockpile, The Lost SuperFoods focuses on methods and ingredients — specifically the foods that sustained people through wars, frontier conditions, and harsh winters before the modern supply chain existed.
You’ll find detailed coverage of preservation techniques like smoking, curing, fermenting, brining, and lacto-fermentation, along with foods that are nutritionally dense, shelf-stable without refrigeration, and largely ignored by the modern survivalist market. Think pemmican, hardtack variations, fermented vegetables, and dozens of other foods your great-great-grandparents would have recognized immediately.
For preppers, the value proposition is different from a growing guide: this is knowledge that makes you a better curator and preserver of whatever food you have access to. Whether you’re extending your current pantry, processing a garden harvest, or foraging locally — the preservation methods in this guide are tools you keep forever.
I cover the guide in detail in my full The Lost SuperFoods review. There’s also a piece on is The Lost SuperFoods a scam? for anyone approaching this one with appropriate skepticism.
Pocket Farm Deep Dive: What You Get
The Growing System
Pocket Farm’s strength is its system orientation. It’s not a loose collection of gardening tips — it’s a structured approach to maximizing food output from a compact growing area. The guide walks you through:
Site assessment and space planning. Before you plant a single seed, the guide helps you audit your available space — accounting for sunlight hours, drainage, access to water, and seasonal exposure. This step alone separates Pocket Farm from generic gardening content: it starts with your actual situation rather than an idealized garden scenario.
High-calorie, high-yield crop selection. Not all vegetables are equal in a survival context. The guide focuses on crops that provide the most caloric return per square foot — potatoes, sweet potatoes, beans, squash, and other dense, storable crops are emphasized over ornamentals or water-heavy produce with limited shelf life. This is exactly the right framing for a preparedness context.
Companion planting combinations. The guide goes deep on which crops grow better together — traditional combinations like the Three Sisters (corn, beans, squash) and more specific pairings that reduce pest pressure, fix nitrogen, and maximize vertical space use. Done right, companion planting increases yield from the same footprint without additional inputs.
Container and vertical gardening. For people without in-ground soil access — apartment dwellers, those on hard clay or contaminated soil, renters — the container and vertical gardening sections are the most practically valuable parts of the guide. It covers substrate mixes, drainage requirements, watering cadence, and which crops adapt best to container growing versus those that need ground soil.
Seed saving and replanting cycles. A guide that ends at harvest isn’t a survival system — it’s a recipe book. Pocket Farm includes seed-saving techniques that let you sustain your growing operation without returning to the store for seeds each season. For long-duration preparedness, this is critical.
Strengths
- Practical system orientation rather than generic gardening advice
- Strong focus on calorie-dense, storable crops relevant to a crisis scenario
- Covers space constraints honestly — doesn’t assume you have a suburban backyard
- Seed-saving content makes the system self-sustaining
- Complements other growing guides like Backyard Miracle Farm — similar compact growing guide
Limitations
- Requires some space — even the container sections assume you have access to light and outdoor or semi-outdoor area
- First meaningful harvest is weeks away minimum — not useful for an immediate crisis already underway
- Doesn’t address food preservation in depth — you’ll need a separate resource for that (which is where The Lost SuperFoods comes in)
- Results depend heavily on climate, season, and execution — it’s a system, not a magic button
For Pocket Farm price and cost, check the current offer at backyardliberty.org — pricing changes with promotions.
The Lost SuperFoods Deep Dive: What You Get
The Knowledge Base
Where Pocket Farm is a production system, The Lost SuperFoods is closer to a historical food reference library — dense with forgotten methods that have been validated by actual survival conditions across centuries.
The 126 superfoods. Art Rude’s central claim is that most modern preppers are ignoring the foods that actually kept people alive through famines, wars, and frontier winters. The guide covers 126 specific foods with caloric density, shelf stability, sourcing notes, and preparation methods. Many of these are common foods used in unfamiliar ways — others are genuinely obscure preparations most readers will have never encountered.
US Army survival manual sourcing. The guide’s most credible section draws directly from declassified US Army field rations and survival manuals. These documents were created under conditions where caloric density and shelf life under adverse conditions were literal life-or-death specifications. This isn’t heritage cooking for its own sake — it’s historically stress-tested nutritional knowledge.
Traditional preservation methods. The preservation section covers smoking (cold and hot), curing with salt and nitrates, lacto-fermentation, brining, rendering fat for preservation, and other methods that predate refrigeration. Each method is covered with the logic behind it (why does salt curing work? what’s happening in fermentation?) alongside the practical steps — which helps readers adapt the techniques rather than just follow recipes rigidly.
Pioneer and indigenous food knowledge. Beyond the Army manuals, the guide draws on documented pioneer food practices and traditional indigenous preservation techniques — pemmican being the most famous example, but far from the only one. These represent field-tested methods from populations who couldn’t afford to lose a food batch.
Strengths
- Immediately applicable — no space or growing infrastructure required
- Knowledge that compounds: once you know how to ferment or cure, you can apply it to anything
- Historical sourcing gives it more credibility than guides built on modern prepper speculation
- Covers a wide range of preservation methods rather than focusing on just one or two
- Extends the value of any food you already have by showing you how to preserve it longer
Limitations
- Not a growing guide — if you have nothing to preserve, the preservation methods have nothing to work on
- The 126 superfoods framing can feel slightly marketing-heavy — the actual density of the book matters more than the number count
- Some techniques require specific equipment (smokers, fermentation crocks) that you’d need to source separately
- Historical focus means some methods require sourcing traditional ingredients that aren’t always at the corner store
Check The Lost SuperFoods cost and price at thelostsurvivalfoods.com for current pricing — the book has been sold at multiple price points depending on the promotion.
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Head-to-Head: Key Differences
Approach: Production vs. Preservation
This is the single most important distinction. Pocket Farm is about creating food — turning sunlight, soil, water, and seeds into calories. The Lost SuperFoods is about extending and transforming food — taking what you have and making it last longer, travel better, and pack more nutrition per ounce.
In a real preparedness context, you need both capabilities. Production without preservation means your harvest rots before you can use it. Preservation without production means you’re extending a finite supply that eventually runs out. The guides occupy opposite ends of the same food security chain.
Audience: Growers vs. Curators
Pocket Farm is written for someone who wants to be an active food producer — someone who either already has some homesteading inclination or is ready to develop it. The guide rewards people who are willing to get their hands in the soil, monitor plant health, manage companion plantings, and iterate on their growing setup season by season.
The Lost SuperFoods is written for someone who thinks of food preparedness in terms of knowledge and curation — someone who wants to understand what to stock, how to preserve it, and which forgotten food traditions carry the most survival value. You don’t need to be a gardener to benefit from this guide.
Practicality: Immediate vs. Incremental
The Lost SuperFoods is immediately applicable. You can finish a chapter and start a fermentation project the same afternoon. The knowledge is transferable to whatever food you already have access to.
Pocket Farm requires setup time. Even the fastest-growing crops take weeks. The value of Pocket Farm is in the system you build — which means it pays out over seasons rather than immediately. If you’re already in an emergency, this guide is too late. If you’re preparing before one arrives, it’s exactly the right investment.
Space Requirements
Pocket Farm needs some physical growing space — how much depends on your goals, but some outdoor or semi-outdoor light-accessible area is a baseline requirement. The guide works hard to minimize space requirements with containers and vertical techniques, but it can’t eliminate them entirely.
The Lost SuperFoods has no space requirement. You could live in a studio apartment and extract full value from this guide. The only “space” it uses is kitchen counter space for fermentation crocks or a small smoker setup in a yard — both optional depending on which techniques you pursue.
Implementation Timeline
| Milestone | Pocket Farm | The Lost SuperFoods |
|---|---|---|
| Start using content | Day 1 (planning) | Day 1 (reading and applying) |
| First tangible output | 2-8 weeks (first harvest) | Within days (first fermentation batch) |
| Full system value | 1-2 growing seasons | Ongoing — compounds with each technique learned |
| Long-term payoff | Self-sustaining food production | Preservation skills that extend any food supply indefinitely |
Complementarity
These guides are designed — whether intentionally or not — to cover each other’s blind spots. Pocket Farm grows food but doesn’t teach you to preserve what you grow beyond seed-saving. The Lost SuperFoods preserves food but doesn’t teach you to grow it. A preparedness strategy that has both guides has both capabilities covered.
When to Choose Pocket Farm
Choose Pocket Farm if any of these describe your situation:
You have growing space but no organized system. Lots of preppers have a yard, a patio, or containers they’re not fully utilizing. If you know you should be growing food but haven’t gotten there yet, Pocket Farm provides the structure that converts good intentions into actual harvests.
You’re focused on renewable food production. Stored food is finite. A functioning garden is a renewable resource. If your long-term preparedness thinking is oriented around food independence rather than just food storage, Pocket Farm addresses the production side of that equation. See my complete survival food guide for how production fits into a broader preparedness model.
You want to grow specific high-calorie crops efficiently. Pocket Farm’s crop selection framework — optimized for caloric density and storability — is more practically useful for preppers than general gardening guides that prioritize ornamentals or variety over survival value.
You’re new to growing and want a systematic start. The guide is written for beginners who don’t already have homesteading knowledge. If you’ve never grown food before and want a structured introduction that accounts for real-world space constraints, this is a reasonable starting point.
You’re interested in the best survival food options for compact growing. Pocket Farm is specifically engineered for the compact growing challenge — it’s not a general-purpose gardening guide retrofitted for preppers.
When to Choose The Lost SuperFoods
Choose The Lost SuperFoods if any of these describe your situation:
You already have a food storage base and want to extend it. If you have a pantry, a chest freezer, or a root cellar and you want to learn how to maximize shelf life and nutritional density of what you already have, the preservation methods in this guide are immediately applicable.
You want to learn traditional preservation techniques. Fermentation, curing, smoking, and other traditional preservation methods are skills you keep forever. The guide provides the framework for understanding these techniques at a level that lets you adapt them rather than just follow recipes.
You have no outdoor growing space. If you’re in an apartment, a dense urban area, or any situation where you can’t realistically grow food, Pocket Farm’s value to you is limited. The Lost SuperFoods requires no space and no growing infrastructure.
You’re oriented toward knowledge-building over system-building. Some preppers are more interested in knowing more than doing more. The Lost SuperFoods is rich reference material — the kind of guide you’ll return to repeatedly as you work through different preservation techniques.
You want to build out your prepper pantry and long-term food storage. The guide’s preservation methods are specifically designed to extend shelf life — which is exactly the challenge of a serious prepper pantry. Check also my long-term food storage guide for how these techniques integrate into a broader storage strategy.
Can You Use Both Together?
Yes — and in my view, a serious food preparedness strategy needs both kinds of knowledge.
Here’s how they integrate in practice:
Stage 1 — Setup (first month): Use Pocket Farm to assess your growing space, select your crops, and build your first growing area. Simultaneously, start working through The Lost SuperFoods to understand what preservation methods you want to develop and what equipment you’ll need.
Stage 2 — Growing season: As Pocket Farm’s system produces your first harvests, The Lost SuperFoods’ preservation techniques become immediately relevant — you now have fresh produce that needs to be preserved, cured, fermented, or stored for the non-growing season.
Stage 3 — Off-season: The Lost SuperFoods’ knowledge keeps working through winter. Your preserved harvest, your fermentation projects, and your growing understanding of calorie-dense forgotten foods continue to develop even when nothing is growing outside.
Stage 4 — Crisis readiness: In an actual emergency, Pocket Farm’s system is already in place producing food, and The Lost SuperFoods’ techniques are keeping that food and any other available food preserved and nutritionally dense for the long term.
The guides don’t overlap — they stack. One produces; one preserves. A preparedness food strategy that ignores either side of that equation has a gap. Together, they’re a more complete system than either is alone.
Our Pick
If I’m recommending one guide to start with — and I have to choose — I recommend Pocket Farm as the first purchase for most preppers.
Here’s my reasoning: food production capacity is the harder capability to build and the one most preppers have not developed. Most people who are serious about preparedness have already done some version of food storage — they have canned goods, freeze-dried stocks, or a pantry. What they typically haven’t done is build an active, renewable food production system.
Pocket Farm addresses that gap directly. It’s a systematic approach to building food production capacity in a compact space, oriented specifically around the caloric density and storability that matters in a survival context. The skills and infrastructure you build from this guide are genuinely yours forever — unlike stored food, they don’t expire.
That said, if you’re already a gardener — if you have growing space and some homesteading background — then The Lost SuperFoods may fill a larger gap for you. The preservation knowledge in that guide is underrepresented in the modern preparedness community, and Art Rude’s historical sourcing gives it more credibility than most survival food guides.
Both are ClickBank products with 60-day money-back guarantees. The risk on either purchase is minimal. If you’re serious about comprehensive food preparedness, I’d eventually recommend both — but if you need to start somewhere, Pocket Farm is where I’d start.
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Frequently Asked Questions
What is the main difference between Pocket Farm and The Lost SuperFoods?
Pocket Farm focuses on food production — teaching you to grow calorie-dense food in compact spaces using containers, vertical gardens, and companion planting. The Lost SuperFoods focuses on food knowledge — specifically 126 forgotten preservation methods and high-nutrition foods used by the US Army and pioneers. They complement each other more than they compete. Pocket Farm builds your capacity to grow food; The Lost SuperFoods builds your capacity to preserve and identify high-value food sources.
Which is better for preppers: Pocket Farm or The Lost SuperFoods?
It depends on your gap. If you need to produce food — you have outdoor space but lack a systematic growing approach — Pocket Farm is more relevant. If you have food storage needs and want to learn forgotten preservation techniques and identify calorie-dense forgotten foods, The Lost SuperFoods fills that gap better. Both are solid products with 60-day money-back guarantees through ClickBank, so the risk of trying either is low. See the When to Choose sections above for a detailed breakdown by situation.
Can you use both Pocket Farm and The Lost SuperFoods together?
Yes — they’re highly complementary. Pocket Farm teaches you to grow food; The Lost SuperFoods teaches you to preserve and identify high-value food sources. A complete preparedness food strategy benefits from both skill sets: production and preservation. In practice, they stack neatly — Pocket Farm’s harvests become raw material for The Lost SuperFoods’ preservation techniques.
Which costs more: Pocket Farm or The Lost SuperFoods?
Both are ClickBank products sold at current promotional pricing that can change over time. Check each official site — backyardliberty.org for Pocket Farm and thelostsurvivalfoods.com for The Lost SuperFoods — for current prices. Both come with a 60-day money-back guarantee. For a pricing breakdown, see my dedicated articles on Pocket Farm price and cost and The Lost SuperFoods cost and price.
Which survival food guide should I buy first?
If you have outdoor growing space and minimal homesteading knowledge, start with Pocket Farm — it addresses the hardest gap to fill (active food production capacity). If you’re focused on building food reserves and learning traditional preservation, start with The Lost SuperFoods. If you’re serious about comprehensive food preparedness, both guides together address complementary gaps in your readiness — one for production, one for preservation.
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Informational only. This article is for general informational purposes and is not professional, legal, medical, electrical, or financial advice. Survival, energy, and water-treatment decisions carry real risks — consult a licensed professional for your specific situation. Product claims are the manufacturer’s; verify current details on the official site.
By Megan Forsythe — off-grid homesteader & CERT-certified emergency preparedness instructor.