farm costs 4

FARM COSTS 4

A reminder before I start. The following mostly pertains to lowland farming. Mountain dwellers face a different dynamic in that there is not the population to feed because they need less military forces to protect themselves. They can scale way down, which makes their job much easier Big Picture ( not to imply the lifestyle itself will be a piece of cake ). Flatlanders have much better land to work with, but other flatland armies want your land so you have to Go Big Or Go Home. Yet, both STILL need a lot of infrastructure to succeed.

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And of course this also applies to hermitages. The difference with a loner or a mountain tribe is that they are Generalists and usually in a flatland ( referred to a Farmers, as opposed to Mountaineers or Hermitages ) you need Specialists ( placing even more pressure for population growth hence expansion ). Up in the mountain you have enough folks to pool labor that the extra folks don't constitute much more resource pressure than a hermitage, but you also avoid the population pressure and hence can survive better off the residue of the collapsed civilization.

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Farming needs much more unique infrastructure that can only be Ready Made if you can keep the carbon fuels flowing. But this requires much more up front investment, both in the infrastructure and in food storage ( because you'll need explosive population growth to convert from Modern back down to Solar ). Whether you skip Modern and substitute food Storage for food Production, or do a two step, relying on Modern then building a Solar infrastructure but at the same time using Modern until it fails so as to put up surplus, the logistics here are going to be insane. I won't cover modern-you know that drill.

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“Solar”, by the way, is plant and muscle power, only. Traditional farming, before coal or oil. You need to return to this as soon as possible, because relying on one tractor and one diminishing fuel supply ( or, increased use of that one tractor to plant even more fields for an ethanol supply ), is a recipe for Murphy's Law to reign supreme. Murphy is nobodies friend and a stern taskmaster. He and Darwin are best buddies, but if they invite you for a beer they are just setting you up to be the patsy.

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First, you need to clear more fields to feed your offensive livestock. Your horses need lots of pasture. Before industrialized equipment, it was pretty standard to have about a third of your land devoted to feeding your livestock. That is a lot of land to tend to have horse labor substitute for human muscle ( and you need horses for war, obviously ). Crowded societies such as in the Orient ( for instance, Japan, with limited lowlands ) would restrict horses for this reason of needed surplus land. Horses are not resource cheap.

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Next you need extra calories, and extra timber, which need extra fodder and calories, for defensive fortifications. And odds are this is NOT a One Off event. You'll need to provide maintenance and more structures for defense of expanded land. Everything you need, will require more land, which will require more infrastructure. It is a reinforced feedback loop. And you'll need to get your structures, after defending them, maximized in energy conservation. That probably means in most locations a dug-out, three sides buried and a roof cover. You are doing this or you'll never stay up to speed in timber.

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Fuel and timber are going to be constant needs ( remember, Go Big or Go Home. You need to expand, offensively and to fuel population increases needed to expand ). You need parties for wood gathering, with most likely a military force protecting them ( as you will if scavenging is practical. Not food or ammo gathering, as all those resources go immediately, but mostly building material scavenging. Window pane and aluminum, and probably copper with some PVC pipe if archery needs show quickly. Automobile stripping, perhaps ). Your man power needs will surprise you, necessitating more land use.

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Which will probably lead to quick farm yield decline. Even with lands set aside for organic material harvesting for soil conditioning, most likely the land you are farming wasn't reconditioned from artificial fertilizer application and overuse, and you can't slow down on current use because of expansion pressures. Yields will fall, necessitating MORE clearance and military expansion. Plus, if you need nitrates for weapons, that is less fertilizer into the soil. Needing new soil because of overuse is THE common denominator in imperial collapse. Well, also expansion in the first place. Even before The War Of Yankee Aggression And Colonization And Industrial Pillage, the US faced massive pressure because of yield decline.

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Which brings up slavery. Don't automatically discount it because your Puritan Elite appointed school teacher insisted that slavery only started ( and had to be ended ) with the Southern Confederacy. Slavery is as normal as the kings that benefited from their use. Remember, to raise a farmer from conception to Farm Implement, you need a good half million calories a year for at least a dozen years. Six million calories, minimum. A bushel of wheat is 60 pounds, 90,000 calories. An acre yields, what? About thirty bushel to a Solar Farmer?

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Each slave is about a free two and a half acres of wheat, if they are at least twelve years old. Are you REALLY going to NOT have slaves when your enemies do, and it translates into a military advantage? Besides, what else are you going to do with POW's? They will be put to work, in chains. Call them POW's, but they are just re-named slaves. And even if you saved two plus acres of grain getting rather than raising a slave, they still need to be fed now. More land. Which all needs more infrastructure.

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You might REALLY want to rethink farming unless you are up in the hills. And you can forget having a tribe up in the hills unless you provide the food and ammo for them. Unless you are are already forming a tribe up in the hills that are already installing infrastructure as homesteaders, in which case SOME of the needed food storage can be substituted with current self-sufficiency production. Most likely, they will still need at least one years food storage ( a huge savings ) and some bulk ammo. Then it goes from twenty grand for your hillbilly buddies multi-family unit to more like under five thousand.

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Of course, that is NOT assuming semi-auto militia porn stars, but more guerrillas with limited ammo fighting. You don't even want to start in on a discussion on the arsenal bill for a lowlands farming tribe. Let's just say even Rawles couldn't afford it. Tribe is preferable. Tribe is also an expense, no matter what you do. Just be realistic in your plans, whatever they may be.

( .Y. )

( today's related Amazon link click HERE )

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note: the movie Airplane II pretty much blows.  Mostly recycled jokes from the original far better film. The funniest part was when nobody was panicked over crashing but as soon as they announced the coffee was running out, everyone freaked :)  However, I thought the beginning was very interesting for the following sight gags.  Airport security is looking at the X-Ray monitors and checking out boobs.  While terrorists board with weapons, grandma is harassed and searched by security.  And the Catholic priest is an obvious pedophile.  The movie was released in 1983.  
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