(Continued from Part 1.)
Successful survivalists consider a variety of scenarios including looking at how previous generations survived to glean any wisdom that they can take as compensation for their time. All of us are only here because our ancestors somehow managed to carry themselves genetically forward. For most of human history, it was difficult to get enough calories to barely stay alive and this fact is lost upon most people as they have so many choices today often struggling on what cuisine to eat, and not how to find food.
A common cause of death throughout history has been starvation, due to crop failure. A lot of individuals reading this if asked to name a critical event of the 14th Century would say the “Black Death” — also known as the Bubonic Plague — reducing Europe’s overall population from 1346 to 1353 by about a third with mortality rates of often 80 percent or higher depending on the plague year. Few people know that just a little earlier in the 14th Century there was a large food crisis that is very important to our discussion on farming. Throughout history, people would often go from harvest to harvest and the slightest interruption often meant disaster as crop yields were not large multiples, but were often in low single-digit multipliers in productivity. Often it was two to one or even lower with even higher loss percentages.
The closest modern equivalent to a person born at the dawn of the 14th Century is a man born in 1900. A baby born in 1900 was old enough to be eligible to participate in the carnage of trench warfare by his 18th birthday, by his 19th birthday he could have been dead of the influenza pandemic starting in 1918 which killed over 50 million people. He was still under 30 at the beginning of the Great Depression, and was under 40 when the Second World War started, and then in his 45th year he entered an age of the atom with all of its consequences to civilian populations, worldwide.
His 14th Century ancestor by his mid-teens, faced a famine that rivaled the Black Death in its capacity to reduce the population. However, this famine is now relatively forgotten as so many have occurred since then: Like most naturally occurring famines, it started with bad weather in the spring (of 1315) with heavy persistent rains and without warm periods. This did not allow the grain to ripen and this cycle continued off and on for about seven years. Any grain that could be harvested had a low yield and animals starved in some areas with an 80 percent reduction in their numbers. Population declined between 10 to 20 percent in many areas and even royal families who were the richest with many experiencing overall reduced life expectancy. During this seven year period in which disease and deficiency debilitated even those who survived, pandemic followed in the form of the Black Death a little over a generation later.
All well-read survivalists know that civilization has a very thin veneer. This famine was not much different as what traditionally occurs in famines as food became less and less available and people become increasingly desperate: crime increased even to unspeakable crimes such as cannibalism and infanticide. The origin of the “fairy tale” of “Hansel and Gretel” actually is from this time period and for those who have read the original telling of it includes the famine component. The historical record is unfortunately replete with examples until this day of the principle of the “nine meals” by Alfred Henry Lewis: “Those of us who are well fed, well garmented and well ordered, ought not to forget that necessity makes frequently the root of crime. It is well for us to recollect that even in our own law-abiding, not to say virtuous cases, the only barrier between us and anarchy is the last nine meals we’ve had. It may be taken as axiomatic that a starving man is never a good citizen.”
When we hear statements like 80 percent of the world’s calories come from grain or other staple crops, this is a very critical point for survivalists to remember. Wheat, corn, and rice comprise over half of the world’s calories. Think about it like a three leg stool with even one leg being knocked out it becomes an unstable platform. Previous civilizations that relied on one crop often suffered tremendous consequences if some form of pestilence became prevalent. From 1845 to 1852, the Irish potato crop which was the Irish “Lumper” potato was the most common variety became subject to the blight.
The net result was that a million Irish died and a million emigrated abroad to avoid starvation and for better opportunities. This is an extreme example of monoculture gone wrong. Specialization is one of the key components of the reason why you are able to do what you do instead of being behind a plow from sunup to sundown or engaged in other food growing or gathering like the majority of adult men for most of history, but any type of complex system can fail. The Irish chose a variety known for its ability to produce high calories in a compact space quickly. Unfortunately, a lack of crop diversification led to much wailing and lamentations throughout Eire.
For most of human history, it was a struggle just to survive and a prepared individual should be prepared for historical pendulum to eventually swing back to a historically normal level where food takes a larger proportion of income and is not available in endless varieties. Our farm can be activated very quickly into a retreat and one of the foundational principles even on a farm is food storage. Our farm can harvest multiple times per year, but there are many months when we are waiting for the harvest. We are blessed to have extensive food storage both packed for long term and on shelves, large freezers full of food (with multiple backup power sources), and the ability to purchase food both locally and from around the world. This is wonderful, but it could stop suddenly.
Based on my historical research, the bare minimum for any retreat is two and a half years of food storage and that is for people who have extensive experience with extracting calories out of the ground. History has shown too many times that when problems happen in food production they can often be regional or national instead of just local. Unless a family truly has limited climate-controlled storage space for food or is in the process of moving, food is often an excellent investment as a hedge against inflation, supply chain issues, and other problems that occur.
Our current civilization is founded on several key components. One of them is the principle of food storage. Most people do not store food, but others are storing food for you so you can exchange your dollars for their food that you want when you want. Previous civilizations stored food or they starved. Even if they stored food, many times they starved. You can get food by looking around for it, by knowing which plants will get you some limited nutrition or are your last meal. This is highly inefficient and often dangerous to those who are not experts in identifying the often minute differences between something highly poisonous and something benign.
The most efficient way to produce food is through modern farming techniques some of which will be covered with my discussion starting tomorrow. Most of this discussion is very similar to what other farmers who own grain farms do throughout the United States and the world.
Modern farming is scientific. At its simplest form, this is the idea that you can take a series of steps and repeat them to show an easily repeatable result. Randomly scattering seed at the wrong time of year without planting will often result in a meal for birds, not food for you or to sell so you can buy something else.
Scientific farming has been developed over the centuries. It is no longer folklore or old wives’ tales which sometimes are the basis of how things really work and sometimes just plain nonsense. This has taken much time and experimentation. Go back far enough, and people thought some really strange things that we know now to be incorrect to dangerous. A more recent example is if you tried to explain the chain of events starting in 2020 to most people in 2019, they would have thought that was impossible.
Sometimes discoveries are made by accident and probably not through the rigorous principles of science. Cheese was probably invented when some merchant was transporting milk across a long distance who discovered that it is quite delicious and a way to preserve milk. It took some time to discover that the stomachs of animals contain the enzyme rennet which causes milk to curdle to separate the curds from whey. Eventually someone figured out to make ricotta cheese which uses the whey. We can now accurately gauge every single phase in the life of a plant including which inputs work best and how to most efficiently harvest it to maximize yield and how to store it to preserve it for the point at which you want to consume it for its caloric output or sell it to someone who wants to eat it or further process it.
One of the foundational principles of farming is based on a very simple idea: you plant a seed and try to increase the amount you get back. A seed is an amazing item. In the case of the humble wheat seed (known as a berry or kernel), it can be eaten now or one seed can given enough time, effort, water, fertilizer and sunlight fill an entire room with more seeds with the potential for each of those to do the same. It does not happen overnight or by accident. It requires a lot of planning and everything to go right. There are so many possibilities that can destroy a harvest. An early frost, excessive rain at the wrong time, a drought, fire from a lightning strike, and hail are just some of the events that can turn a “fine stand of wheat” into a topic for a newspaper story on the state of American agriculture.
One ordinary seed has all of the power to restart a crop and all of agriculture. You just need a lot of time, knowledge, and the basic inputs of farming for that one seed to become the progenitor. It is a play on the old game of showing exponential growth of rice thought of a long time ago starting with one square and doubling it each day. Over a hundred years ago someone considered it for wheat and figured it would take 15 years at the rate back then for one wheat berry to turn into over 5 billion bushels. In the United States, we routinely harvest a multiple of what previous generations of farmers would harvest, so it would take less time today to get to the same level of production. The one problem is how to make it over the “starving time” between planting and harvest, so for survivalists deep larders, knowledge, and tools will be necessary if we ever need to restart agriculture.
Consistently repeating that simple idea is often the problem. Seeing that you could turn that one seed into two on a consistent basis was most likely the genesis of agriculture where people could stay in one spot and develop what we often term “civilization” instead of just figuring out a way to stay alive by going from harvesting wild edibles to chasing herds of nomadic animals. Now, we routinely return 30 or more to one seed through amazing agricultural productivity through the principles of scientific farming. An acre of wheat planted in our area in Kansas could yield 50 or more bushels to the acre. We plant about one bushel to the acre, so that could be a 50 to 1 return at that level of productivity. This level of productivity is simply historically amazing and the reason why you are not behind the plow currently (actually not many people are “behind a plow” currently except by lifestyle choice or who are “historically interpreting” animal-powered agriculture).
Corporate farms versus family farms
As I wrote last time in my series on retreats, family farms are the vast majority of all farms in this country which are owned by families, not large corporations. Depending on the source of the statistics that you read, it is somewhere around 95 to 98 percent of family farms in the United States, currently. Large corporations control between 2 to 5 percent of the farms, but since these are very large, the percentage of their total output is high. However, your food most likely comes from a family farm as over 80 percent of food grown in this country is actually from family farms. At the dawn of civilization, one farmer barely supported his family; now farmers are feeding almost 170 people. This has increased consistently and fewer people are needed each year to be involved in agriculture. Because of the efficiency of modern agriculture, you are most likely able to devote your time to other pursuits which improve our lives.
(To be continued tomorrow, in Part 3.)
A Concluding Note From JWR: This young man is prayerfully seeking a wife. He is offering a gift of $18,000 to whoever introduces him to his bride, after marriage. For some details, see his recent article: A Quest and a Gift.