PAW subsistence farming.

[bunyip]

The PAW world that many here contemplate, is, unfortunately, the real world for many in the third world.

East Timor is probably the poorest country in SE Asia, located just to the NW of Australia. They suffered greatly under Japanese occupation in WW2, and Indonesian occupation from 1975-1999.

Have a look at this story;

www.abc.net.au/landline/content/2010/s2845293.htm

(Click on the top left 'play video' icon).

It may give some appreciation of just how hard a subsistence lifestyle is - especially if you also are trying to have some sort of excess for barter or a cash crop.

[patience]

Yes, it is NOT an easy life. It is often just enough to keep people alive, if that.

When our kids were growing up, we owned a 45 acre place, more than half wooded, that we logged and farmed with a pair of Percheron draft horses. I worked a day job as an engineer, so this was a hobby farm, but a learning time incase we should need to know how to make this work.

It can be done, if such a venture is properly scaled, managed and has enough capital behind it at the outset. It would not be a high standard of living under the best of circumstances. But, in a PAW, it could keep you alive and even thriving to the degree possible without the benefit of cheap energy from oil, coal, electricity, etc..

I enjoyed it at the time, but that was in my mid-thirties and in great health. At 65, with the problems of getting older, I wouldn't relish going back to that lifestyle.

[rvm45]

Every since Columbus "Discovered" this land, Europeans have been prospering in this land.

There were a few droughts, crop failures and pestilences along the way--but they prospered.

The Indians who preceded us generally prospered too--they just didn't have the technology to hedge their bets the way that "We" did.

And do you know why they prospered?

They prospered because our soil and climate is, averaged on the whole, the best in the World.

The Amish prosper using 1800's farming methods--though that is not quite a fair test.

The Amish Dude who like needs a shovel or a pair of scissors, hitches his buggy and goes to the nearest "Harbor Freight" or "True Value" and buys one from the "Anglishman".....He may pick up a big whetstone and a set of drill-bits while he's there.

If everyone was "Amish" and we eschewed Electricity and other tools of of mass production--The Amish Dude would find the price of many of his tools, and other purchase items--like bolts of cotton--climbing.

For a better visualization, think of "Little House on The Prairie".

No its not entirely realistic--but there's a railroad into town, a general store, a saw-mill, A blacksmith's shop, etc.

After TEOTWAWKI--#1} We will have ignorant and inexperienced people trying to apply 1800's farming techniques--and where are they gonna get Plows, Draft Horses, Proper Seed, Etc.?

#2} As both the ignorant and the competent--as well as everyone in between, tries to grow their own food--they will have the possibility of Raiders, Brigands and would-be Petty Tyrants to deal with on the side.

#3} Land is expensive. It has always been so. Look at the Pilgrims, Daniel Boone, the Westward Wagon Trains--

If good land was reasonable, why were so many ready to lay their lives on the line to claim a good piece?

(Yeah, the Pilgrims wanted Religious Freedom--but if isolation alone were sufficient for their cause--They could have all moved into the Harshest part of The Sahara--or Greenland.....)

Many--not all, but many of our modern "Self-Sufficient" and/or "Survivalists" sort of folks were and are operating out of a shoestring budget. They are not often able to afford the best land--and once they get their land, they can't always afford to improve it as much as they'd like.

Patience and I have had some rather detailed discussions on improving soil--And there is probably no such thing as soil that cannot be improved to some degree. He probably understands what I'm trying to say.....

But even after a EOTWAWKI incident, we are unlikely to be as poor, or have to live "Hand-to-Mouth" as much as many third-Worlders--at least not once we get our act together (after the first few years)

But it is also correct, that most will be earning their daily bread by sweating over it, once again.

.....RVM45

[patience]

rvm45 said:
"...most will be earning their daily bread by sweating over it, once again."

That's a fact. Farm life isn't easy now, even with all the benefits of cheap energy and modern tech. I farmed Dad's place in the 1950's and '60's with older technology, and that involved a lot more labor. Certainly, the often quoted "live off the land" idea sounds nostalgically cool, but once you get into it, it turns into a lot of drudgery, if you are going to scratch out any more than a bare existence.

The crux of the matter in my mind is energy sources. We are spoiled rotten using electricity, natural gas, gasoline and diesel fuel for "slaves" to do the heavy work. If for some reason we are left without those, we have a problem. All of a sudden we are back to an 1850 lifestyle. Your efforts become drastically limited by what you can do with your own 2 hands, and whatever animal power you can muster to help.

Horses are athletes, and must be kept in good physical shape in order to do a days work. That means that they need to work at least some almost every day, or they get soft like most people are nowadays. That means getting yourself off your butt and working with them, walking every step they do, as they pull implements and loads around your place.

One researcher had some Amish folks wear pedometers to learn how far they walked in a day. The record was a guy who walked about 12 miles, following his horses around while discing plowed ground. The man was quoted as saying, "T'weren't easy walkin', either." Anyone who has ever tried to walk through plowed ground can attest to that.

That researcher came up with a weight-loss program he called the "Amish Diet". You could eat anything you wanted to, and as much as you wanted to eat. The catch was, you had to be able to keep up with the Amish folks as they did their daily work. He guaranteed you would lose weight if you stayed with the program!

A man with a team of medium size draft horses plowing easy ground might get anywhere from 2 to 4 acres plowed in a day, assuming they are in good shape to start with. In our red clay, that might be 1 to 2 acres a day. With a 25 HP tractor pulling two 12" plows, you can double those figures, or more. And, you get to RIDE on the tractor!

No, it's not an easy life.

[bunyip]

Here in Australia, we have a political party called 'the greens'. I'm not a fan.

Many here call them the watermelon greens - green on the outside and red on the inside. Mostly inner city types they have a view they want to force on us of a post-industrial world. Climate change - and the policies they espouse to combat it - is their latest method of foisting this on us.

So a subsistence existence is not something I would seek for anyone, certainly not a choice where other options exist.

[patience]

bunyip,

Right. There are a lot of those wannabe "greenies" in the US, too. Most of them here have a lot to learn about how that lifestyle really works. Typically, they are upper middle class or above in income, and live a fairly upscale life that is based in large part on the industrialization they say they are against!

I wouldn't wish a rural subsistence life on anyone except my worst enemies! It is hard physical labor and lots of it, with very little reward.

I do think we could see a return to such a way of life in a PAW, notably because of expensive energy and an economic breakdown of our present industrial society. That breakdown is starting to happen in the US since our industrial base has moved away and gone to Asia, Mexico, etc.. That has left the US with primarily "service" jobs: I wash your car and you cook me a burger, you pay the insurance man and he comes to me for a car wash. Nothing is produced in such an economy, so, as every transaction is taxed, the wealth gets to be less and less.

[bunyip]

patience, I think you are right about going backwards in a service economy.

The US still has a good primary and secondary (ie manufacturing) industry base - but nowhere near what it had in the '50s-'70s. Farmingis still there, and mining.

the two big changes I see to the US is the huge imports of oil starting in the late 70s, and now add in also the huge amount of manufactured goods from China. These MUST weaken the industrial base (and employmeny base) and terms of trade.

We in Oz are somewhat luckier. Those same economies you buy goods from (China, Japan, Korea (India?) get their raw materials from us (coal, iron ore, bauxite, et al). We run a huge trade surplus with each of them (the main country we run a trade deficit with is the US - things like military hardware, aircraft, mining equipment, CNC machinery, Apple Macs etc).

But exporting those jobs has to be a factor in the position the US finds itself in IMHO.

I am noy going to give up on the US though - you have come through tough times before.

[patience]

bunyip,

I hate to say it, but the truth is, in the US we have a bunch of very incapable people now. A lot of the PAW fiction reflects that, indicating that they aren't able to deal with a major crisis. I see the truth of that around me. Young checkout clerks that can't count change, middle age people who can't do simple maintenance on their cars, and the vast majority that have never grown anything in their lives, let alone a garden.

The generation that operated US industry from the 1950's through the 1980's is almost gone now. Our labor pool now is mostly trained to operate keyboards, not equipment. I don't see the foundation of knowledge that is necessary to bring back productivity to the US.

That is the result of the jobs going away, as much as anything else. I was a manufacturing process engineer in the auto industry here from the late 1960's through the early 1990's. I saw that going bad and took a job as a machinist. The tooling business was declining with the auto plants, so I started my own shop doing farm repair work. Now, I am 65 years old and retired.

I know a couple dozen excellent tool and die makers that either retired or are doing other work because there is no work for them in industry. It went to Asia.

Farming is worse. The labor base used to be young kids working in the summers, and the farm owners doing the rest with their families. Now, it is all mechanized for want of kids to handle hay bales! The kids simply wouldn't do it any more, so farmers went to big round bales and handle them with machinery. Take away the machinery, or make the fuel too expensive and there is no way out for them. We have painted ourselves into a corner.

In a PAW setting, I firmly believe most of the city folk would starve. They would surely get unruly very quickly, as we have seen in the LA riots of the 1990's, and the aftermath of hurricane Katrina. All I can think of is to try to stay out of the way until the fires burn out in the cities and see if there is anything left to salvage.

A few in the more rural areas have the knowledge to make a subsistence living by farming of a small sort, but it would be a very iffy thing. The necessary seed, fertilizers, equipment and fuel would be hard to come by for a small acreage setup.

I fear for my country in any sort of real emergency. When the price of oil based fuels gets too high, we are toast.

[papaof2]

I've been reading through some of the older posts and sadly don't see much change for the better.

Although I have enough heirloom seed for a subsistence garden for two, I have less than 1/4 acre that could be cultivated and it's next to the street so anyone who walked by could see what's growing. A wooden (or other can't-see-through) fence is out of budget as is a tiller big enough to do the initial sod removal/burial. The sod could be taken out by hand (I'm pretty good at sharpening shovels) but I wouldn't be able to do that very long on any given day (seven decades of wear and tear do take their toll). The house across the street has about the same amount of lawn and I know that they aren't gardeners by ant stretch of imagination - they had their lawn service plant some rose bushes a few years ago and all of the bushes are now dead and gone. They do have a teenage son who could be a source of labor in a SHTF situation. I might be able to trade solar-generated power for his video games for some hours of physical labor to make both lawns into gardens. If he gets hungry enough, he possibly would be willing to work for veggies...

Probably best to do power-for-labor trading in neat little packages, such as a charged 12 volt gel cell with a small inverter and he has to put in Z hours to get the battery charged again. Never tell him that there are 3 identical gel cell batteries and that I always have at least one fully charged ;-)

[mnn2300]

Yeah, I've only got close to 6 decades on this old body but I'm slowing down too.
We have put in a couple of raised bed circles near the fence this spring, but with what I have for gardens I'd never be able to feed my family without tilling the entire yard. Luckily I have a tiller but with the sun and heat here in Texas you would need a steady supply of water to keep it alive and that would be the hard part. We're on City water and the nearest year round stream is about 5 miles from us, and I'm sure a quarter of a million people (the population of my suburb) would be headed there too.

[papaof2]

Being in the upper half of Georgia means we don't quite as hot as your location. I have rain barrels at several points around the house and a 250 gallon storage tank. I did the math some years ago and came up the figure of 15,000 gallons for storage to be able to water the equivalent of one inch every week (in a year with average rainfall - average based on 40 years of NOAA records). There's no place to put a 15,000 gallon tank, except possibly underground, but the cost of excavation plus the big tank is not in the budget.

Had I been in the prepper mindset some years ago, I would have bought out my wife's grandmother when she was no longer able to live alone (northern Alabama). The house was old, but the construction was sturdy (Grandpa built it). One thing the house lacked was insulation, but that can be remedied. They had updated to propane for heating, but I would bet $$ that the wood stoves they'd previously used for heat were still in one of the outbuildings. Cooking was electric. No garage, as they never owned a car. With no free garbage pickup, they burned or stored whatever they needed to get rid of. The land was in two segments: perhaps 3 acres with the house on one side of the road and the rest, with the barn, on the other side of the road (don't remember how big the parcel was, but have sales documents found in my genealogy research). Water was from a well that was under the back of the house (electric pump) but there was another well out front with the long skinny diptube instead of a bucket. The county was extending the water system, but I no longer remember if it was that far out. Sanitation was a septic tank (plus an outhouse). There was room for a large garden on the house lot (I remember at least 1/2 acre always being in use and there was plenty of unused land remaining) and the other acreage was rented out for farming. The nearest town was 30 minutes away by car.

Sent from my IdeaTabA2109A using proboards

[millwright]

I have been thinking about a small hydroponic system, maybe made with sections of gutter with a solar fountain pump to circulate the water.

Wouldn't take much of a greenhouse to keep a little fresh lettuce coming in in winter.

[pbbrown0]

I am concerned that too many who think they are preparing for the worst are going to make 2 to 5 years and then have a rude awakening when they realize the grid ain't coming back for a good while yet because the incredible distribution system we have enjoyed will take many many years to rebuild, and even the grid depends on that. It is all inter-dependent. Most of our manufacturing other than high tech, short life stuff has moved to the other side of the oceans. We have become so accustomed to replacing things that wear out, that we cannot conceive of what to do if one of our essential tools wears out and there is no replacement. We think of solar power for when the grid goes down, but what happens when the cells and batteries are worn out, or chips in the laptop finally deteriorate. Gasifiers to substitute for gasoline? What happens when the engine or transmission parts or brake pads wear out, or tires go flat and there is no one making replacements? I could go on and on, but you get the point.

When Rome fell it was technologically only a minor blip, but it took a thousand years before the Renaissance started the recovery of learning in Western Europe.

[bunyip]

Well I started this thread in 2011 - quite a long time ago now.

Gardening?
Well I have been trying the square foot gardening idea, raised beds, and also some gardening in pots and those 'potato bags'
The potato bags worked well, as did the sq ft garden. The pots/buckets are a work in progress.
Indications are that 2 to 3 4'x8' raised beds, farmed in the sq ft garden manner, and a good number of pots will keep me and the wife in fresh veg, with some to put by.

...And of course, a video to share. Dry area farming in an opal mining town - no not Coober Pedy - this is Lightning Ridge.
youtu.be/1-7jDijY8o4

youtu.be/tDqrzj5FM78

[wvfarmgirl]

In PAW there will be minimal outside inputs available to increase soil fertility. A great addition to gardens is leaves. Every fall I rake up every leaf in my yard and add them to the garden. Mix in some partially composted manure and by spring you’re ready to plant. The leaves add water retention and makes the soil much easier to work.

Comfrey is a great fertilizer to utilize for potatoes and tomatoes too.