Chapter Seven
Case Studies or the Grasshopper and the Ant
Was it invariably this clean? No, of course not. In any society there are those who consider trust to be aberrant and stupid. There were those who hoarded and looted even in high trust zones. But, by and large, yes, it was that clean. People gathered together in "voluntary random associations" for mutual support. And it saved our nation.
Case Study: Blackjack, Georgia.
Blackjack was, at the time of the height of the Plague, a town of two thousand in a very small rural county in south Georgia total population of thirty thousand. Counties in Georgia are tiny. I hunted around to find out why and learned it has to do with their charter, which was written right after the Revolutionary War. Basically, the county seat has to be "one half day's ride" from any point in the county. That was so voters (who at the time of the charter had to be middle class to wealthy white males) could ride into town, vote and ride home in one day.
Does any of that matter? Not really for this story. But it made doing studies county by county in Georgia a lot easier, which is why so many case studies of the Plague were done there. Also that the University of Georgia survived with so limited effect.
(Clarke County Health Department was one of those who got it right with the immunizations. It didn't hurt that the Tropical and Emerging Diseases Lab at UGA was immediately consulted and gave very professional advice, that was followed, to university, city and county administrators. No fewer than 90% of the students and faculty of UGA survived the H5N1 Plague and an astounding 70% of the residents of not only Clarke but the surrounding five counties. Athens has pretty much become the linchpin of Georgia at this point.)
Blackjack. The county health administrator was not the brightest light in the array nor were any of the other county politicians. Immunizations were not properly stored. They were administered purely by the two (count them, two for thirty thousand people) county health centers. All emergency services personnel, all county workers and administrators were vaccinated before the first local case of H5N1. (A Hispanic as was far too frequently the case.) Studies of the remaining doses indicated that they were probably less than 20% effective anyway. When the Plague hit in earnest, pretty much everyone went down.
When the wave was past, there were the initial voluntary associations. But once you've made sure your neighbors are okay, what do you do? Sit there and wait for the gub'mint to come help? Not hardly, brother.
There were many people in the county who needed assistance beyond just surviving the Plague. The elderly who had survived (a surprising number) needed assistance. Power was out and it was chilly that spring. There was food aplenty for the time being, but it was irregularly spaced. Bodies needed to be buried.
Did the county step up and get things going? After a while. But the next step was another "voluntary random association": Churches.
The preeminent church of Blackjack, as was the case of most areas in the deep south, was the First Baptist Church. The pastor was away on a missionary trip in, of all places, Thailand. Where he and his wife both died. The assistant pastor's narrative is unknown. He apparently took to the hills at the first suggestion of Plague and his whereabouts were unknown to the researchers.
This left the eldest daughter of the pastor in charge by a form of default. There were deacons of the church and such but they were doing other things to assist the community. The emergency services of the entire county ended up on the shoulders of a petite nineteen-year-old girl.
People who had special needs were brought to the church. A community kitchen was set up. Pews were moved and cots put in their place. People brought in food and supplies as they had them. Emergency crews trying to get power restored had first priority on food and beds. Then children. Then the elderly. Then "associated workers," that is everyday citizens who were helping out. Last were general refugees. If you were able-bodied and unwilling to help, you by God got the last of the food if there was any.
The priority was established by the preacher's daughter and nobody argued with her. And every time that things seemed to be on the brink of disaster, out of food, out of wood for fireplaces, out of blankets, in the words of the young lady in charge, "The Lord would provide."
Note: The limited effect of SARS and H5N1 leads people like this remarkable young lady to suggest the real reason isn't free-market medicine or hormones or "voluntary random associations" but that the Lord God looks over America. Given that "bigoted" and "stupid" and "backward" areas like Blackjack had lower mortality rates than more "enlightened" areas, even if similarly rural, it is occasionally hard to argue the logic.
They did not wait for the King to tell them what to do. They did not even wait for the local Lord, their elected county and city representatives, to tell them what to do. They just gathered in "voluntary random associations" and did whatever seemed to be the right thing at the time.
And it saved our nation.
Now we get to "who do you trust?" Well, you trust "us" whatever that "us" might be. Yes, if we're continuing this narrative, the white-bread residents of Smokey Hollow subdivision are not going to trust outsiders. They especially don't trust outsiders that don't look like them. Are they wrong?
Blackjack, again, was an interesting case. The local churches did not just take in those from their church. They ministered to anyone in need, which included Hispanic migrant farm workers as well as people who had become stranded on roads trying to escape the Plague. Did they trust those people? The answers given to the researchers were very Southern. Which means as opaque as a Japanese koan. "They were, by and large, nice people." "Did you trust them?" "They were, by and large, nice people."
The answer seemed to be "no." At least in the definition of "societal trust." But they also didn't turn them away. In places there were small towns and counties that closed their borders but Blackjack was, fortunately, far from major metropolitan areas and thus never reached the point of "overrun" with refugees.
The young lady in charge, however, only had problems from members of two minority groups: Hispanic males and African-American females. Neither group would accept her authority unless she brought in a male. Generally, that was one of the emergency workers who was catching a brief rest and a bite of whatever food was available. They were tired, they were frustrated already and they were very clear: You get what you're given, you give what help you can give or you get the hell out and go starve in the wilderness.
The news was still working and occasionally this sort of thing, or the "bigoted" counties that turned away refugees were pointed out on the news as signs of how "backward" such areas were.
Backwards and bigoted or just smart, wise even?
Let us take a look at our kumbaya brethren, what we can piece together of their narrative.
Comparing a city to a small, rural county would be ingenuous. I'll get to cities later. In the meantime, let's look at another case study.
Lamoille County, Vermont.
The county seat, Hyde Park, was a small town. The largest populated area in the county, Morrisville, had a population of 2000 just like Blackjack. The surrounding county had some farming but was primarily a "bedroom community" of mixed semi-retireds, "crafty" artisans and various others who for one reason or another could escape to the wilderness. Some of the homes were rentals but at the first touch of Plague the owners fled their suburban or urban residences and headed for the hills.
The county went 87% for Warrick. To call it bedrock rural "blue" is an understatement. The county government had issued nonbinding resolutions against the War in Iraq, the War in Iran, global-warming and every other cause celebre of the left. It had issued proclamations lamenting the fact that Lamoille was so intensively white-bread. Where are all our little brown brethren? Don't they know the Berkshires is the place to be?
Lamoille followed Frau Warrick's orders to the letter. Since they received a small shipment of vaccine, they were able to store about a third of their doses and kept the rest in styrofoam shipping containers. They violated the orders only to the extent of sending enough doses to the emergency services for them to spread their innoculations.
Instead of calling for people to come to the county health centers, though, they went out. They went first to nursing homes and innoculated all the old people. They got virtually every oldster that was in a nursing home or other care facility and that didn't object. Then they went to schools. That was harder. They had to get permission from the parents, first. Many of the parents were camped out at the, closed, county health centers so that was tough. They gave the schools a few days to get permission slips. God forbid they innoculate some poor dear when the parents objected.
The Plague hit Lamoille County in earnest about two weeks after they received the vaccine. Some of the vaccine had gone bad without refrigeration but not most. It was chilly in Vermont and it was stored in a back room. It, mostly, kept. But the only people vaccinated in the county, for all practical purposes, were the elderly, county workers, emergency service workers, some of the latter two's families and one school.
(Patient Zero at Copley Health Systems was a stockbroker from Massachusetts. His method of infection was never precisely determined. And many subsequent patients had never had interaction with him. But by then the Plague was really getting around.)
It took them two weeks to get to that point. At which point the schools shut down because parents were keeping their kids home, anyway.
It snowed that March in Vermont. It was a very cold and wet spring. People died. They were sometimes buried in backyards. People walked out and talked to their neighbors. There was some "voluntary random association" of local groups.
And at that point, it stopped. A few people, many of them long-term locals, gathered in larger groups centered around churches. The vast majority of the county, however, sat in their houses and waited for the King (Queen, actually) to tell them what to do.
Why?
Well, one reason was purely political. The vast majority of the "transport" population of Lamoille were liberals. Liberals Believe in the government the way that the young lady in Blackjack Believes in the Lord. It's almost a disservice to refer to such people as liberals. They were, in fact, aristocratists. They were very Old Country in that they felt that beyond their little fence it was the King's duty to fix things.
On average after one week they were out of Maslov's basic necessities, food, water. They then mostly drove to the nearest town to find help. They found dozens and hundreds of their mental brethren doing the same thing. The few "voluntary random associations" that had formed around churches or other societal groups tried to help at first. But there was no significant reciprocation. The transports felt that it was the duty of others to help them in need but not their duty to reciprocate. They wanted to be fed and watered and given shelter because it was a Right. From everyone according to their abilities, to everyone according to their needs. I have no abilities but I have lots of needs.
The voluntary associations, of necessity, started turning them away. Even if they had, societally, trusted the transports (and there had always been a degree of friction) they quickly learned that it was misguided.
En masse the transports complained to what was left of the county administration, accusing the voluntary associations of hoarding, bigotry, being badness. The county began rounding up supplies and distributing them, as was the right thing to do in any communist county. There was resistance from the ants that had prepared when the grasshopper, in a situation of survive or die and too many had already died, came to take his gathered seeds. In some cases, literally.
Farms were ordered to bring in all their food stuffs. Of course farms have vast stores of food. They're farms!
Uh . . . no. I mean, farmers tend to build up some personal stores in cans and such. Sure. But they don't store bulk grain, for example, on site. When they harvest it, it gets shipped to silos and distributed further. If they do have a couple of silos filled with what looks like grain, that's what's called seed. It's what you make more food from. Unless, of course, you eat it.
Farmers were preparing for planting season at that point. Some of them had seed in their silos. It was confiscated. Those that weren't already using "organic farming" methods or had genmod seeds were roundly castigated. A couple of the local farmers resisted, forcibly, having their seed taken from them. They lost in the end. More deaths.
And all the time the grasshoppers were wanting to know what the gub'mint was going to do to help them. They were protesting and shouting and generally making a nuisance of themselves.
Were all of them being idiots? No, no more than "random association" worked perfectly in high trust zones. But, statistically, "blue" counties had lower levels of local volunteerism on every level, from helping their neighbor to assisting in large-scale voluntary associations.
Why? These were, by and large, the people who spoke the most fulsomely of communal living, of everyone binding together in some sort of vast communistic surge to make the world a perfect utopia. And all organic, mind you. This general class of people, looked at in macrocosm, had the most experts in it on communal association of any class of people in the U.S. They should have been the biggest "voluntary associators" in the country.
Looked at in macrocosm. The hard-core believers in communal association, though, made up a small fraction of the overall "blue" group. Less than five percent. And most of them were already in "voluntary random associations." It's called a commune. And a commune where everyone voluntarily and randomly believes in communal living sometimes works. Sometimes. Generally, though, it don't.
Let's look at the most famous commune in history, even if most people don't know it was one: The Plymouth Colony.
That's right, the Pilgrims were communists. Oh, they didn't have the words and they sure didn't have Marx's great "From everyone according to their abilities to everyone according to their needs" line. But the original charter of the Plymouth Colony, the Mayflower Compact, was clear: Share and share alike.
This lasted through one year in The New World. A year with a death rate that made the Plague, at least in the U.S., look like a minor cold. They simply didn't grow enough food to make it to the next harvest. Various reasons. They were lousy farmers. They didn't understand the soil and weather conditions. But the most important thing they learned, forget putting fish heads under the corn if you got that in elementary school, was that if you treated the people who were doing the majority of the work exactly the same as those who would not or could not contribute as much to the community, the workers eventually decided to work less hard. And farming at that level is, trust me, very hard work.
Let's look back at Blackjack and that remarkable young lady. She looked at the situation very clearly and made a list of who really needed food and shelter. First, the guys who were officially trying to rectify things. They were out working hard every day to try to fix the disaster that was still ongoing. If things were ever going to get better it was going to depend, to a great degree, on them. Some of them were female. They got fed the same as males; take all you can eat, eat all you take. Then kids and the elderly. Okay, that fell into two categories but, face it, kids and old people don't eat much. And it was, after all, a church. Think "Christian charity."
Then the "random associators" got fed. These were the men and women that were doing things in the community to help out. They weren't going to save the world but they were saving lives and supporting the church's efforts. Farms get a mention here. At one point, according to the stories from that case study, they ate okra soup for three days. Why? Because there was a farm that just happened to have a bunch of okra. They offered it to the church for the refugees. One of the deacons from the church, a "voluntary random associator" went out and picked it up and brought it back. Those were the people who were next in line for food and beds.
Last, and certainly least, were the refugees who could help but did not. They were fed last, if there was food. Why? Because they simply didn't matter. If they all died, it wasn't going to offend God or Man because live or die they weren't fixing the situation. They were waiting for the King to make it Right. They were grasshoppers. They were the people that Da Vinci spoke of when he said "Most men are good for naught more than turning good food into shit."
Another true study. In any disaster situation, after the disaster is over and things are back to some degree of normal, ten percent of the refugees in temporary shelter have to be forcibly removed. No matter how bad it is, if they don't have to do anything they're content to sit on their ass. By the same token, there's another ten percent that, no matter how bad it is, has to help. Disaster professionals leave a certain number of blank spots in their response group because they know that there are going to be people who simply cannot sit on their ass and not help out. Giving them pre-specified jobs keeps them from being a nuisance. They're also very temporary slots because the same people will leave the refugee environment as fast as possible. Probably to head back to their communities and see how they can help out.
Grasshoppers. Ants.
Back to Lamoille County. The vast majority of the "transport" population, the crafty artisans and semi-retireds and such weren't true communalists. They were grasshoppers.
Look, I'll give you an example of the difference in another disaster: Hurricane Katrina.
Forget the suboptimal response of New Orleans, a city of grasshoppers led by a grasshopper, vs. Mississippi. Forget all the rest. This is a personal story from when I was a kid.
Like everybody else I watched the news when the disaster hit New Orleans. And I grew up on Fox or nothing. But even that left a bad taste in my mouth. Not because of what was happening, because of how it was being covered.
I recall this one incident clearly. It's never a thing they replay over the years when stuff comes up about Katrina but I recall it clearly as day.
Shepard Smith was interviewing people down by where the water stopped. When the TV crew first got there there was this guy standing up to his hips in that rotten fucking water. Skinny little black guy, looked like he might have had a drug habit or maybe he was a street person. I dunno, but he was skinny as fuck. He was, when they arrived, helping an old lady out of the water. Walking back to the land with her. When she got to land he turned around to go back out.
Shepard Smith stopped him and asked him what he was doing. The guy said he'd been there all morning, it was a bit after noon and looked hot as shit, helping people through the water. He hadn't had anything to eat or drink. (It's been noted that the news people never seemed to offer except to one lady with a baby that looked as if it was dying.) There was some back and forth then the guy went back out to help another lady.
This bitch, though, was about a hundred pounds overweight. She was bitching up a storm, too. She had on some sort of ID hanging on a lanyard, didn't see what it was. She was sure bitching, though. By God, where was the government! She'd been in her apartment for two days waiting for help and no help done come! Where the hell was the help! Nobody was helping us! We's got nothing and nobody doan care!
Did the cameras tune her out and go back to the good Samaritan up to his hips in water that was probably eating away his fucking legs?
No, they followed her. They caught every bitch and complaint. She just kept walking and they just kept following until the segment ended.
Let's be clear, here. This is a digression about the media. They had a fucking hero right in their fucking sights and they chose to follow a fucking complainer. Here is a guy killing himself to help others and they follow the overweight bitch that wants to know "why's nobody heppin us?"
But it's also about grasshoppers and ants. I don't care if the guy in the water was a heroin addict who lived by stealing purses. He was a fucking ant. When the shit hit the fan he helped others and didn't wait for the King to tell him what to do. He jumped into the fucking breach.
The fat bitch? Grasshopper. I don't give a shit if that ID was for some job somewhere and the guy in the water was a street person. She was a grasshopper, he was an ant. "I waited for somebody to help me. Why didn't somebody help me? You should help me. The government should help me."
Me. Me. Me. Me. Fucking Me.
(Ran into Shepard in Iran one time and was forced by higher to give him an interview. He tried like hell to be charming. I admit I was less so. I suppose some day I've got to explain why, but it's one of those things from your childhood you just remember, you know? You're trying to figure out how to be an adult and you look at that and go; "Well, I'm not going to be like that bastard Shepard Smith, giving the limelight to a bitching grasshopper while a hero toils away behind his back." Addendum: Turns out it was his producer's fault, not his. Okay, so I'm not perfect, I should have realized he was just the ventriloquist's dummy. In that case, his producer is an idiot. Sorry, Shepard.)
Me. It's all about me. Okay, they were called the Me generation. Yes, the vast majority of Lamoille County were baby boomers. "If it feels good do it" was the mantra. "It's all about me."
Well, you know in peace and plenty (brought to you in great degree by us ants) "It's all about me" works. It doesn't work for anyone with honor and dignity, but the "It's all about me" people don't care about that. They just care about themselves.
And even in a sufficiently awful disaster situation "It's all about me" works. If you can get out of the disaster area and stealing a car will get you out, you can go far using that technique.
But beyond a certain point, you need help. You can try to shoot your way to what you want, but eventually you're going to be outnumbered and outgunned. (That happened a few times in the U.S. Not many, but it happened. Very common in other countries, but I'll get to that.)
The wolf only ever gets to the door because it hasn't hit some blocking force before it gets there. Normally, that's people like me. "People rest safe in their beds at night because rough men stand ready to do violence in their name." I'm one of those "rough men" and proud of it. But when things come apart, hard, like an exploding turbine, well it helps to have a group gathered for mutual support. Lone wolves found themselves increasingly challenged in many areas (mostly red areas) by "voluntary random associations."
So what happened in Lamoille?
Foodstuffs down to seed were confiscated for "community benefit" kitchens. There were soup lines. (Well, they were all over for the next few years. Remember?) There was rationing. Remember the ten percent that have to do something? They were the first to leave, looking for somewhere less screwed up. Many of them were the natives of the area who were having their supplies stripped for the grasshoppers. They packed up and ran. Many of them to New Hampshire. Many of those counties weren't taking refugees, but a true Yankee accent could generally talk its way through. Especially if it was carrying supplies or had a sob story from somewhere like Lamoille.
Eventually things were getting bad and worse. There were starting to be some food shipments at that point. Things were starting to derandomize in the U.S. by May or so. Not anywhere near pre-Plague and there were still people getting sick, but it was starting to derandomize.
But it still wasn't great. And then there were the evil farmers who many were sure were still hoarding food. So many of the grasshoppers were moved out, or moved out voluntarily, to the farms.
This is called the Cambodia Syndrome. Also The Zimbabwe Method. In a situation where food is short, send people out to farms. There they can produce food for themselves and for the cities. More about that later as well. It's the explanation for 2020 and 2021.
In Cambodia it led to a 20% drop in the population. The farms were and are called The Killing Fields. In Zimbabwe it led to the "grain basket of Africa" entering a long-term famine.
Look, farming is hard. It's not only hard physical work, it's hard mental work. Farm boy, remember? Degree in Agronomy. I know whereof I speak. Sending a bunch of tofu-eaters out to rebuild the local farm economy, or even the semiretired stock market traders, or lawyers or power traders or whatever, was like asking a two-year-old to program your stock trading computer.
Especially the way they did it. And the weather didn't help much a-tall.
Most of the seed had been seized and eaten. But there was some left, at least for vegetables and beans. Little packets that had basic instructions on how and when to plant the crops. There was a county agent, a, you guessed it, expert on natural farming methods.
So people were sent out to farms and given the packets and told to read and follow the directions. How hard could it be. Put the seed in the ground and wait for the food to come rolling in.
Most of the packets had planting zone instructions. There were generally five, ranging north to south. Vermont (and Minnesota) were Zone One, meaning the last zone to be planted.
The seeds would give a time frame for planting in the zone you were in. Most of the seeds passed out that April and May were in the zone for planting. Corn, peas, even in Vermont they would normally be ready to go into the ground. Corn "knee high by the Fourth of July."
Big Chill, remember? Actual planting time, what you plant and when you plant it, depends on two things: soil temperature and projected growing season. (Wow, real farming information.) Seeds need the soil to be a certain temperature before they'll sprout. Plant them too soon and they're mostly going to go bad. By the same token, the plants need a certain amount of time to mature. Plant them too late and they'll get caught by an early frost or a cold front and be unharvestable. Or the harvest will be lousy.
My dad used to start pacing around March. He'd watch the weather reports like a hawk. He'd surf the Internet. He'd listen to the radio. He'd take soil temperatures. He was gathering all the information he could about how things were warming up, what they might be like that summer. He'd look, I don't joke, at things like the flight of birds. When they were migrating. How fast they were moving. It all went into that organic and extremely experienced computer in his head. And then he'd make a decision on just when we were going to plant and what.
The Big Chill was already setting in. Soil temperatures, which is what the little instructions were based on, were not following normal progression. The tofu-eaters and retirees and the rest of the grasshoppers who now thought themselves ants put the seeds in the ground and waited for the crops to roll in.
And, by and large, they didn't sprout. Some did, they happened to have gotten the soil temperature right. Those were, by and large, caught later by the fact that it was "a year without summer." Frosts continued into June and started again in August. Corn does not do well under those conditions. It can handle frost when it's near harvest. It does not handle it well when it has tassels.
Speaking of which: Then there was the insistence on "organic." I know, I know, how many hobby horses can one person have? But bear with me.
Up in Minnesota we've got our fair share of Amish. Nobody is bothered by them. They're not "us" but we're not "them" so it works out. Nobody wants to try to sing kumbaya with the Amish and the Amish won't even consider singing kumbaya with us. "Clannish" doesn't begin to cover it.
But they farmed organically. I mean, it was like their religion, right? They had been doing it for a long time and they were not stupid. They paid attention to what worked within the constraints of their culture. They used every trick in the book that wasn't a violation of their faith. They were, hands down, the best truly organic farmers in the United States.
Their harvests averaged half of my dad's evil farm corporation. The only reason they were able to stay in business at all was that they had so few needs and everyone worked for, essentially, no pay. They ate what they harvested and anything left over went to buy the very few things they couldn't make themselves.
They were excellent organic farmers. They were not excellent farmers. Excellence in farming is how much use you get out of a patch of soil. My dad was an excellent farmer.
The best organic farming in the world is hugely inefficient compared to industrial farming. All the kumbaya types that wanted everyone to go to organic farming simply could not do math. Say that everyone was suddenly forced, by some sort of edict, (like, say, The Emergency Powers Act and a fucking Presidential Order) to do organic farming. We won't even talk about horse-drawn plows, just no genmod seeds, no herbicides, no pesticides, no "nonorganic" (a contradiction in terms, by the way) fertilizers.
Look, the U.S. was and is beginning to be again the world's bread basket. We produced, and are getting back to producing, 15% of world agricultural production. With about a quarter the workers per ton. But if we had to go to "all organic farming" we'd have had to break three times the amount of land that was farmed. Why three? Because in areas that weren't rapidly urbanizing, good farmland was all in use. That means working the marginal stuff where production falls off, fast.
Three times as much plowing. Three times as much transportation. About five times (for some complicated reasons) the hands. There was already a notable shortage of skilled farm workers; I have no clue where we'd get the extra guys.
And you have to use some fertilizer. I can project places we could get it, they're called sewers. Do you transport it raw? I don't think even the tofu-eaters like the idea of honey-wagons all over the road and they would be all over the road. The transportation network for professionally produced fertilizer was very efficient. Trying to replace it with some massive network of shit carriers was going to be ugly. And then there's the energy involved in transportation.
Again, plenty of studies. Environmental damage from a total switch to organic farming would have been ten times that of the current conditions of mass industrial farming. Don't care what the tofu-eaters believed; that was the reality.
For every simple answer people don't use there are big complicated reasons they don't. But some people can't comprehend big complicated reasons so they cling to the simple answers.
Back to the tofu-eaters in Lamoille. The crops didn't sprout. Those that did did poorly. It was a sucky year to farm, that was part of it. The big part was that the tofu-eaters had no clue what they were doing. And they weren't willing to work nearly hard enough. If you're going to organically farm, you'd better be ready to work ten times as hard as an industrial farmer. And I mean "swinging a hoe" hard. And "picking the corn" hard. (The latter is not harvesting.) Why? Weeds. Pests.
Laying down a bed, industrially, works like this in the simplest possible way. (Understand, this is the farming version of C-A-T spells "Cat." Don't think this little paragraph can make you a farmer.) Start with winter fallow field. Spray with herbicide. Let sink in. Wait two weeks for Roundup to degrade. Spray with ammonium nitrate to "seal" the soil. Some stuff you have to combine these but that's getting into sentences and complex words like complex. Wait a short period of time for ammonia to do its magic. Check soil temperature (if you're good you've guessed the day perfectly) and start plowing and planting simultaneously with a John Deere combination planter. At specified intervals spray with insecticide and herbicide chemically targeted to miss your crops. Depending on what you're growing, you might have to do pollination. (Usually except for the low-grains like rye, wheat and barley.) Pollination is the one thing that is hugely manpower intense. (Oh and picking rocks. I can't believe I left out picking rocks!) Generally it happens in summer and you hire a whole bunch of the local kids to come out and hand pollinate. And they'd better be willing to work for peanuts or it's going to break you.
Harvest when it's ready and get ready to either do a second crop or let the field lie fallow for winter. Repeat.
(By the way, all farmers have some level of debt. Ever signed a mortgage and get the question "Do you want to pay monthly, quarterly, biannually or annually" and look at the banker like they're nuts? Monthly, of course! Are you nuts? Unless you're a farmer. In which case, it's generally yearly. You don't make diddly until harvest. That's when all debts get paid, payments on tractors, payments on improvements to the house, payments on your car. And you'd better have budgeted for next year, including the pollinators, or you're going to go bust. Farmers are planners.)
So, let's say you're growing corn and you don't do all that. You just put it in the ground (at the right time) and let it grow its own way. Okay, maybe you spread the field with "manure" (shit) before you plow. (The tofu-eaters mostly didn't.) But you're not going to use evil herbicides or pesticides.
Well, weeds grow much faster than crops. In fact, it seems weeds will grow like, well, weeds. They get up everywhere. Even in fields that have been sprayed over and over again, they spring up. They are transported by wind, by birds. Fucking thistles are the bane of any farmer's existence. They get carried on bird legs and birds will get into the fields. If you don't spray in a year or so you're covered in thistles.
But wait! I can hear the organic types screaming about burning and cutting and all that. Yeah. Tell it to the Amish. Go look at an Amish field right next to an "evil" field. Let's take wheat since it's easy to spot. Look at the "evil" field. You'll see, scattered through it, some brown looking stuff that isn't wheat. If you don't know what that is, it's called "Indian Tobacco." It's related, distantly, to tobacco but has no value as a crop. Period. It's a weed.
Look at the "evil" field. Maybe five percent of the total, usually less, is taken over by Indian Tobacco. Look at the Amish field. Closer to thirty percent.
And they burn. And they cut during fallow at intervals to catch weeds. Some of them, and there was a big debate about it, even used biological controls. (Pests that target specific weeds.)
And it's still there. Hell, it's hard enough to get rid of with herbicides. And its root structure strangles out everything around it. Let fucking Indian Tobacco get loose in a wheat field for long enough and you might as well move to Florida and retire.
And don't even get me started on mustard weed! I really fucking hate mustard weed!
But we were talking about corn. So let's talk about burcucumber. Sounds cute, right? It's a combination of two words, the first of which is "bur." Don't know if anyone reading this has ever dealt with burs. They're the things that stick onto your legs when you're walking through grass in summer. Burcucumber doesn't have really nasty burs, but it's a climber. It climbs like any viny plant. Let it get into a corn crop and it will climb right up and kill the plants.
And all weeds, no matter how minor, take away nutrients from your crops. They are a pain in the ass.
So, you can do industrial things to get rid of them. From a paper on weed management and burcucumber:
"Management: Soil applications of Balance Pro or postemergence applications of atrazine, Beacon, Buctril, Classic, Cobra, glyphosate, or Liberty."
You know, herbicides. Get out there in your spray truck. Call in a crop duster. Corn's a monocot. Burcucumber is a dichot. (grass vs. broad-leaf plant) Some herbicides (2-4-d: Brush-Be-Gone) only killed dichots. If you didn't get it with the first application of Roundup you can get it with Brush-Be-Gone. In the case of soy, which had been "genetically modified" to be resistant to glypho (Roundup) you can go ahead and spray 'em anyway. I do so love modern bio-tech.
Or, you can manage it by tilling fallow fields (not a great use of anyone's time), burning at appropriate times and, most especially, weeding. (All but the last, by the way, causing more damage to the environment.)
Weeding. You know, get out there with a hoe and hack away at the weeds. Better make sure you get all the roots and especially get them before they seed. Or next year is going to be worse. And worse. And worse. Gonna spend a lot of time on your knees. Backbreaking work. Stoop-work, the worst kind. It will kill you fast. Ask any Mexican farm laborer.
But those guys were mostly doing it at harvest. You'd better be doing it all summer. Hell, spring, summer and fall; there are weeds that spring up all three seasons and you need to get them young.
If you've got an area that's large enough to support four people and some to sell, you're going to be weeding all the time. Or you're not going to get enough to support the foursome.
And you still will have more weeds than those evil bastards using chemicals. Ask the Amish.
Then there's pests. We're sticking with corn again. Corn borer. Ever picked up fresh corn at a roadside stand and when you're shucking it there's this big fucking caterpillar which has eaten, like, half the kernels? You go "Yuck!" and toss it out. But a bunch of the rest has the same shit?
Corn borer. And your friendly roadside farmer is an organic nut. Welcome to the reality of organic farming on the sharp end. If it doesn't have a worm somewhere, it's industrial. If it has a worm, it's organic. If you're eating something organic, there has been a worm involved. Guaran-fucking-teed.
And if the worms are eating it, people can't.
Prior to the advent of modern pesticides and other pest prevention methods, pests and infections (corn gets sick, too) caused a loss of 25% of all crops before they could be consumed. That's a lot of fucking food.
Digression again. Ever heard of a guy called Thomas Robert Malthus? As in "Malthusian Equations"? There was a book called The Population Bomb that was based on Malthusian Equations. Basically, according to Malthus, people reproduce a lot faster than food production can be increased. (Geometric vs. arithmetic.) Thus every so often you're going to get a massive famine since the amount of mouths outstrip the production.
Malthus did his study and wrote his treatise just as the industrial revolution was getting into gear. And for his knowledge of the day, organic farming by human and animal labor, he was absolutely right. There was a regular cycle of population growth stopped by famine throughout the world prior to the industrial revolution. See the upcoming thing about Marie Antoinette. Not to mention Les Miserables.
What changed it was industrial farming methods. Period. Dot. Everybody on earth would occasionally be going through a widespread killer famine if we all went back to organic farming worldwide. Simple as that. I hate "all organic" nearly as much as I hate mustard weed. More, probably. Mustard weed just evolved. Organic farming nuts have brains. They just can't use them.
But the good organic farmers (oxymoron, I know) are going to use tricks to keep it to a minimum. They'd pick the corn. Very labor intensive, again, but get a bunch of people out there looking for the corn borer eggs on the surface. Getting the eggs off. Looking for caterpillars or grasshoppers (they're fucking locusts, okay?) and picking them off by hand. Have a big fry at the end of the day since you might as well get some protein from your fields.
The tofu-eaters were not good organic farmers. They were not good farmers. They were not good horticulturalists. They thought they could be grasshoppers (fucking locusts) and just prop their feet up and wait for the food to fall into their mouths.
"Summer time, and the living is easy . . . "
No. It's not. Traditionally, spring and summer were when people starved. Back in medieval times the lords would store the grain and if you had been a good worker, when your personal stores ran out you could go to the lord and get grain to feed yourself and your family. If not, starve. Sometimes stores didn't make it all the way through the next harvest. They had huge problems with pests. (See above.) But that was the general idea.
There wasn't any food. Crops weren't coming up. There was nothing to eat.
There was nothing to eat.
This is referred to as famine. It hadn't happened to the U.S. in a century or more. And even then it was, to an extent, localized. 2020 was the first widespread famine the U.S. ever had. In 2019 it was still localized until the example of Lamoille became fucking national policy!
But I digress . . . Again.
There was still a certain amount of fuel. Most people had run their fuel out but there was still some. And there was always the leather-personnel-carrier. (Shoes.)
People started wandering. The tofu-eaters started looking for food, any food. The grasshoppers were turning into locusts and starting to fly.
There was food. Grain stores from the previous year were at near record highs. Even the winter wheat harvest hadn't been awful, despite the weather. And there were, alas, fewer mouths to feed. By June there was some movement on emergency distribution.
And then there was the Big Grab.
But we'll get back to that.
Okay, last bit on "organic" farming.
It's bad for the environment. It's sucky efficiency. Trying to go to it as the only way that farming was done caused the famines of 2019 and 2020. And then there's the whole pest thing.
Sure, there are more worms but, hell, it's healthier for you! Right? Well, there's the part about hormones and their effect on H5N1 but that's sort of specious. Let's talk about real health and safety issues.
What do they use for fertilizer? Shit. Okay, dress it up in any pretty language you want, "manure," "fully natural plant food," whatever. It's shit. It's what came out of your anus and you flushed down the toilet. It might come from cows or horses or whatever. It's all shit.
Don't get me wrong. It's a pretty good fertilizer. Especially horse shit. Very balanced. Also less smelly than the cow shit. (Which means, by the way, less nitrogen.)
But it's shit. It's made up of e coli bacteria. And the good organic farmers not only use it to prep their fields, they spray it (using a tractor and a manure sprayer) at times during the growing season. Because while it's pretty good fertilizer, it's not as good as the industrial type.
Yes, that's right folks. That organically grown food you just ate at some point was sprayed with shit. In many cases, it's "debiologicaled" shit. That is, it's been heated to the point that the germs should be dead. Doesn't always work out that way. And that kind is more expensive. Anything that's not cooked—lettuce, celery, green onions—generally got "debiologicaled." And sometimes it wasn't quite debioed as people would prefer.
Look, bottomline: Of the ten major e coli outbreaks of base food materials in the five years before the Plague, one was associated with industrial farming. One. The other nine were products that were "all natural."
Way more people died of "all natural" food that was contaminated with some "all natural" toxin than people who stuck to that icky "evil" food.
Back to trying to avoid famine.