(Edited with a chuckle by Gary Gibson.)

I always love your work, but, alas, there is going to be a “but” following. Sometimes I wonder, Cupcake, if we live in the same world. Please explain to me, in your brilliant, far-sighted way, “young adults who had expected lifetime employment as corporate executives but who, instead, find themselves ten years from now working at farming.” We’ll pass lightly over the fact that it takes at least ten years to become an adequate farmer according to traditional wisdom.

What I can NOT give that statement a pass on is two factors:

1. Where, exactly, are these people to find employers? Ranch hands make $7/hour–if they are lucky!–with no benefits. Even when paid under the table, as many (probably all!) part time rural workers are and will be in a Depression, they could not live on twelve hundred dollars a month if they got forty hour weeks. That will not cover housing, transportation, and food, particularly as prices rise and the dollar continues to sink, as we think inevitable.

Take my word for it, starting a farming or ranching operation whether one has the requisite knowledge or no is so ruinously expensive that very few can aspire to even “Five Acres to Independence.” The bare minimum is land, a house, a barn, at least a couple of dairy goats and a buck, chickens, a way to support one’s self that has nothing to do with work in the boondocks, chickens, stockpiled fuel, farm equipment, food stores, seeds, a private source of water…the list is endless. I’ve been working on the project for two solid years and am not totally self-sufficient yet, not even considering being off the power grid.

The city boys and girls have no useful skills, although presumably they have strong backs. Maybe. They don’t know how to pick corn, plant herbs, or shut gates every time. They are afraid of cows, horses, goats, snakes, and tractors. What will they be GOOD for?

Where will they live? Farming communities are not usually lush with available housing. As I have noted before, they tend to be well-balanced closed societies which provide all the basics (WalMart is never more than 25 miles away.) All needs are provided and if there were room for a new enterprise someone would already have filled that need. Not enough people want a bowling alley, a skating rink, a tatoo parlor, or frequently even more than a once a week movie house enough to make them viable economically.

If your assumption is that young people with degrees in finance–or worse, those who majored in Geography, “Women’s Studies,” or Marketing–are going to be forced to do whatever they can to keep from starving I can certainly agree that the best choice will be a job someplace where food grows. However, we are never going to need any of them.

We’re considering a third hand, and the people you describe couldn’t begin to compete against a homeless man who has been in prison for fifteen months! (Well, okay, so he was there in modern debtor’s prison for being unable to pay child support. I think they make thirty-seven cents an hour in some prisons, don’t they?) Roy is ex-military (something that always touches my heart) and has carpentry, roofing, and automotive repair skills. He loves to hunt and wants to take on the wild hawg population with a spear! (I feel faint.) He is in excellent physical condition and in his forties. He has not been valued in this society, but during the Greater Depression he will be. For those who can afford such a very useful man, he and others like him can probably be obtained for room, board, and a couple of hundred dollars a week at present. If we get to the barter society such men will be well worth food and shelter and happy to work for nothing for the incredible security they will have. The goal is to put together a self-sufficient fiefdom that provides all of the needs of those who contribute to the wellbeing of the community.

2. The Obama Nation is doing a superb job of making it completely impossible for us to feed ourselves legally. The Food ‘Safety’ Bill outlaws heritage seeds, raw milk, and slaughtering our own animals for home consumption. Small farmers will not be able to feed themselves, far less supply local grocery stores if we get to the Anti-Industrial Revolution without subsequent loss of millions of pages of regulations. MDC–sorry, My darling Charles–stripped an ear of Monsanto-produced corn recently. Not only did it not contain seed which would reproduce, it contained no kernels at all…nothing but silk and the cob. Oklahoma is trying to shut down 1800 poultry houses that produced millions of pounds last year and employed 55,000 people, on the incredible charge that chicken manure–the finest natural fertilizer available–is polluting the watershed! The houses are usually cleaned out twice a year, during which period most of the manure has composted naturally. Precisely how are they supposed to make money if they have to do…what? with 345,000 tons of chicken manure and wood shavings annually? The suggestion that it be burned would surely find favor with the Greens and the Cap and Trade bunch. The land needs the manure, and any run off does NOT cause disease but leads to fish growth.

We live in a world where it will be a CRIME to have raw milk in your car, a CRIME to possess heritage seeds which breed true, and a CRIME to wring a chicken’s neck, dunk it in hot water, pull out the smelly feathers, eviserate it, wash it off, and pop it into the oven for dinner. It will be a crime to give away raw milk and the regulations to be enacted are so costly and complicated that those without large herds and big bank accounts will never be able to comply.

“We have an awful lot to get real about,” indeed.

I couldn’t bear to live in the city, but legislation being churned out right now is going to turn my enormous (for me) investment into a millstone. What am I supposed to do with the Black Irish Dexter cows which not only eat a thousand dollars’ worth of food a month in bad times but will be taxed for emitting methane? No one else will want to buy them either. If we can’t feed ourselves and our hands legally, how can we begin to offer shelter to others in return for them being of no use unles supervised continually for at least a year, at which point we will still not have produced food we can eat or sell?

If you have some answers, I would really appreciate them.

Great article, you know, even if I can’t agree that the 2.1 million small farms still hanging on can assimilate millions of hungry unemployed. I try to imagine Thomas Jefferson’s response if told the Bill of Rights needed to include the right to grow and process our own food.

Regards,

LBT

Closer to home, getting rid of stop signs and lights at most intersections and redesigning to avoid accidents would immediately save millions of barrels of oil, not only in idle and acceleration, but in wear and tear on brakes, clutches, bands, bearings, shafts, tires, ad nauseum- all of which require energy intensive manufacturing. Instead they put out more cops and nazicams to enforce venality and stupidity.