With the fall of civilization and the collapse of long-distance communication networks and air travel, the global village will shatter back into a globe of villages. The Internet, despite being originally designed as a resilient computer network to survive nuclear attack and the loss of many of its nodes, will fare no better than any other modern technology with systemic failure of the electricity grids. Mobile phones will also last only a matter of days after grid-down, once the backup generators at the computer centers and cell towers run out of fuel. This will mean that marginal or old technologies will suddenly assume a profound new importance. One of the first things you’ll want to find are old-fashioned walkie-talkies for keeping in contact with other members of your group when you’re separated while out scavenging. For long-range communication, citizens band or ham radio sets will become pretty valuable for trying to establish contact with other pockets of survivors.
But the most valuable resource to gather before it is lost is knowledge. Books may have been destroyed in unchecked fires ripping though cities and towns, turned to illegible mush by the pulse of floodwaters, or simply rotted on the shelves from the humidity and rain blowing in through broken windows. Although far more expansive, our civilization’s paper-based writings are actually less-permanent records than the clay tablets, tough papyrus rolls, or animal-skin parchment of earlier cultures. But if the contents of libraries are still intact when the surviving population begins to rebuild, these fabulous resources can be mined for knowledge. Many of the titles listed in the bibliography at the back of this book, for example, offer details of key practical skills and the processes required for civilization, and would be well worth searching for. Equally, it would be worth trying repositories of older technology—science and industry museums—for contraptions like spinning machines or steam engines that could be studied and reverse engineered as appropriate technologies for the post-apocalyptic world.
So a scene that is likely to become common during the recovery would be growing settlements of survivors dotted across the countryside. These are not located haphazardly but arranged in rings around the dead cities, circling the core of dilapidated high-rises and other urban infrastructure. Only salvage crews venture into these uninhabited zones, picking over the bones of the dead cities, mining their remnants for the most useful materials, perhaps using homemade explosives to fell buildings and makeshift acetylene torches to dissect metal components. The valuable swag is then hauled back to be reprocessed into tools, plowshares, or whatever is needed during the reboot.
One of your earliest challenges after the Fall will be restarting agriculture. While there will be plenty of empty buildings to provide shelter, and underground lakes of fuel for running vehicles and powering generators, all will be for naught if you starve to death.
CHAPTER 3
AGRICULTURE
We’ve been given a flying start in a new kind of world. We’re endowed with a capital of enough of everything to begin with, but that isn’t going to last forever. . . . Later we’ll have to plow; still later we’ll have to learn how to make plowshares; later than that we’ll have to learn how to smelt the iron to make the shares. . . . The most valuable part of our flying start is knowledge. That’s the short cut to save us starting where our ancestors did.
JOHN WYNDHAM, The Day of the Triffids (1951)
THE URGENCY WITH WHICH you will need to reboot agriculture depends entirely on how many people survived whatever event precipitated the collapse of society. For the purposes of our thought experiment, you will have breathing room before the stocks of preserved food are depleted. This will give you time to find your feet, scout for some suitable land to resettle on, and gradually learn from your mistakes in the fields before a reliable harvest becomes a matter of life or death.
You’ll need to move quickly after the Fall to recover and preserve as many crop plants as you can. Every modern strain of crop represents thousands of years of diligent selective breeding, and if you lose ready-domesticated species, you may lose any hope of shortcutting the rebuilding of civilization. Over the course of their domestication, species such as wheat and maize have been optimized for the production of nutrition and are now poorly adapted for life without us. Many will be quickly outcompeted and may be driven to extinction by wild plants seizing their opportunity to reclaim the abandoned fields.
Overgrown, abandoned fields or backyard vegetable patches would be sensible places to look for surviving edible plants. Varieties like rhubarb, potato, and artichoke are likely to keep self-propagating long after the patch is abandoned. But the staple of our diets is cereal crops, and if you were particularly conscientious, you might try to organize sampling expeditions immediately after the Fall to collect seed before the plants die and rot in the fields. Or you may be lucky enough to scavenge from abandoned farm barns sacks of seed corn still viable years later.
The problem you will face, though, is that many of the crops cultivated in modern agriculture are “hybrids”: they are produced by crossing two inbred strains possessing desirable characteristics to produce progeny that are very uniform and extremely high-yielding. Unfortunately, seeds produced in turn by this hybrid crop will not retain that consistency—they do not “breed true,” and so new hybrid seeds must be bought to plant each year. What you really want to gather in the immediate aftermath, therefore, are heirloom crops: traditional varieties that can be reliably propagated from one year to the next. Many Preppers stockpile heirloom seeds for exactly this eventuality, but where should you turn if you’ve not prepared a reserve ahead of time?
Hundreds of seed banks exist around the world, safeguarding biological diversity for posterity. The largest of these is the Millennium Seed Bank in West Sussex, just outside London. Here, billions of seeds are stored in a nuclear-bombproof, multistory underground vault, offering a vital post-apocalyptic library, not of knowledge-laden books, but of diverse crop strains. The seeds of many kinds of plants remain viable for decades in a cool, dry environment, including cereal crops, and peas and other legumes, as well as potato, eggplant, and tomato. But even these seeds die after a while if they have not been germinated, grown, and fresh seeds collected for continued storage.
MAP AND LATITUDE-LONGITUDE COORDINATES OF THE SVALBARD GLOBAL SEED VAULT.
Low temperatures extend this persistence period, and so perhaps the most resilient agricultural backup, a SAVE file that will last long after the collapse of civilization, is the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. This repository is built 125 meters into a mountainside on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen. The 1-meter-thick steel-reinforced concrete walls, blast doors, and airlocks will protect the biological cache inside from the worst global cataclysm, and even with a loss of power the entombing permafrost (the site is well within the Arctic Circle) naturally maintains a subzero temperature for long-term preservation. Viable wheat and barley seeds will be safeguarded for more than a millennium.
PRINCIPLES OF AGRICULTURE
The crucial question that you need to be able to answer is: How do I walk out into a muddy field with a handful of seed and make food come out of it before the winter sets in?
This might seem like a no-brainer: seeds germinate naturally, and plants had been growing quite happily for millions of years before humans evolved. But that doesn’t mean by a long shot that cultivation and agriculture come easy. While plants grow naturally, farming is grossly artificial. You are trying to cultivate one particular variety of plant in monoculture, a pure and uniform crop isolated in a field to the exclusion of all other plants. (Any other plants that do begin growing in the field are by definition weeds and are competing with your food crop for sunlight and soil nutrients.) You are also trying to optimize the density of crop plants in your field, to get as much as possible out of the land and minimize the effort and energy expended in cultivating large areas. But you need to prevent this juicy target from being overrun by insects and other pests or fungal diseases that run riot und
er such ideal conditions (in the same way that cities are perfect breeding grounds for human pathogens). These two factors mean that a field of crops is a highly synthetic environment, and nature is constantly pushing back at you. It takes a great deal of careful control and effort to maintain this unstable situation.
Yet you have an even more fundamental problem to overcome in agriculture. In a natural ecosystem such as a woodland, trees and underbrush plants grow by soaking up energy from sunlight, absorbing carbon from the air, and piping up a variety of mineral nutrients from the soil through their roots. These vital substances become incorporated into the leaves, stems, and roots of plants, and, when eaten, become part of an animal’s body. When the animal later excretes, or dies and decays, these nutrients simply soak back into the soil whence they came. A natural ecosystem is therefore a healthy circulating economy of elements being transferred endlessly between different accounts. But the nature of farmland is fundamentally different: you are encouraging growth for the sole purpose of harvesting and removing the products for human consumption. Even if you spread much of the leftover vegetative matter back onto the fields, you’ve still removed the portion actually eaten, and year after year the land is steadily depleted. So the very nature of farming necessitates that you are progressively removing mineral nutrients, bleeding the soil of its vitality. And particularly with modern sewage systems—our waste is treated to kill harmful bacteria and then discharged into rivers or seas—agriculture today is an efficient pipeline for stripping nutrients from the land and flushing them into the ocean. Vegetation needs balanced nutrition just as much as the human body does, and the three major plant foods are the elements nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium. Phosphorus is crucial for the transfer of energy, and potassium helps reduce water loss, but it is nitrogen, used in building all proteins, that is most often the limiting factor for crop yield. Unless you’re extraordinarily lucky, like the ancient Egyptians in the Nile valley, where the annual floods revitalize the land with fertile silt, you need to take action to address this fundamental deficit in the balance sheets.
Modern industrialized agriculture is astonishingly successful, with an acre today producing two to four times more food than the same land provided a hundred years ago. But the only way that farms today can function, growing dense monocultures on the same land and still producing high yields year after year, is by spraying potent herbicides and pesticides to maintain an iron-fist control over the ecosystem, and by the liberal application of chemical fertilizers. The nitrogen-rich compounds provided in these artificial fertilizers are created industrially by the Haber-Bosch process, which we’ll return to in Chapter 11. All of these herbicides, pesticides, and artificial fertilizers are synthesized using fossil fuels, which also power the farmyard machinery. In a sense, then, modern farming is a process that transforms oil into food—with some input from sunshine—and consumes around ten calories of fossil fuel energy for every calorie of food actually eaten. With a collapse of civilization and the disappearance of an advanced chemical industry, you’ll need to relearn traditional methods. Today, organic produce is the preserve of the wealthy; in the aftermath it will be your only option.
We’ll come back later in this chapter to how you can maintain soil fertility over the years. Let’s start with the fundamentals of cultivating crops from the ground up.
WHAT IS SOIL?
As a farmer, you have only limited control over nature. You obviously cannot control the amount of sunlight beaming onto your fields: you can’t change the climate of your region or dial in the seasons. You also can’t control the rainfall, although you can regulate the moisture content of your fields by balancing irrigation and drainage. The one thing you have most control over is the soil: you can chemically enrich it with fertilizers, as we’ve just seen, and physically manipulate it with tools like the plow. So the most fundamental element of agriculture under a farmer’s control is the soil, and that requires an understanding of what soil is, and how it supports plant growth.
All the civilizations of history owe their existence to this thin scraping of topsoil. Hunter-gatherers can support themselves by foraging in woodlands, but cities and civilization rely on the enormous productivity of cereal crops—shallow-rooted grasses that are utterly dependent on the resources provided by topsoil. The basis of all soil is disintegrated rocks that make up the crust of our planet. Rock is physically attacked by flowing water, blowing wind, and grinding glaciers, and chemically weathered by weakly acidic rainwater that dissolves a little carbon dioxide as it drops from the clouds. Depending on the degree of crumbling, this produces gravels, sands, and clays. These particles are stuck together with humus—a matrix of organic matter that helps retain moisture and minerals, and gives topsoil its dark color. Soils typically contain between 1 and 10 percent humus, although peats approach 100 percent organic matter. But, most important, soil hosts a huge and diverse population of microbial life, an invisible ecosystem that processes decaying matter and recycles nutrients for plants.
The main factor that determines the nature of a particular soil and its appropriateness for different crops is the proportion of different particle sizes: gritty sand, intermediate silt, and fine clay. It’s easy to get a visual check on soil composition. Fill a glass jar one-third of the way with soil (picking out any hard clumps, stems, or leaves) and top it off almost to the brim with water. Screw on a lid, and shake vigorously until all lumps have been broken up and you have a uniform muddy soup. Let the jar stand undisturbed for a day or so, allowing time for the suspension to settle back down and the water to be nearly clear again. The different grains will have sedimented out in order of their particle size to show distinct layers or bands. The bottom band is the coarse-grained sand component of the soil, the middle layer is silt, and the very top layer holds the finest clay particles, allowing you to visually judge their proportions in the mixed soil.
The ideal kind of soil for farming is known as loam and is a balanced mixture of roughly 40 percent sand, 40 percent silt, and 20 percent clay. A sandy soil (more than two-thirds of the total) drains well and so is good for wintering cattle, as it won’t get trodden into a quagmire, but minerals and fertilizers are easily washed out and require extra manure. On the other hand, a heavy clay soil (more than a third clay particles and less than half sand) is physically hard to work with plows and harrows, and will require more liming to maintain a healthy crumbly structure.
Wheat, beans, potatoes, and rapeseed (the source of canola oil) all grow superbly well in well-managed clay soils. Oats thrive in heavier, damper soils than are suitable for wheat or barley, such as the soils of Scotland created by the grinding sweep of glaciers in the last ice age. Historically, oats and potatoes have allowed people to achieve high yields and settle areas where other crops do not grow. Barley prefers lighter soils than wheat, and rye will grow in poorer, sandier soils than other cereals. Sugar beets and carrots also grow well in sandy soils.
Being lucky enough to find fertile loam soil in a well-drained region is only the start for rebooting agriculture. In order to give your crops the best chance of success, you’re also going to need to physically work the ground. Tillage is the name for all the mechanical effort you need to put into loosening hard soil, controlling weeds, and preparing a receptive layer of topsoil (tilth) for sowing the seeds.
On a sufficiently small scale, you could get by with very rudimentary handheld tools. A hoe will do an admirable job of breaking up the topsoil and mixing in manure or green fertilizer (rotting vegetative matter) before the growing season, as well as chopping up weeds before sowing and at intervals as the crop grows. A simple dibber stick can be used to poke shallow holes in the ground with regular spacing to drop seeds into and rebury with your foot. But it’s backbreaking, time-consuming work, and you’d have little opportunity for doing anything else. The history of agriculture over the millennia has been a story of improving designs of farm equipment to perform these essential functions
more efficiently, to maximize the productivity of the land while minimizing the labor needed.
SIMPLE FARMING TOOLS: HOE (A), DIBBER (B), SICKLE (C), SCYTHE (D), THRESHING FLAIL (E).
The iconic implement of agriculture is the plow, but its role has actually changed since the beginning of cultivation. In the fertile, easily cultivable soils of Mesopotamia, Egypt, and China, where agriculture was first developed, the primitive plow was little more than a sharpened log jabbed into the ground at an angle and hauled through the soil by oxen or human laborers. The intention was to gouge a shallow trench that seeds could then be dropped into and lightly buried. In most of the arable land on the planet, however, the soil needs a bit more preparation to make agriculture productive. Nowadays, the function of a plow is to carefully scoop up the uppermost layer of soil across an entire field and flip it upside down, crumbling it slightly. The primary aim of this process is weed control. Before sowing your crop on the land, undesired plants are sliced from their roots and unceremoniously covered with soil. Hidden from the sunlight, they wither and die, and their seeds are buried too deeply to successfully germinate. This cultivation of the land also helps mix organic matter and nutrients into the topsoil, particularly if you’re plowing in manure, and improves drainage of the ground as well as aeration to benefit the soil microbes.
The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Our World From Scratch Page 6