The Last Centurion

by John Ringo

  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 professio
nally 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.
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  Malthus did his study and wrote his treastise 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.