ZetaTalk: Crop Adjustments
Note: written prior to July 15, 1995

To a very great extent, adjusting to crop failure depends on the personality of the individual forced to make an adjustment. We will get specific.

• Take, for example, a farm in the Midwest. Prosperous. Several farm hands. Occasional crop failures but in the main they can smooth their profits to cover these. Now come the crop failures. First year, the usual fallbacks are relied upon, although with the talk in the news about weather problems all over, they will be nervous. Second year, everyone gets brittle. Tempers flare. Long-time farm hands are laid off, with much guilt and regret. Plans are changed, and arguments ensue. However, there are still savings, and perhaps bank credit, and the expectation is that the next year will bring sky-high prices, even if the crop is only fair-to-middling. Third year. Shock. Depression, and we're not just talking financial. Personal gardens are producing enough to feed the family, but the bank would foreclose if they could find a buyer. Everyone thinks of the dust bowl, the depression, and goes to the movies a lot!

• Now, need this be the scenario? Are there no alternatives? Let us say there is a prosperous Midwest farmer who listens to the news, eyeballs the Internet, and isn't a stick-in-the-mud. He hears, perhaps rarely but nevertheless on occasion, about pole shift predictions, and notices that some of these predictions are connecting with his reality. He decides to prepare for all contingencies. Since the drought is increasing, he stores and recycles water. Since cattle are dying, he moves to indoor fish tanks to fill his empty barn and prevent evaporation of the water. Lo and behold, there is a market for the fish! He makes money. He already has a Windmill, and with the winds increasing, takes more and more advantage of this. Now he has the electricity to irrigate hydroponics, as this guy is no dummy and he isn't pouring precious water into the ground.

After the cataclysms livestock will die for lack of feed or be eaten. Seeds sown will fail to thrive after germination from lack of sunlight and the excessive drenching rains. What will the survivors eat? Those who have prepared by establishing intensive indoor gardening such as Hydroponics and the most protein efficient animal husbandry, Fish tanks and ponds, will find themselves not only subsisting but subsisting well. Such arrangements require indoor lighting. Hydroponics can be grown around the clock and fish eat either this produce or water plants that feed off the community's Sewage Effluent, but the base of this food chain is the hydroponic vegetation. For plants, light is life, for without it plants die. Such indoor farming, in place prior to the cataclysms, should not rely on lighting from either the Sun or the utility companies. Both will in essence go out during the decades immediately following the cataclysms. Power for indoor lighting should rely on harnessing wind, or water flows, or other such mechanical generation that can be counted upon to be present after the cataclysms.

Food stuffs that can be grown without artificial light and will do quite nicely on the gloomy light supplied by the Sun are mushrooms, earthworms, and various insects that feed on dead tissue. After the cataclysms bugs will be in abundance, as dead tissue from both plants and animals is everywhere. This trend can be taken advantage of, as distasteful as that concept might be to humans who have never eaten a bug. Larva, grown in humus, can be turned into pureed and creamed soups, puddings, or omelets by skilled cooks. Those eating the fare would never guess that the base was not cream, milk, and eggs. For those humans who do not prepare, they will find themselves Eating Bugs in any case, as meals from what they can catch or find growing will be few and far between.

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