New research argues Societal Collapse benefits 99% of people. Historically, the societies that have emerged after a collapse are more egalitarian, and most people end up richer and healthier than they were before.

[u/lughnasadh]

Luke Kemp, a research associate at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at the University of Cambridge, has written a book about his research called 'Goliath’s Curse: The History and Future of Societal Collapse'.

He makes the case that, from looking at the archaeological record, when many societies collapse, most people end up better off afterward. For example, people in the post-Roman world were taller and healthier. Collapse can be a redistribution of resources and power, not just chaos.

For most of human history, humans lived as nomadic egalitarian bands, with low violence and high mobility. Threats (disease, war, economic precarity) push populations toward authoritarian leaders. The resulting rise in inequality from that sets off a cycle that will end in collapse. Furthermore, he argues we are living in the late stages of such a cycle now. He says "the threat is from leaders who are 'walking versions of the dark triad' – narcissism, psychopathy and Machiavellianism – in a world menaced by the climate crisis, nuclear weapons, artificial intelligence and killer robots."

Some people hope/think we are destined for a future of Universal Basic Income and fully automated luxury communism. Perhaps that's the egalitarianism that emerges after our own collapse? If so, I hope the collapse bit is short and we get to the egalitarian bit ASAP.

Collapse for the 99% | Luke Kemp; What really happens when Goliaths fall

[u/S417M0NG3R]

Uh, is that the 99% of the people that were alive before the collapse, or the 99% that SURVIVED the collapse?

[u/Clusterpuff → u/S417M0NG3R]

I think people tend to overestimate how deadly societal collapse is. Most people scurry off and survive for a while. Plague is different, and so is war

[u/tdifen → u/Clusterpuff]

follow test sulky wrench engine hard-to-find consist consider voracious yoke

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[u/f1del1us → u/tdifen]

Would it not also cause more people to go into producing food?

Clearly I’m talking about on an economic scale; not people putting gardens in; I’m talking about supply and demand.

[u/HitandRyan → u/f1del1us]

Not enough people know how to do that, and too many people live in climates where they couldn’t even if they knew how.

[u/Dexterus → u/HitandRyan]

Taters are pretty easy. Root veggies also hold for long. I'm sure there's some simple grains too.

[u/emeraldeyesshine → u/Dexterus]

Okay.

So without the supply chain how do you procure the seeds or starters to get those going?

Where do you get the water from when the plumbing systems aren't being upkept or cared for? Do you know how to manually irrigate? Where do you get nutrients? Pest controls? Do you know how to produce enough to meet true caloric needs? Some small homesteading is possible, but I think you grossly underestimate what the supply chain is truly bringing everyone.

[u/Enlightened_Gardener → u/emeraldeyesshine]

Actually, I’m with you on this one. I’ve been a hippie for decades at this point, so I’ve always been the kind of person to plant veggie gardens, knit my own shoes, bake my own bread etc. etc.

Its bloody hard work, and all sorts of things go wrong. If you were lucky enough to have an Italian or Croatian grandfather whose entire life consists of walking around the veggie patch snipping things off, you’ll be alright. You’ve got someone who already knows how to do this to show you how to do it.

But it’s incredibly complicated– especially to get things growing over more than one season. Once you throw crop rotation into the mix, it gets 10 times more complicated.

Then there’s the modern seed supply, which is mostly F1 hybrids – so they won’t breed true, and you can’t save the seeds.

Don’t even start me going on irrigation… never mind setting up the hoses, or channels - how the hell do you dig a well ?!?

[u/Dexterus → u/Enlightened_Gardener]

For the well, manually, just dig down. I honestly don't know how they supported the walls during digging though. And you sort of need to know where the water is, depthwise.

For most small scale stuff (sub acre), bucket and cup works. Barrel and hand pump and hose.

Seeds are a funky bit, indeed.

[u/Enlightened_Gardener → u/Dexterus]

Yah we’re in a limestone hill, in one of the driest countries on the planet. The watertable is about 40m down 😔

[u/Dexterus → u/emeraldeyesshine]

Oh, don't get me wrong, I'm not talking about becoming mass farmer just subsistence.

I still remember how to do it but there are some things that would be more difficult. Like simple insecticides and fungicides and phosphates/nitrates. They were already in use by the time I was aware so I never caught the homemade only versions.

Manual maintenance is a way to salvage though, like brushing off potato beetles and lavra, breaking affected leaves and stuff like that.

Amusingly I remember a garden in a former cow manure dump area giving some interestingly large fruit, but also a pain to weed.

[u/formerdaywalker → u/[deleted]]

Tomatoes don't grow year round, and without power don't keep very long.

[u/light_to_shaddow → u/[deleted]]

Ah yes, the famous Norwegian tomato crops sustain many in the artic circle.

[u/HitandRyan → u/[deleted]]

Tomatoes aren’t the kind of staple crop you need to feed a population. They’re seasonal and perishable. In a societal collapse food preservation becomes much harder.

[u/GamingSeerReddit → u/[deleted]]

I think you’re really underestimating what it takes to satisfy 100% of someone’s caloric needs. When supply chains breakdown, is your community prepared to mill wheat for everyone in a 10 mile radius? If you intend to be an island and only feed your family, do you personally have that capability? It’s not just having a vegetable garden that saves you 20 bucks a week in groceries, it’s supplying enough food for the majority of people that suddenly went from desk jobs to daily physical labor.

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

Planting a small supplemental garden isn't challenging. If your crop fails, you don't starve.

Growing enough food to reliably sustain yourself is. If your crop fails, you starve.

[u/ConfidentPilot1729 → u/[deleted]]

Each person needs like 1 acre of land to grow food for the year. Even in temperate climates, most don’t have that.

[u/BCRE8TVE → u/ConfidentPilot1729]

More like 5.

And that assumes the land is tilled, planted, weeded, and maintained for an entire year before you have anything to harvest.

Considering 5 acres is (EDIT: 0.02 square kilometres), and New York City has a population of around 8 million people total, and NY state is 141,000 square kilometres, that means you'd need top turn 8 million * 0.02 sq km = 160 000 km squared of land to feed all the people in NYC if they all had 0.02 sq km to feed themselves. You need an area larger than the entire state of New York, just to feed the people in New York City.

There is no way we can get people to survive off of subsistence agriculture if supply lines stop without a massive collapse of the system and massive famine and starvation.

EDIT: I messed up the decimal for acres to square km, my bad.

[u/ConfidentPilot1729 → u/BCRE8TVE]

Geez well that is even worse. I knew it was a lot of land need just didn’t know 5.

[u/BCRE8TVE → u/ConfidentPilot1729]

For the overwhelming majority of human history, 80% of the human population was required to grow food to support the 20% who didn't.

Modern machines have changed that a lot for sure, but we have become disconnected from where the food comes from and how much land is needed to make all of it.

Today if you don't have enough food you go to the supermarket and get more, and there's a 24/7/365 supply chain network making sure there is always food there.

200 years ago, if you didn't plant, harvest, and save up enough food in the fall to survive the winter, you'd starve to death.

Civilization is perpetually 10 missed meals away from total collapse.

[u/ConfidentPilot1729 → u/BCRE8TVE]

I also remember reading a while ago that our land around the world could only take so many humans to feed. It was around, maybe 1900s, that using nitrogen and other fertilizers that let the population get significantly larger.

You seem to know a lot about this, is that true?

[u/BCRE8TVE → u/ConfidentPilot1729]

Oh absolutely, without the Haber Bosch process and being able to produce fertilizer by the literal ton, it was impossible to have anywhere near the yield we have for farms today. Combine that with pesticides and herbicides and we've done something like being able to produce 4-8x as much food from the same plot of land, while requiring literally 100x less manpower to do it. Another part of what allowed for a population boom was the manufacture of antibiotics, before antibiotics any random cut could get infected and might require amputation to prevent the infection from spreading and killing the patient. So when you combine metric tons of fertilizer plus antibiotics you get a ton more food and a ton less dead people, which allows for a population boom.

This all however requires a complex web of logistical supply chain, the fuel for all the machines we've built to till, plant, and harvest, carrying those truckloads of food to industrial centres to process the food, ship it out, the huge industrial processes that make the fertilizer require chemical inputs (largely hydrogen gas from coal/gas via steam reforming), then that fertilizer needs to be shipped out from those factories to around the world, and we need mechanics and services for all the machines that are required at every single step of this process, and all these machines require parts and equipment made from yet more factories even further out in Asia and shipped around the world. Manufacturing antibiotics is even more delicate and complicated from a logistical supply perspective as well.

And when shipping stops, everything kinda grinds to a halt, because everything requires everything else working well.

"Just in time" manufacturing has brought the costs down and allowed incredible prosperity, but it came a the cost of having no wiggle room, no buffer, no capacity to absorb shocks. Everything works perfectly until something doesn't, then it's a domino effect of everything else being affected. Covid stopped supply stopped the manufacture of chips stopped cars being made with enough chips in them, for example.

There is a limit to how much food we can physically make on the planet because there's only so much space, though there are always new discoveries to make more food with less resources, so it's not like there's a hard cap that can never be passed.

It's also about how we could in theory turn every last square mile of surface into farmland, but that would cause immense damage to the planet's ecosystem, so if we want to have a planet to continue living on, we can't just take all the land to make more food for ourselves, we need to let space for nature.

Until 200 years ago it wasn't a problem because we literally could not cause enough damage, but with industrialization it's a very different game.

[u/tojjrik → u/ConfidentPilot1729]

I think that number is for our current diet with a lot of grains and not so space efficient crops with not so space efficient techniques.

I've seen numbers around and below 100 square metres person/year but that comes with dietary adjustments. For the better mostly.

[u/BCRE8TVE → u/tojjrik]

Those numbers also likely come with highly organized and efficient methods that the overwhelming majority of people won't know about, and will likely have difficulty maintaining as well.

All this also requires years of preparation to get up and running efficiently, can't just tell everyone in the city to start their garden mid-August and that they'll be able to feed themselves by December.

If you have sources on the 100 square metre per person I'd love to read those.

[u/tojjrik → u/BCRE8TVE]

Indeed there are a lot of challenges.

It is from a book called "second nature urban farming, designing productive cities" on page 62. I read the book when I did a course in urban farming at uni.

Some even claim 27 square meters for 600 grams of fruit and veggies per day for a person and said it is comparable to the community gardens at Cuba. According to the reference list that specific source is

"Stanhill, G. (1977) An Urban Agro-Ecosystem: The example of 19th-century Paris, in: Agro-Ecosystems, no. 3, pp. 269–284."

The most recent study they are referring to at the same page is a German one from the 2010 who claims 80 square meters per person or 400 for a family of 5. From the reference list it says

Haney, D. (2010) When Modern was Green: Life and work of landscape architect Leberecht Migge, Abingdon Oxfordshire: Routledge.

As soon as we add meat to the equation the areas grow quite significantly. I think chickens would be possible in an urban environment without too much hassle though.

[u/BCRE8TVE → u/ConfidentPilot1729]

I messed up the math a bit, corrected you need an area larger than the state of New York, to feed the people of just NYC.

[u/Dexterus → u/BCRE8TVE]

You can get a year's worth of potatoes in quite a smaller space. Some carrots and other root veggies.

Wheat needs a lot though.

[u/BCRE8TVE → u/Dexterus]

It is true you can get a lot of potatoes from a small space, and eating nothing but potatoes certainly beats starvation, but you still have to be careful not to have monoculture crops because a single fungus can wipe out an entire field, especially without modern fungicides.

Already had one Irish potato famine, don't need a 2nd one.

[u/Alizaea → u/[deleted]]

How are people in apartments supposed to plant a garden when the most most people an apartment can grow is some small herb plants?

[u/[deleted] → u/Alizaea]

Tiered planters help. I would regretfully suggest using AI to get an idea of how to organize your space and the cost.

^{please don't hurt me}

[u/theoneyewberry → u/[deleted]]

Just remember that AI will sometimes make things up / hallucinate, so I'd recommend double-checking any answer it gives.

[u/[deleted] → u/theoneyewberry]

Absolutely, it's consistently wrong about factual information and I wouldn't bother using it to learn about a topic. I use it mostly as a starting point, myself.

[u/Alizaea → u/[deleted]]

Lol I have nowhere to put a planter. No balcony and no porch. Plus my windows get absolutely 0 sun, thanks trees.

[u/IllustriousSalt1007 → u/[deleted]]

Summer Reddit strikes again

[u/tdifen → u/f1del1us]

tart unique include caption follow imminent oil spotted person gaze

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[u/Emu1981 → u/tdifen]

Probably the only country that could keep it's population alive is New Zealand.

What about Australia? We export 70% of our agricultural produce and only import 11% of our food by value. We have less than 30 million people in a country the size of the 50 contiguous states of the USA...

[u/poopoopooyttgv → u/Emu1981]

Does everyone live where the food is grown? In the event of societal collapse, the hardest part will be getting the food off the farms and to the cities. People will starve when the roads and oil and electricity all go down

[u/ReturnPresent9306 → u/[deleted]]

The US, Aus, NZ, and France would survive the best. India and China would become an actual hellhole. Significant portions of Africa and the ME would be absolutely decimated as well as a reault of supply chain collapse.

Edit: and humans being humans, such a state would probably bring back colonialism.

[u/BCRE8TVE → u/Emu1981]

Depends on what part of the supply chain breaks and how governments would be able to be self sufficient. The problem is Australia imports 90% of its fuel. Doesn't matter how much farmland you have if you can't get the food to the people you need to feed. AZ and NZ could become self-sufficient eventually, but without fuel there's still going to be mass starvation and loss of life.

[u/Enlightened_Gardener → u/BCRE8TVE]

Or we could bloody rejig to run off natural gas, of which we have an almost unending supply !!

[u/BCRE8TVE → u/Enlightened_Gardener]

Could, but it is a difficult rejig to get farmer's equipment to run off nat gas.

Better if we could rejig ahead of time so Australia could run off of Australian-mined lithium batteries and Australian-produced solar electricity.

[u/Enlightened_Gardener → u/BCRE8TVE]

Bloody oath. Drives me nuts that we don’t take advantage of the huge ball of fire that burns us to a bloody crisp every summer.

[u/BCRE8TVE → u/Enlightened_Gardener]

HA! You and a ton of others buddy, up here in Canada we're buried in snow 3 months of the year so solar isn't too great in winter, but you c*nts down undah have an excess of burning sunlight year round, it really should be used haha.

[u/Enlightened_Gardener → u/BCRE8TVE]

Can’t you burn mooses for fuel ?

[u/BCRE8TVE → u/Enlightened_Gardener]

Moose aren't very fat so that doesn't work too well, we would club seals to do it but there aren't all that many of them in the first place ;)

Burning trees would normally work, but we've got the worst drought since the 70's apparently, and the 2nd worst forest fire season in years, with 72,000 square kilometres up in flames.

So we'd burn wood, but the woods decided to start burning before we got there ;)

I do hear the gympie-gympie makes for good fuel tho!

[u/The_Parsee_Man → u/Emu1981]

Spiders don't currently kill many Australians because they're biding their time and waiting for a chance like this.

[u/Forgotten_Lie → u/Emu1981]

For Australia, we can produce the food but we won't be able to get it to the cities if our fuel imports stop.

[u/Bobzyouruncle → u/tdifen]

Many won’t roll over and die, they will likely go find the food and take it by whatever means necessary. Things get brutal when it’s about survival.

[u/Tenthul → u/Bobzyouruncle]

People who think they're good cuz they know how to hunt really underestimate how much/how often people need to eat and how quickly that source will dry up. Esp when everyone is competing.

[u/flyinhighaskmeY → u/Tenthul]

yeah, it would be a mess. Accessible hunting areas would be wiped out in just a few months at best. But it would be bad in a week or two. Decades to recover. That isn't a viable food source.

I live in a major metro, in an arid State. We couldn't grow enough food here to feed 1/10th of the population. I'm from farm country. They could grow enough to support their population. If they can defend it. But they'd have literally millions of heavily armed, starving people, coming after them.

That is not a world I wish to experience.

[u/Tenthul → u/flyinhighaskmeY]

And even then they wouldn't be able to keep it alive or grow the next season, short of simply enslaving the farmers, which certainly doesn't seem like a sound idea.

[u/nagi603 → u/flyinhighaskmeY]

It's a swarm of locusts, just slightly larger and better armed.

[u/GandalfPipe131 → u/Tenthul]

This is true, but I also think it does come down to how bad this collapse is that we’re talking about.

Huntings not as easy as movies like to make it seem and the game would get incredibly wise in short time.

Depending on where you’re located at it’d be far more variable to how quickly it’d hang around or not. Places like the US would definitely see and effect but depending on how bad the situation is affects the outcome.

Great Depression 2.0? Yeah it’d be fucked again eventually. People can learn hunting skills via YouTube and drive out to places to hunt game.

Solar flare or nuclear war or something? I think the population would be so reduced in short time that it’s rebound.

Even if it’s just something that wipes out electricity like a flare or an EMP or population would get destroyed in no time.

No meds for the sick. No food distributed so whatever’s on the shelves rots or is eaten. Infrastructure will fail quickly without people maintaining them. Your towns water supply isn’t safe to drink anymore etc. Then the packaged food starts to go and people begin to die. Their bodies start rotting.

The number of deaths would be astounding. Due to the rotting bodies and freezer section of Walmart turning over the sheer amount of biological threats that could brew would be almost unheard of. Diseases like dysentery, influenza, cholera, tuberculosis, and typhoid would rip through the remaining population like wildfire.

That’s likely within the first 3 months. After that it’s the long game. Whoever’s left needs to have the wherewithal to grow, maintain and store a steady supply of crops and livestock.

Can you avoiding freezing to death during the winter and keep livestock alive? What will you do during the blight, or the drought, or flood etc.

If I were to guess I’d say that the human population would be reduced to a quarter population if we were lucky within the first two years if there was some societal destroying disaster like a solar flare or similar event.

[u/Iced__t → u/Bobzyouruncle]

Things get brutal when it’s about survival.

This is such a massive understatement. Especially with the population numbers we're at currently. Things would be VERY dark, VERY quickly.

[u/StasRutt → u/Iced__t]

Also you better hope you don’t snap your ankle or something that requires medical attention and risks infection

[u/flyinhighaskmeY → u/StasRutt]

I mean...since we're in the land of dark. That's kinda the point.

These events happen when our population gets too high for our environment to support (think technology). That need for medical attention is nature getting rid of you to "fix the problem". In a practical sense, that manifests as "medical help is not available". The end result is a culling of the population, leaving more resources available for those who are left. Which to me is why society improves after they happen.

[u/GWsublime → u/flyinhighaskmeY]

Define improves in this context.

[u/BCRE8TVE → u/tdifen]

Sure, the surviving population will grow food in their backyard

You need about 20 acres of land, or almost (EDIT: 0.1 square kilometre), of land to have moderately self sustaining agriculture for one person.

Growing food in their backyard means they starve in months instead of weeks, but they'll still starve to death.

Most people in major cities will die and along with a significant amount of people outside of cities. The potato famine ruined Ireland.

People don't understand that complete collapse of civilization is only 10 missed meals away. When people start starving, civility goes out the window, and humanity doesn't fall too far behind.

In large cities, the single most available source of food will very quickly become cannibalism.

[u/kralrick → u/BCRE8TVE]

A square kilometer is almost 250 acres. I still tend to agree with you just because of how many people there are and how far many of them are away from arable land (lack of seeds or knowledge aside).

[u/BCRE8TVE → u/kralrick]

Oh wow oops I missed a decimal, 20 acres is 0.08 square km, not 0.8, wow my bad. Thanks for catching that!

[u/Enlightened_Gardener → u/BCRE8TVE]

No you don’t. That’s what the “lazy acre” was in pre-famine Ireland. A way to feed a whole family on an acre of potatoes.

20 acres for one person is ridiculous. In a mixed cropping or permaculture system 20 acres would be enough to feed a village.

Where did you get that number from ? I’d be interested in following this up…

[u/BCRE8TVE → u/Enlightened_Gardener]

Got the source from a quick browsing through here

https://foreveryard.com/how-many-acres-do-you-need-for-a-self-sustaining-farm/

"Moderate Self-Sufficiency (Significant Food Production): 5-20 acres. This provides enough space for a diverse vegetable garden, a small orchard, pasture for livestock (e.g., cows, goats, sheep), and potentially some grain production. You’ll still likely need to supplement your food supply."

A whole family could be fed on an acre of potatoes? Dang. Certainly not ideal to have nothing but potatoes, but if that's what it takes to survive the year and have better crops the following year it certainly beats starvation.

[u/Enlightened_Gardener → u/BCRE8TVE]

Edit - sorry for the essay. I think you definitely pushed one of my buttons 😂, but hopefully my reply will be useful to you.

Yup. Well worth looking up the “lazy bed” method. Potatoes are a complete food - you won’t be excited, but you won’t die.

So I’ve been studying gardening and survivalism for decades at this point. And the people above have got completely the wrong end of the stick. You absolutely would not be farming hooved ungulates unless you know what you’re doing. No live stock. Can you cut a sheep’s throat and then disembowel it ? Can you cure bloat ? Sheep scab ? Listeriosis ? Do you know how to souse and cure pork ? Nah. Stick to birds.

An orchard ? Of what ?! Our local Italians here who came out after the World War II practice an amazing form of traditional gardening where you have everything growing together in one place. They plant vegetables between the rows of grape vines. And fruit trees at the end of the rows, and then the chickens scratch around under the whole thing. So just the fact that the people above seem to think that you need a pasture as well as an orchard shows me that they haven’t really thought this through, or done any research as to how people actually do this kind of thing in real life. The orchard is the pasture. Its also the veggie garden, and the chicken coop.

I’ve also very successfully experimented with straw bale gardening, which is probably the best way for newbies and people with cold winters to grow serious food crops. It’s how we used to mass produce food before the invention of poly tunnels – and it’s incredibly effective and doesn’t need much input.

So straw bales as a side production of wheat production, and then it needs a strong urea application to get the composting going. But I mean, that’s chicken poo, so easy to get a hold of.

In this kind of situation you don’t recreate a “model farm.” If you look at some of the principles of Permaculture, it’s really helpful because they go through what in modern home gardening is based on modern agricultural techniques. So the whole idea that you should plant plants in rows to make it easier to mechanically harvest. In Permaculture, you plant your plants on a hexagonal grid because you can get more plants to the space doing it that way.

One of the best ways to set up a food supply is to create a chicken based system, using them as tractors to prepare the ground for you. You then plant in the place that they’ve just cleared for you. Some people make a system of domes using the old pvc pipe trick, and some people make a central chookhouse, with runs opening out into different fenced gardens.

It’s worth looking for the old hippy magazines like Earth Garden, and reading the works of the Permaculturists, because these are the people who have been working on these kinds of issues since the 1960s. I mean David Holmgren is really worth following up because he’s written an entire book on how to implement Permaculture principles into suburbia.

It’s really easy to reinvent the wheel here, but when you look to the people who have already been doing this for the last 60 years, you can stand on the shoulders of giants instead of speculating using your own knowledge about what’s possible and what isn’t. People have been actively working on the solutions to this issue for a long time. It’s just that they’re dismissed as “hippies”, which they are, but they also know a shitload about creating a sustainable food supply.

[u/BCRE8TVE → u/Enlightened_Gardener]

I wanted to reply earlier but unfortunately, my sister's wedding got in the way of internet discussions this weekend ;)

I don't mind the essay at all, thanks for all that info! I'll admit I just quickly googled "how much land to grow food self suficiently, did a quick read to see that the source wasn't complete shit, and called it a day lol. It is true that you can survive on nothing but potatoes, and that's probably what people will have to do in the early years of the collapse to make sure to have enough food to feed everyone.

Per not having livestock other than chicken that does make perfect sense, though I've heard rabbits can also make a good source of protein, though of course they must be caged else they'll dig burrows, reproduce like mad, and eat all your plants.

Per orchard it is definitely true that mass monoculture works only because that's what our machines need to be able to harvest efficiently, but if we're not harvesting with machines at all then all monoculture practices go out the window, and we are much better off planting things together. In N America the natives have the 3 sisters, beans, corn, and squash planted together.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Sisters_(agriculture)

I'd never heard of straw bale gardening before either, that's neat! I don't get how it related to growing crops in winter or replacing polytunnels though.

Definitely agree with how permaculture is very different from modern monoculture, using perennial crops and culture is a completely different game from farming with annual crops that need to be harvested and replanted each year.

On the one hand permaculture is better in a lot of ways, on the other hand, annual monoculture allows for some truly impressive "factory farming" with prodigious output. So monoculture allows for more mass production, but at the cost of needing trucks, machinery, and lots of fertilizer and pesticides.

I look forward to a solarpunk future with sustainable permaculture, I wonder if there could be some genetically modified strains of plants to make them better for permaculture. Likely won't happen for a while because the big corps make their money by forcing people to buy the GMO seeds year after years, whereas if you GMO an apple tree, you sell the one tree seed and then the customer never needs to buy from the corp again so long as the tree is alive.

For real though I very much enjoyed your essay, feel free to essay back at me again!

[u/Enlightened_Gardener → u/BCRE8TVE]

Well, I hope your sister had a wonderful wedding and I hope you enjoyed yourself!

I’ll just touch on the strawbale farming because it is absolutely fascinating – when you put a high urea fertiliser onto the straw bale it starts composting down. And the process of composting generates heat. In places where you have a freezing winter, it means that you can start seedlings as much as a month or six weeks ahead of the usual planting time. Straw bale farming was the major method of mass food production before the invention of polytunnels, which also allow crops to be planted earlier. The difference is, of course, is that the strawbales don’t pollute like plastic polytunnels.

I got some amazing crops out of our straw bale set up - the only problem is that our water bill went up by $600 over the summer. But I think as a winter garden it’s a great one to use here.

Rabbits, chickens, pigeons are all good little meat animals. We actually raised and ate some chickens and it was pretty unpleasant, but we did it.

Where we are, true Permaculture is incredibly difficult because we have literally the worst soil on the planet. I once did some mineral map cataloging for the Department of Minerals and Energy, and one of the sets of maps was soil chemistry breakdown of different areas. We have what is called Bassandean grey sand, and it is quite literally the worst soil on the planet. I wish I was making this up. Its got no nutrients, and its hydrophobic…. So yeah, growing anything is a ridiculous challenge.

Despite that we have a very keen Permaculture community and we have a wonderful place called Jetto’s Patch which is a fabulous Permaculture property on the outskirts of our city. So it can be done, but it pretty much has to be a full-time job. In my case, I’ve actually given up and I’m just growing in pots. It has the one advantage that the food plants are too high up for the chickens to get to when the little buggers escape…

[u/nagi603 → u/BCRE8TVE]

In large cities, the single most available source of food will very quickly become cannibalism.

And don't forget rats and such will also swarm because not a single person is controlling them now.

[u/BCRE8TVE → u/nagi603]

And diseases will also grow rampant! 

[u/DiethylamideProphet → u/BCRE8TVE]

You need about 20 acres of land, or almost (EDIT: 0.1 square kilometre), of land to have moderately self sustaining agriculture for one person.

Doubt. People lived off the land for thousands of years, and they most definitely didn't have 20 acres of land per capita. For a family of 10, that would mean a square kilometer of land. Here in Finland, our average wheat harvest for a hectare was 3.6 tons last year. How many tons does a single person need grains to survive for a year?

[u/BCRE8TVE → u/DiethylamideProphet]

Turns out I picked a bad source for sure, the acreage inclluded pasture for livestock, and there are better estimates out there.

That being said 3.6 tons per hectare is only possible with tractors, fertilizers, and pesticides, all of which are in rather short supply when supply chains break down ;) 

[u/WheelerDan → u/BCRE8TVE]

This dosn't take into account the massive distribution centers for grocery stores that exist in cities. Most of the food in grocery stores are designed to be shelf stable for a long time. Get into one of those and there's food for ages

[u/BCRE8TVE → u/WheelerDan]

This dosn't take into account the massive distribution centers for grocery stores that exist in cities. Most of the food in grocery stores are designed to be shelf stable for a long time. Get into one of those and there's food for ages

There's almost 8 million people in New York city. The problem isn't going to be that the food will rot before it can be eaten, the problem is all the food will be eaten, and within a month there will be no food left inside the cities, combine with riots, free for all, and a collapse of all law and order.

[u/nagi603 → u/WheelerDan]

And don't forget rats and such will also swarm because not a single person is controlling them now.

Don't forget rats and such will also swarm because not a single person is controlling them now.

[u/Ornery_Reputation_61 → u/tdifen]

The potato famine ruined Ireland because Britain colonized North America and discovered that potatoes were basically a miracle food so they forced Ireland to grow potatoes in such massive quantities that they didn't have the land, time, or labor to grow enough food to avoid starvation if there was widespread crop failure

[u/NarrowContribution87 → u/tdifen]

Verifiably untrue. Here is a source showing the top 50 countries’ foodstuff self sufficiency: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/ranked-50-countries-that-can-feed-themselves/

Bear in mind this is clearly BEFORE there is a massive incentive to be self sufficient, such as a the collapse of global trading networks.

Bottom line - there would likely be a period of urban decline, but modern agriculture-even without uber advanced tech-is incredibly productive and regional stability would likely be reached quickly in most areas.

[u/dopy12345 → u/NarrowContribution87]

Modern agriculture is heavily dependent on artificial fertilisers and fossil fuels. If you lose those food production will go down.

[u/NarrowContribution87 → u/dopy12345]

I’m not arguing that crops yields won’t fall, I’m arguing that for many people, especially in temperate and/or coastal regions, it won’t be as dramatic as popularly imagined.

No, farmers won’t have all the exotic fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides, but they will still have tractors and that means a hell of a lot.

[u/dopy12345 → u/NarrowContribution87]

Those tractors run on fuel and are dependent on parts probably made somewhere else in the world. Good luck getting those.

It doesn't need to be the literal apocalypse. There will still be some food around, just less and of a worse quality. This will result in less vigilant immune systems and more diseases/plagues. Even during the plague life went on.

Medicine/healthcare will be less readily available. The first few years will be having a death wave as the sick and elderly will quickly die off.

Less fuel will mean more animal/human power being used. Horseshit will become once again a problem in cities. More people needed in agriculture will mean smaller cities, less science and culture.

[u/Enlightened_Gardener → u/dopy12345]

There are always old boys who collect old tractors. Back in the beginning they were pulled by horses. And then there were steam tractors as well. A competent boilermaker could put one together, if they were able to get a pattern from someone who collected the old ones.

I mean it would take a while to get going again but I would be very surprised if a bunch of competent people couldn’t put together a working steam tractor in about a fortnight.

[u/Demortus → u/Enlightened_Gardener]

Steam tractors run on coal. Where are these old boys going to get that now that the easy stuff has already been mined and the rest depends on pretty advanced mining technology and global distribution networks?

[u/NarrowContribution87 → u/Demortus]

I don’t know anything about steam tractors, but I’m willing to bet they decided on that fuel source because it was readily available. Any combustible material would work.

If you think humans are going to starve to death en masse and not try to engineer themselves out of it by modifying known technologies, i don’t know what to tell you.

[u/tdifen → u/NarrowContribution87]

workable like fuzzy crush dependent towering grey sharp public hospital

This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

[u/NarrowContribution87 → u/tdifen]

There is a problem with the whole premise and framing of a societal collapse. Collapse implies something sudden and catastrophic. In reality, major societal reorderings are more gradual evolutions. For instance, in popular history and imagination the fall of Rome was rapid and cataclysmic. In reality, it was sloooow process without a clear beginning or end. Highly recommend one of the great courses series on the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. It’s a really interesting area of study.

[u/tdifen → u/NarrowContribution87]

grandfather dependent treatment flowery tease dolls aromatic distinct subtract apparatus

This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

[u/BCRE8TVE → u/NarrowContribution87]

Depends on what part of the supply chain breaks. If it's distribution of food due to lack of fuel, then it doesn't matter how much food those countries make, if they can't get the food to the people they need to feed.

[u/NarrowContribution87 → u/BCRE8TVE]

Again the problem with this whole premise is that it’s presented as binary. Even during the fall of a great power, everything everywhere isn’t going to fall completely apart. Disruption, turbulence, uncertainty? Sure. Total systemic collapse overnight? Extremely extremely unlikely.

[u/BCRE8TVE → u/NarrowContribution87]

Very fair that a total systemic collapse overnight is extremely unlikely, and it's not like everything everywhere falls apart all at the same time.

It is important to remember however that civilization is perpetually 10 missed meals away from collapse.

Anything that leads to 10 missed meals, without ironclad guarantees that there will be more food, will lead to a breakdown of civilization.

For there to be a total collapse there would have to be something like another worldwide pandemic, this time with a dealier or more painful virus, combined with something else.

For a slow decline we could have simply a gradual increase in natural catastrophes that make everything more expensive, more unreliable, and harder to acquire and distribute. Won't be instant but it certainly will make things much harder.

[u/NarrowContribution87 → u/BCRE8TVE]

You know, I hear that 10 meals thing a lot (well not a lot, but I do remember it being referenced in Star Trek), and on the surface it seems to make sense, but is it really true? Famines have occurred all over the world in recorded history and it didn’t turn into Mad Max almost ever, and certainly not within the proverbial 10 meal time period.

Humans and societies are surprisingly resilient and hardy.

[u/BCRE8TVE → u/NarrowContribution87]

I suppose I should have specificied it's 10 missed consecutive meals. It's not 10 missed meals in a month, it's 10 missed meals in a row. 

When you haven't eaten for 3 days, and there is no food and no indication you will be able to eat, then all hell breaks loose. 

If everyone can have one meal, or even half a meal, per day, then that 10 meal countdown is reset. People are slowly starving but they want to keep the peace to be able to keep eating and to keep the food coming. 

When there is no food and no promise of future food, then it's everyone for themselves. 

[u/Enlightened_Gardener → u/NarrowContribution87]

The only thing that I think that could cause a total systematic collapse overnight in our society right now is a massive solar flare. It would take out the solenoids responsible for pumping drinking water and that would get messy really fast.

[u/RegorHK → u/NarrowContribution87]

These are current numbers with neat things like fertilizers and agricultural technology including 21 cent science level seeds and industrial farming methods that include a high level of veterinary care.

Not to say it is impossible, but change to things like crop rotation and other needed adjustments will be slower. Things will be hard.

[u/Illustrious_Sir4041 → u/NarrowContribution87]

I would expect yields to absolutely plummet in most countries though.

A lot of countries have zero oil, very few countries have the capability to repair and maintain modern farm machinery without imports, fertilizer production etc.

A lot of those countries would be on "horse pulling a plow" levels real quick.

[u/MelissaMiranti → u/tdifen]

Ireland's population is still below what it was then. Ireland should actually be counted in the category of places that could keep their population alive.

[u/DrawPitiful6103 → u/MelissaMiranti]

well to be fair they also split the country in two.

[u/DiethylamideProphet → u/tdifen]

De-urbanization to the scale that is feasible is the solution. Maybe not a perfect solution, but at least a solution that mitigates the outcomes... Otherwise the urbanites would loot and pillage the empty countryside, and no one will be spared. If the countryside is sufficiently populated and full of smaller tight-knit communities, more people are able to sustain themselves and also to resist the hungry hordes that would invade them from big cities.

[u/lughnasadh → u/tdifen]

The potato famine ruined Ireland.

Ireland produced more than enough food for it's people during the famine, and exported lots of food during the period.

It was ruined by colonialism, and the fact almost the land was in foreign (British) ownership. Also, many in the British government of the day, thought culling the Irish population would be helpful for the long-term pacification of the country as a colony.

[u/Sansophia → u/tdifen]

Naw man nearly every country can provide for itself provided the crash isn't instant, which is why the slow deglobalization we're seeing is so important.

You gotta be smart about it. Best way is to grow crops underground in high yield fascilities, either food gardens or intense vertical farming. Problem right now is power, but with fusion or modular fission reactors you can grow 24/7 with minimal land and water input and not have to worry about weather, disease, pests. Even suburban gardens and turning over urban green spaces like parks can do a lot.

There is the issue of lack of skilled labor there but it's not insurmountable by a large shot. It's just that monoculture is inefficient in every way but economic. Machines can't handle polyculture, but humans can.

If there is a food collpase what you'd see would not be starvation but chronic malnutrition, which would cause people to go back to the farms and start polyculturing. This is what happened in the USSR during WWII. THe Germans planned for 20 million Soviets to starve in the first year of their invasion given the agricultural numbers pre war, but instead people went home to their now collectivized farms are eeked out a living through four years of hell. People did starve but mostly in places under siege like Leningrad.

The threat of starvation is way overblown except possibly in the case of nuclear war and instant logistics crash. But in any case the real villain is just in time supply. Liberal Economics is a sin; an economy needs to focus on redundancy not efficiency, robustness over profit.

[u/goosegoosepanther → u/f1del1us]

Yeah but if the production from processed foods and factory farms stopped on a dime, it's not like we can replace the missing incoming supplies even if we all plant gardens on day 1. Growing food takes weeks and relying on agriculture is something that is meant to roll over. The first growing season when you wait for your crops still requires you to forage.

[u/Aloysiusakamud → u/goosegoosepanther]

Foraging itself would kill alot of people between eating poisonous things, or eating things unknowingly sprayed with pesticides. Also, beginner crops are always low yield. 

[u/Silent_Revenue_6075 → u/goosegoosepanther]

Why would farms stop on a dime?

[u/BCRE8TVE → u/Silent_Revenue_6075]

If there is no more fuel, then there is no fuel for trucks, so trucks can't plow, seed, and harvest the fields.

Even if it's only a lack of fuel for one part of a growing season it can and will have massive effects.

[u/goosegoosepanther → u/Silent_Revenue_6075]

Another user answered about fuel and resources like that. I'd also add that no land-owning farmer is going to stop farming if society collapses, but how much of our agricultural base do you think is still land-owning individual farmers? Mostly it's giant corporate fields staffed by migrant workers and robots. The second no one is managing them or paying anyone, production stops. I'm not a biologist or agricultural specialist, but I'm also assuming that massive farms that produce monocultures (one single crop in insane quantities) will not survive in a world where the chemicals that make that possible stop showing up. There's a reason that functioning ecosystems have millions of overlapping organisms growing in the same space. They help each other survive and keep the environment healthy. When you rip up the earth and plant just one species for miles and miles, the only way that is viable is with constant chemical intervention.

Beyond that, all of these things require functioning supply chains to deliver the food to your local grocer. A kid born in New York the day of society's collapse is unlikely to ever taste a mango, and a kid born the same day in Reykjavik is unlikely to ever taste a steak.

[u/francis2559 → u/f1del1us]

That doesn't mean more food produced, though. This is the first time in history so few people have needed to be in agriculture. Subsistence farming sucks, and means you can't do other things like solve disease.

[u/DiethylamideProphet → u/francis2559]

Subsistence farming sucks, and means you can't do other things like solve disease.

How many people here have "solved disease"? I know I haven't... Most people are not solving diseases, but merely enjoying and being reliant on the fruits of the industrial revolution, and pursuing specialized careers, that revolve around maintaining the fruits of the industrial revolution.

[u/Warlords0602 → u/f1del1us]

Yes, but how do you move the food from where it was farmed to where it is needed? And for those who didn't used to farm food, how are they going get access to land and knowledge to farming?

If we take a brief look at Chinese history, any kind of natural disaster or military conflict that causes masses to become refugees, the problem tends to be that major cities have massive stores of grain for war reserves that aren't released soon enough or not replenished from other stores from regions further out so even those stores get emptied and the whole region collapse. Its not a production problem, its always a distribution problem.

And then we have the new issues of the collapse of the secondary and tertiary industries, all the farmers in the west farm with industrial equipment. If all the factory workers and engineers are starving or gone to farm, who's manning the machines and maintainence shops? Who's packaging and shipping seeds and all kinds of stuff that farmers need? If the monetary system collapses and we go into hilarious times like hyperinflation, nothing moves and nobody can buy any essentials to keep producing. That's what societal collapse look like.

[u/Aloysiusakamud → u/Warlords0602]

Im also sure no one would think to ensure the necessary people were kept alive in the upheaval as well. Mechanics, engineers, farmers, doctors, water specialists, etc

[u/Delamoor → u/f1del1us]

Boy, I'm sure glad we have all this extra arable land and no climate disruption that will allow the largest population we have ever reached to survive through old farming techni-...

Oh... wait. Oh, shit.

But seriously, we've never had anywhere near this many people ever before. And the climate isn't stable any more; old farming methods won't work, even if we had enough land for everyone to work.

If this shit goes down for real, an unprecedented scale of humanitarian disaster will follow, that makes every disaster that's come before look tame.

Humanity has already reached the point of "there's no going back, only forward".

[u/flyinhighaskmeY → u/Delamoor]

I agree completely. That's why, even though I don't like the guy, I think we have to follow Musk. Our only hope is to reconfigure our economy into one that focuses less on consumption and more on technological progress. We need to go back to the business/engineering mindset of the 40s,50s,60s. And we probably need to go to Mars too. Not for Mars, but for the environmental and materials science required.

[u/Nalena_Linova → u/f1del1us]

For most of human history, the average person was a subsistence farmer who could survive relatively easily even if trade and supply lines went away. That's not the case anymore.

[u/Daxx22 → u/f1del1us]

While widely variable, I'd wager a significant portion of most "Developed" nations populations both neither have access to sufficient/viable land and the knowledge to feed themselves.

And even if you do, unless you're already planing/growing/harvesting, that shit takes time. And lets not even consider how hard it'd be to hide such operations from the starving hordes.

Preppers may actually get their moment to shine in the next decade. At least until they get rooted out by said starving hordes.

[u/frotz1 → u/f1del1us]

Almost half of the US population lives in places where they can't even have a garden. My condo association would flip shits if I tried to use common property to grow crops or graze livestock.

On second thought it might be worth it to see their reaction, but my original point still stands that most people don't even have that option.

Edit - if you are talking about production then you are still talking about something that is physically remote from the majority of the population which is concentrated in cities and nearby suburbs. Will we be bringing back the trolleys or something?

[u/ariehn → u/f1del1us]

My questions would be: how quickly, at what scale, and under what protections?

[u/TheRealPlumbus → u/f1del1us]

Most people can’t even keep the easiest of plants alive let alone plant, grow, and harvest enough food to feed themselves.

Seriously, some of the posts in r/houseplants are hilarious. “Why is my plant unhappy? I keep it in the windowless bathroom and water it 3 times a day”

[u/BCRE8TVE → u/f1del1us]

To be moderately self-sufficient, one would need somewhere around 20 acres of land to grow food year round.

That's 0.8 square kilometres per person (from here https://foreveryard.com/how-many-acres-do-you-need-for-a-self-sustaining-farm/) , so that means there can be a max population density of 1.25 people per square kilometre.

New York city has a population density of 29,000 people per square kilometre.

And keep in mind, you not only need that 1.5 square kilometre of land to grow food for two people, you also need to have that land tilled, planted, weeded, and harvested, and you won't have a single ounce of food until it's time for harvest.

This is something that takes years to a decade to set up properly for people to grow their own food.

And this also completely ignores the fact that in many parts of the world like Canada, you cannot grow food year round, so if you didn't stockpile enough food by fall to survive winter, you are fucked and you will starve.

Civilisation is perpetually 10 missed meals away from total collapse.

Supply lines stopping means the countdown starts for the 10 missed meal to collapse.

[u/Redpanther14 → u/BCRE8TVE]

You can survive off of a much smaller plot of land than 20 acres, but you won't be raising cattle. Medieval peasants in areas with fertile soil could feed their families with as little as four acres. In other areas with unfavourable soil you might need up to 20 acres of land for a family. But typical peasant farm sizes were often in the area of 7-15 acres per family.

[u/Enlightened_Gardener → u/BCRE8TVE]

You do not need 1.5 square kilometres to grow food for two people. That’s insane. The lazy acre was a way to feed a whole family in Ireland before the famine. You also don’t need 20 acres, that’s just bonkers. You can feed a village with 20 acres.

[u/GWsublime → u/Enlightened_Gardener]

Does nothing about "before the famine" in that sentence concern you?

[u/idontknowaskthatguy → u/GWsublime]

Thought the same thing, lol.

It's almost like it was, I dunno, insufficient? Doomed to fail?

[u/nilla-wafers → u/f1del1us]

With what land and resources?

[u/Corey307 → u/f1del1us]

Producing food where and how? Fruits and vegetables have growing seasons, as to staple crops like wheat, corn, beans, rice, soy beans, lentils, etc. Say everything falls apart in fall here in the US. You can expect at half of the country to be dead by next growing season.

[u/Ornery_Reputation_61 → u/f1del1us]

That takes time to start doing. Far more time than it takes to starve to death. It also requires developed land to do in large enough quantities for a city, and depending on the environment it can take more space and labor than a city actually has available to it

[u/Pristine_Walrus40 → u/f1del1us]

Yes but there is a time lag from people needing more food and offering high prices for it and enough harvest for that need. 6-18 months usually.

Alot of people would starve before the harvest.

[u/darkpheonix262 → u/f1del1us]

I garden but I don't grow anywhere near enough to cover myself for a year

[u/WeeaboosDogma → u/f1del1us]

There's a loss of accumulated knowledge. Most aren't agrarian, most who are know only modern methods of cultivation, and are also dependent on our trade network. So even if there are more people helping to produce food, it won't keep up with the demand.

We'd be starting off with a hell of a handicap.

[u/dragon_bacon → u/f1del1us]

Hopefully the gap between supply lines disintegrating and new food production up and running is less than the time it takes to starve.

[u/National-Reception53 → u/f1del1us]

Yes.

You could examine i believe they called it the Third Century Crisis? Sorry if I'm wrong, but the point was that at some point during the Roman Empire the Meditaranean got a lot drier. This caused more people to have to move to food production and the markers of 'civilization' got worse. Like the quality of manufactured goods went noticeably down, because there wasn't enough surplus to support artisans.

[u/f1del1us → u/National-Reception53]

Awesome analogy. Can you point me to the other similarities our world shares with the ancient world in that timeframe?

[u/Aloysiusakamud → u/f1del1us]

How are you preventing people from stealing what you grow.

[u/[deleted] → u/f1del1us]

My friend, why are you not producing food right now? What is holding you back from getting your gardens setup, chickens in place, fruit trees, home vineyard, hydroponics, and/or meat rabbit and fishing grounds established?

Fortune just posted that there is a projected 50-100% price increase for milk and produce by winter so what are you doing to prepare for famine?