I have a quick After America related research question. What kind of farming would you do in east Texas, besides running Bedak Whitetail beef cattle (to replace all the longhorns that disappeared in the Wave.)
Specifically what kind crops are you looking at if you had say two hunnert acres somewhere around Limestone or Robertson counties.
Or perhaps I should ask, if you were a small homesteader with that many acres, and you’d been tasked to run a mixed cropping farm under President Kippers resettlement scheme, where would be the land for that in Texas?
And, as a bonus question for everyone else, if not Texas, and if not anywhere within say four or five hundred miles of eastern seaboard, where?
McKinney, Northern California is far less prone to drought than Southern. The first three settlements in the Los Angeles area perished due to drought…. I live in the Sacramento region, and you’re right! But We grow EVERTHING hereabouts…. even the demon weed:)
SB, I saw a picture of the world’s biggest rabbit a while back on the old JS….. the size of a small child…. no kidding! Good Idea!
Ok, funsters.
Caveat caveat – This is my understanding not hard fact.
One subtle difference between Texas & California is the water pattern.
In Texas (to a much higher extent) it rains, it runs off. In California the precipitation falls as snow, melts & runs off. It’d be worth sussing out how the pollution load is affected by the diferent pattern. I reckon the snow pack would trap more pollution & release it over a much longer timeframe.
Per Missouri, wheat, corn, soy, milo, apples, hemp is possible though not currently grown, peaches, cherries, strawberries, tomatoes, potatoes, squash, eggplant, lettuce, raddishes, onions, carrots, peas, broccoli, brussel sprouts, pears, grapes, watermelons, cantelopes, tobacco near Weston (not as much as they used to).
Pecans, walnuts, gooseberries.
According to my green thumb parents, the only thing that will not grow here is tropical items.
Respects,
Murph
On the Outer Marches
Growing Seasons: April to November.
Hogs. Don’t ignore their importance in quick yield, quick cash livestock.
In my geographical area, anything less than 300 acres is nothing but a garden. Beef cattle, and the crops to sustain them, require at least 300 acres, and this is floating land located above natural springs and situated between constant creeks – anything without a constant supply of water needs more acres per head of beef.
Oh, a few in Texas still raise longhorns, but they eat black angus.
J.
Murph raises a good point: hemp is an amazingly useful agricultural crop that could quickly fill some of the huge hole left by the sudden demise of much of the plastics industry in the event. This would of course have many interesting literary possibilities in the hands of one like the esteemed Birmo…
Might I point out that I recomended growing dope..sorry hemp way back at the start of this thread?
Viscount Bedak: “100% of the time this is true. And the reason I wear a water-proof watch, even in drought.”
EWWWW!
My grandfather was a dairyman with 100-200ac and about 50 head. He managed to crop on that land too and did a lot of contruction work in his “spare” time (when he was having his second knee replacement done in Ipswich, he could see from his hospital window a lift tower that he helped build). Some of my earliest memories are pulling a cow out of the mud in the creek with a tractor. Or of being woken early one morning to see the remarkable result of that night’s calving: a completely pink and white albino calf.
What this is leading to is: Shirley you take your watch off?
Sorry Chaz, there seems to be something wrong with my short-term memory
Actually Damian, on the watchfront, I have no idea where it is at the moment. Maybe I’ve left it somewhere. I don’t know about the titles I seem to pick up around here such as squire & viscount. Perhaps I’m happy with cattle baron, although we call eachother Cowpokes in our castle. Ooops, I mean chateaux..sorry, house…humpy..whatever..
SJS, the hogs idea is a sound one. On the subject of watering cattle, post-Birmo apocolypse pioneers might consider that (for want of a better expression) ‘fresh clean bore water’ often contains a superb array of minerals which adds lustre to your stock. It’s difficult to put my finger on it, but on the whole, cattle drinking our groundwater from regularly cleaned troughs do much better and seem, well, happier. Dam and rain run off just doesn’t have the same level of magnesium, and whilst the human palate may consider it brackish, cows dig it. I suspect there will be plenty of wells still dug along the 1867 trails in Texas. Indeed, there’d probably be a bloody good map of them tucked away in a library someplace.
might I say that this beyond my limited knowledge of farming and the territory, but it is sounding damned interesting and the book seems much too far away.
Kudo’s to all you clever muchkins for giving the education to the Birmo.
Simon’s plan is the way to go.
FActoid. Argentina and Brazil.17thC Estimated free range herds of cattle, mule and horses in the near millions. Ahuh . . .millions. Just like Australia but better climate. And these were the unmanaged herds. Ferals. No surprise really when you look at the plains lands down there.
The point? If left unmanaged the herds will breed themselves up.
Err . . .Bernand Fraudels economics books IIRC.
If you’re a baron, then we should stick with a simple “Sir Simon” ;)
“water-proof watch” – gag – “Maybe I’ve left it somewhere” – shudder -
.
“it gets way too hot in July and August for tomatoes or other tender vegetables” – crap, I’ll be there in August.
.
‘mazing discussion.
.
My mistake, I was thinking of a baronet. As a baron it would be Lord Bedak.
Hope this clears things up once and for all ;)
Good thing your a southerner Bedak.
Poking cattle is unlawful north of the Tweed River
Unless you marry them first.
Badoom tish.
Re missing watch; How suprised is that slaughterman going to be?
RobW, did the guy who got lost in the wildflower fields have a compass? That would help the going in circles IMHO.
Also, what is the state of the GPS network after the wave? A lot of the earthside maintenance for those satellites would be one from North America. But I assume there would be ways the Hawaiians could keep the system functional.
I think Russia recently has its own GPS network up, or maybe that was europes. Was it by 2003 I am not so sure
Lord Bedek of Wagga Wagga: For the story line, I just can’t see some homesteader standing protectively in front of his family, Winchester in hand, nobly fending off desperados out to russel his rabbits.
Inda was doing something about their own GPS too.
Savo, I think the Indians are helping Ivan restore the GLONASS constellation but it’s not finished yet. Google Earth wasnt launched until 2004, so thats out for navigation. But maps and compass along with existing road networks should make it easy to get around.
Story line, Savo? I thought this was real life.
The main thing you’d need if you were droving pre-burger across post-US Texas would be some four-legged employees. Again, if I were doing the job, I’d favour three types of dog for this exercise.
The first employee it may surprise some would be a brown kelpie. Normally, they’re sheep dogs however their tendency to skirt to the animal widest from the mob and return it to their master would be just the job to make my droving life easier. My second choice in dog would be the Blue Heeler, which is a more brutal animal which tends to drive the stock from behind (ie, running backs in NFL) rather than skirting like brown kelpies (like wingers in rugby union).
My third dog would perhaps be the most important. A small, vicious yappy mongrel bastard, female, something with a hatred of everything in the world bar me, no larger than a Jack Russell, who would ride on my lap and bark psycho at any one she didn’t know. The sort of dog that would kill you as soon as look at you, but liked a scratch on the tummy.
…back in the real world, the drought contiues and i’ve just dragged a dead rotting cow out of a drying up dam in 39deg heat. I’m running out of tucker on the ground and have to work out how many more cows to cull before dancing on the knife-edge rips a hole in the bottom of my ballet shoes.
GPS satellites are made to last ten years and are replaced continuously, so there ought to be enough still available for a fix 5 years after the event.
Nothing at all wrong with the traditional methods, of course. On land, even dead reckoning is pretty accurate if you do it right (ie, use a compass and measure your speed).
Damian makes a good point, tech fails (apologies for re opening the JS wound), always have fall back ways of doing something.
Fascinating stuff. Uneducated guesses: hilly stuff might do better with baa baas or venison as they do in the ugly stuff over here (NZ). And I keep coming back to the point that burning down most of the US is going to create so much toxic shite that large swathes of the joint ain’t going to be particularly habitable for a very bloody long time (not sure of the prevailing winds but big eff-off mountain ranges to west surely won’t help.)
I dare say Monsanto’s US patents re canola aren’t going to be much of an issue given neither Monsanto nor the US Patent Office are available for comment. Canola will grow on pretty much anything, GM or otherwise. Hey JB if you really want to piss off the lesbian dolphin empowerment types you could add a pro-GM agenda to your right-wing military-industrialist definitely-not-thinking-of-the-children war porn and really ensure busted arse book sales in Newtown and Fitzroy.
And the Dr. pipes in late with some quality thoughts.
The deer will be in plague proportions. Why raise beef when tasty sweeeet venison *drool* will be falling over themselves to get at your vege patch?
Thinking to myself some steam punk action going on. Vacola fruit bottling & jerked vennison with wifi web access.
When birmo’s greenhorn settlers arrive in Texas, they will find more semi-feral cattle and fully feral hogs than they can manage comfortably, but probably no dairy cattle, which like the closely penned registered stock, are so well penned that they likely died for lack of human intervention. Meat will not be an issue, at least on the initial procurement side of things. Preserving the meat is another issue altogether and part of a whole host of subsidiary skill, maintenance and labor issues involved in living off the land.
Dairy cattle are the highest maintenance, highest labor operation I know of. The cows have to be milked twice a day, everyday and the milk captured under sanitary conditions and then kept so that it doesn’t spoil. Pasteurization and homogenization are also part of the process.
Hog farming is smelly, labor intensive work, but most importantly, the settlers cannot live on meat alone, at least not for long.
Murph is right, you can grow pretty much anything in Missouri. There are a lot of clear, year round creeks and rivers in southwest Missouri (I graduated high school there and farmed for my girlfriend’s dad for 3 years, fortunately he’d gotten out of the dairy business the year before), but some have been pretty polluted–the Spring River comes to mind.
Pollution is another issue. Someone with the necessary skills needs to check the groundwater. also, someone with the necessary skills needs to have the equipment and power sources to get the water out of the ground. Lord Bedak is right, bore water is best for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is reliability.
A final note–JB is it realistic to limit people to 200 acres? there is more than enough land to go around and what is to prevent someone from moving inland and declaring himself owner of 12,000 acres (or pick your number)? And who is going to do the surveying, record land titles, etc.?
I should have remembered hogs. Missouri is a fairly substantial hog state and most of my family was involved with hog farms at one point. Sheep is also another though perhaps not to the same degree.
Hemp, for those wondering, was grown in Missouri during the Civil War era along the Missouri River Valley. It was also one of the industries which utilized African American slaves (cotton is a no go up here near as I can tell). I often wonder why they ban it (yes, the dope thing but from what I hear, hemp and ditch weed are very poor stand ins for Mary Jane).
mckinney makes a good point about water resources. My parents were talking this morning about the dangers of drinking the water from the Murphy Hometown of Maysville, Missouri. The reservoir has drums in it with dubious chemicals. The well water is probably safe but it tastes nasty in parts. Also many of the ponds will have decades of run off from various livestock lots (the lake near Grandpa Murphy’s farm will turn your feet orange) as well as chemicals.
It should be noted, since we don’t know (not even I know) what effect the Wave has on the environment. The standard, perhaps even cliched answer, is that it left a polluted wasteland.
Another entirely plausible (since we don’t really know what the Wave is, how it works, what it kills and doesn’t) is that the Wave has a cleansing effect on the environment. It would be up to Birmo to decide the parameters but in our earlier discussions, I pointed out that if you killed EVERYTHING in CONUS then you weren’t dealing with a resettlement situation, you were dealing with a terraforming situation.
Which would also make for an interesting novel, terraforming, but also an incredibly difficult existence. I think that the US needs to have some value (territory wise) aside from minerals and salvage. Perhaps the Wave addresses issues such as water quality, soil fertility, and other problems.
One neat side effect is that if the Wave neutralizes, say, gasoline, then maybe all of the fuel in the US is useless.
Mckinney, I think the 200 acres limit is originally tied to the Homesteading Act of 1862 model I suggested (which was an initial start of 160 acres). I’d have to look but I believe they were eligible to acquire additional land up to 1000 acres. I’d need to check my notes and do some research.
Another place where cattle work might be viable is Montana. And I’m trying to remember where The Horse Whisperer was set but I think it was in the Dakotas. That might also be useful.
On the survey work issue, there will be a lot of out of work surveyors from the artillery branches of the Army and the Marines. Those skills are useful in the civilian world and perhaps they could do the work.
As for squatters, I don’t think there is much to stop them aside for the ever so often patrols.
Respects,
Murph
On the Outer Marches
Do’ya know, I think we’ve forgotten the marginal species, such as the plains buffalo, and the original Grasses that grew on the Great Plains… Most of the Wheat seed is designer Wheat, and does not replicate well on its own, thanks to the Seed companies proprietary patents. With no one to plant it, the native grasses will stage the beginnings of a comeback. Here in California, the bobcat population will grow, along with just about all the other native fauna, due to lack of human pressure to keep them in check, and a large available food sources due to lack of same…. Birds will be problematical throughout the Continental U.S. especially around the cities because of the feral cat population explosion, and near cities, the dog packs will pretty much take care of the rest…. I once saw a quote from a Book entitled “Biological Imperialism” about the damage done to the east coast due to the introduction of the earthworm to the New England States, and I know that Australians have a personal experience with that kind of thing due to one man’s desire to hunt cute bunny rabbits. (In the end, Australia’s use of their biological warfare department was the only thing that kept them from drowning in Rabbits.) I’m sure that these oft over looked effects of something like the wave will be reflected dramatically in the next book.
These confused rambling of a dazed mind come to you from Tygertim whom can be found at Tygertim’s Journal on the new journalspace, Tygertimate on blogspot, or tygertim8 at livejournal….
PS, do you suppose the elephants and rhino’s will be able to smash their way out of the Zoo’s???? That would make an interesting mix out on the land, wouldn’t it?
Last post then back to work–i would rethink the land limit. Also, the practicalities: There are conflicting priorities. Initially, people will want to live close to one another for mutual support. In time, they will want a lot of acreage to expand and, ultimately, to pass down, which has them move apart. I see friction as to who moves and who stays.
The other issue, particularly when people are spread out, is health care delivery: medical, dental, optometry, etc.
Murph, Montana’s winters are too cold and you’d have to spread people around too much to be able to provide medical, dental, mutual support, etc. Besides, having enough cows will not be a problem. Rather, there will be too damn many and reproducing all the time. Feral cattle will be a major nuisance in the out years unless the US imports 20 million or so new citizens.
Good point, McKinney. Thanks.
Per population, I do think it is vital that the US replenish their citizenship ranks as rapidly as possible. I’d try to offer opportunities to folks with desireable skills, agricultural being one of them.
The US grew rapidly during pre Wave History and if managed correctly, with the right environmental conditions, I think it can grow rapidly again.
I have a teacher In Service to attend and an inaug speech to read (blah). Later.
Respects,
Murph
On the Outer Marches
On farming in Limestone County Texas, there’s an excellent, if not a little long-winded yarn at
http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/LL/hcl9.html
Regarding farms for sale at Limestine which one person could run pretty easily, there’s 1000ac at Grosebeck which was overpriced before the Wave but might suit:
http://www.landsoftexas.com/texas/index.cfm?Detail=&INV_ID=218992
Although ideally, I find about 2500ac of mixed fair/good country is ideal for one family to run a cattle & cropping operation with appx 24″ rainfall p.a.
This has been a most interesting discussion. Good to meet you again Murph, McKinney, Damian, Savo, TygyerT & all. Toodles
Careful on the 200 acres thing. 200 acres of Texas plain doesn’t equal 200 acres of prime watered bottom land in the East – in terms of fertility or animal carrying capacity.
For some reason the 200 acres has embedded itself in the conciousness without reference to the capability of the land to support a family. It also depends if its a monoculture or a truck farm AKA mixed farm operation.
I was suprised to learn that a so called self sufficient peasant operation in the Middle Ages varied from about 5 hectares for a family to about 300 for a village (50-100 people). Hmm . . . .please read ‘Last Centurian’ by Ringo for a rough idea on current ag realities.
brian
“Another place where cattle work might be viable is Montana” but how are masses of people easily going to get there? The coastline and banks of the bigger rivers are easily accessible by large numbers through water transport. You may have been able to get to Montana once via the Missouri but there are too many dams now and the road from Seattle looks like a b’tard to walk.
TT8 thakyou for that word from our sponsor but Tygertim’s Journal on the new journalspace ain’t there.
re the zoo business, there is going to be all sorts of imported carnivors wandering around looking for a tasty cheeseburger to munch down on. I’d imagine some high tech settler armed with the last of the first gen commercial GPS’s getting lost coz the satellites are falling out of the sky and being rescued by the Lord Bedek type witha map and a compass. 3-4 years after the wave means there’s two generations of lions tigers etc on the ground.
The fauna may not be a problem
“besides running Bedak Whitetail beef cattle (to replace all the longhorns that disappeared in the Wave.)”
I read that to mean no mammals survived(plus possibly affecting other animal groups).
cotton
Agriculture in Limestone County
Average size of farms: 371 acres
Average number of cattle and calves per 100 acres of all land in farms: 22.13
Milk cows as a percentage of all cattle and calves: 0.20%
Corn for grain: 11786 harvested acres
All wheat for grain: 1037 harvested acres
Upland cotton: 1467 harvested acres
Vegetables: 286 harvested acres
Land in orchards: 736 acres
Agriculture in Freestone County
Average size of farms: 292 acres
Average number of cattle and calves per 100 acres of all land in farms: 23.48
Corn for grain: 3 harvested acres
Vegetables: 144 harvested acres
Land in orchards: 384 acres
Agriculture in Robertson County
Average size of farms: 331 acres
Irrigated harvested cropland as a percentage of land in farms: 25.98%
Average number of cattle and calves per 100 acres of all land in farms: 21.85
Milk cows as a percentage of all cattle and calves: 0.54%
Corn for grain: 7018 harvested acres
All wheat for grain: 166 harvested acres
Upland cotton: 14979 harvested acres
Vegetables: 48 harvested acres
Land in orchards: 716 acres
Just to follow up the thinking on the venison thing, my thinking was that like ‘roo it’s a very dense, high protein, low fat meat which might be better in a food-limiting environment than moo cows, and would tend to bash less hell out of the environment (ie might not need as intensive farming practices.) However I’m reminded that deer, particularly semi-feral ones, are thorough-going bastards to fence and herd. They hunt the wild ones with choppers in the more feral parts of the NZ South Island. Still, makes good eating.
Doc, I thought more rather than less fat was better for meat in a subsistence level diet. Thinking energy density there. Leaving aside the Inuit of course, one of the few cultures whose life expectancy actually improved after adopting a European diet, no matter how much oily fish they could keep down. But their options were rather more limited than the scenario we’re thinking about.
Of course we’re not talking about subsistence, are we? Just a brainfart, then, esscuse me…
I’ve been admiring your thinking on this side of the ditch Prof Yob and you’re right about the fencing costs. Even though I’m a beef-man, I adore rare venison provided a french-chef makes it for me. I know many farmers, better than me, who’d chuck their current sheep operations tomorrow if the govt kicked in with some fencing for ‘roo. Beautiful meat, great conversion, adapted for the conditions.
Perhaps a compromise dear chap which ties in with where you’re going would be goat. Admittedly, it can be a bit grissley, but it would work up in the mtns and on the proposed plains of Texas. Friends of mine with hundreds of thousand of more (shit) acres than us, use goat-traps around dams and water holes to draw the buggers in and they can’t escape. Saves the herding prob.
Damian, nice beard. Dr Yob, nice hat. Fella with the stats, um…nice…
PS …Bangar, there must’ve been a cargo vessel full of bedak Whitetails on route to the Port of Galveston when the disaster struck – http://www.portofgalveston.com/
Which is kinda cool cause they’re the only breed of cattle that dig Jim Webb and Glen Campbell, although they prefer MacArthur Park.
Bedes, Doc et al–the Texas plains are in the panhandle. The area Birmo is talking about is rolling oak country not dissimilar from large parts of Europe and Argentina. Texas’ venison is whitetail deer. I’ve eaten a lot of whitetail, but mostly either as sausage mixed with pork and seasoned all to hell or the tenderloin. IMHO, venison is a pretty shitty meal. It is tough, dry and gamy. After a year of living off of grass, avoiding predators, doing a lot of running for various reasons, etc, your feral cattle herd will be running plenty lean.
But, gentlemen, meat will never be a problem for a very small but armed human population: the hard work will be getting seeds in the ground, harvesting and transporting the crop.
My dear Savo, Try:
http://tygertimsjournal.journalspace.com/
or
http://journalspace.com/members/tygertim8/
Or
http://tygertimate.blogspot.com/
Or
http://tygertim8.livejournal.com
I’m there, guys I’m there I tells ya!
I oughta write a book How’s Ghost in the Machine for a title?
and how does altPam have so many more people who believe in her??? She’s even got a Pommy Aristo pouf Sir Reginald Boult, 7th Bart. on her friends list…. :(
At Savo
Westy says in her blog JournalSpace(New)for Dummies:
“It says you haven’t published a “public” blog yet – it seems to consider it “not public,” but not quite private either. Readers can only access it by manually typing in balognabutt.journalspace.com (or whatever your address is), and a lot of people don’t know that they can do that! They just see that message and believe it, grumbling about how that lazy (insert cuss word here) hasn’t gotten off of their moldy butt and made a journal yet. I’ve started typing in people’s blog addresses manually (username.journalspace.com) if their profile says that they haven’t created a blog, just to see if they have made one or not. Only TWO of those times, the person actually hadn’t created a blog.”
So there. I do too exist….
Thanks McKinney sir. I assumed we had some diesel after the wave. Life’ll be a bit of a struggle without it.
In real life, I have some 1920s ploughs and cropping plant here which can be towed behind some horses, but even though I have 3 horses on the place, I wouldn’t want to trust my livelihood to them, nor have to rely on my lack of equine skills.
My quickest solution for the cropping in the new PRT, off the top of my head is, and this is in a post-apocolyptic emergency mind you, to use sheep first up.
Yep, I’d need a huge mob of sheep in a fenced area. Their poo to act as fertiliser. Graze everything bare by way of soil preparation. Wait for rain.
Remove sheep and with dogs drive a herd of cattle around the bare wet ground to make muddy clomps.
Remove cattle, make a simple seed broadcaster, walk and distribute oats by hand at say 100kg per hectare or 100lbs per acre if you prefer. After seed is cast, hook up a bar with light harrow scarifiers behind a horse or two to cover the seed. Wait.
Shoot birds attracted to any uncovered oats and eat them.
Hope for rain.
Alternatively, millet might work although this year my crop of that failed so don’t listen to me.
Lord Bedek, is this all off the top of your head or are you the agricultural equivalent of Brigadier Barnes?
Savo, it’s off the top of my head but I suspect it might work.
Plenty of farmers, good ones and shit ones, use sheep to clear paddocks of weeds before sowing so the above’s an extreme example of that I s’pose.
I was just thinking that another way to cover the seed might be to employ a herd of cattle running over it all again to trample it in when it’s wet.
“Ah, but they’d eat the oats!” I hear a sensible voice suggest.
Well, given that these are desperate times, and let’s say my lack of equine skills has seen my horse and harrow set-up skip over the horizon, the solution to the problem is a simple one.
Get your herd in the yards.
Place an empty 20kg seed bag over the muzzle of each animal in the herd, secured with baling twine.
Run them around the paddocks till the seeds are covered.
Return herd to yards, remove bags, send back out to their paddocks.
BarnesM with a pitchfork? Dunno. But if the great man was here he’d probaby suggest it’s almost time for a Zombie Burger
McKinney, if you ever get over to NZ, try some decent Bambi. Wild stuff is gamey as hell (some like it that way, usually hairy men who live in bracken huts on hillsides) but the farmed stuff is fairly spesh.
Or we could spot you some roo. I think we have a couple million spare out the back of Boggabri. Big advantage of roo is that it seems to take two fifths of arse all to look after them, they weather drought etc particularly well. Fencing situation would be even more ugly though, as Bedes wisely foreshadows. Would advise bolting very large roo bars to the Dodge Ram for after-dark sorties. Horse-drawn or otherwise.