AEB
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Re: Food, Rations, Sustainability

Thu 28 Oct 2021, 14:08

Another thing to remember is that farming goes through cycles of intense activity followed up by periods of less activity. Unlike Australia European farming is more controlled by the seasons. Add in a nuclear winter and farm animals that were not kept in barns may not survive the winter. Barning requires not just a barn but enough feed - hay and grain - to keep the animals alive.

Cropping requires intensive effort when you sow and when you harvest. Crops in the field, unlike animals, are actually hard to steal so mauraders will wait until after the harvest to attack. Burning crops in the fields can destroy a settlement as you just lost your seed grain for next year and have nothing to eat.

I run a 42 hectre farm by myself thanks to oil and machinery. It is the vegetable garden and orchard to take up the most time as - unlike the cattle who look after themselves a lot of the time - you need to constantly work a vegetable patch to keep a constant flow of vegies. Again things will be seasonal and a European winter will be hard unless you have a greenhouse. Orchards are busy first at pruning time then thinning out the fruit and then picking the fruit.

Also preserving enough food to survive the winter will be the number one concern of a TW2000 Poland. One advantage Poland does have is salt mines so again they may be better off than large parts of Western Europe on that front.

Chickens and pigs will be common as they'll eat trash and leftovers and can be kept in small spaces.

All of the above is likely to be needed by any settlement or canton in TW2000 to provide a diet with enough calories and vitamins.

Also losing oil means losing argicultural chemicals and in particular fertilizers. While you can use manuring and rotation productivity will be way below modern standards. The UK realised that its whole civil defense strategy in the face of a nuclear war was useless as lacking oil for fuel and fertilizer agricultural productivity would fall to pre-industrial levels and hence could only support a pre-industrial sized population, so letting people die in the attacks was better than having them starve in the aftermath.
 
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Ursus Maior
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Re: Food, Rations, Sustainability

Thu 28 Oct 2021, 18:15

Yes, without artificial fertilizers, mechanization and chemical treatments - we're talking the 1990s, organic / biological alternatives were far less common than today - yields will go down to the standards of before 1870. But after a nuclear war and especially in Poland, population would drop significantly due to conflict, atrocities committed and total collapse of society and food sources. I's estimate that by 1870 there were around 10-15 million inhabitants within the borders of modern Poland. Estimates are hard to make, because of the massive shifts of borders between the Napoleonic era ("Congress Poland" and Third Partition) and the aftermath of World War Two with the Great War, the Polish-Ukrainian, the Polish-Russian and World War Two all happening within 31 years. By outbreak of the Twilight War population would have been around 36-38 million. I'd be surprised if more than a third made it into the year 2000.

Fertility of the land of course is a huge problem due to contamination. In fact, proper decontamination, i. e. removal of 2-3 inches of soil and rinsing down all surfaces and equipment with fresh, cold (and uncontaminated) water would likely be impossible in most places, since there would be no administrative and governmental structures in place to coordinate the effort or even recruit the necessary labor force. So this happens locally or not at all.
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ottarrus
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Re: Food, Rations, Sustainability

Fri 29 Oct 2021, 02:26

I'm glad I sparked a lot of discussion, it's really encouraging for me.

I'm feeling just a bit under the weather today, so my promised second part will have to wait till tomorrow. My apologies. When I get back to it, I have some Civil War era solutions to things, as well as some things all the contributors haven't thought of!

OH! Before I forget, is there a way to post a picture from my hard drive to the site? It's not online via a url, it's just a photo of Civil War era rations my company did for a reenactment.
 
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omnipus
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Re: Food, Rations, Sustainability

Fri 29 Oct 2021, 03:38

There is an "attachments" tab below the field when you comment where you can upload small files. Personally I still recommend something like imgur instead.

A question I've always had and this conversation has now sparked. Say you have your trusty diesel tractor on your little plot of Poland. Say you're growing crops that can be in turn turned into alcohol or biofuel. How close to the break-even point are you with that? After all, you are turning what could have been edible food into relatively inefficient fuel so that you can in turn work the field a bit faster... so you've got a bigger field you can work, but...
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AEB
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Re: Food, Rations, Sustainability

Fri 29 Oct 2021, 06:20

There is a lot of research on biofuel production. It is important to note that in addition to oil you get meal and straw, both which are animal feeds.

https://sciforum.net/manuscripts/631/original.pdf - from a Polish paper.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Table_of_ ... rop_yields - note that yields per hectare will be lower in a TW2000 scenario.

Yes you are scarificing food for fuel but that fuel allows you to work a larger area of land and hence provide more food. It also reduces the amount of human labour involved in sowing and harvesting.

Rapeseed is one of the better oil seeds. At a guess you could get 400-500 litres of biofuel per hectare assuming a descent processing setup in a TW2000 world. That is per year mind you so you won't be fueling a tank division with biofuel.

I did some research and roughly 5 hectares of oilseed would run my truck and machinery for a year using modern processing (would give around 4,000 to 4.500 litres).
 
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Vader
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Re: Food, Rations, Sustainability

Fri 29 Oct 2021, 07:53

Note also that with the steadily increased political focus on climate gas neutrality during the past decade or two, research into biofuels has only really taken off on this side of the Millennium (the Polish paper is from 2011, I believe). In the 90's, "biofuel" wasn't really a thing, as far as I can recall.

Therefore, as AEB notes, efficiency of the conversion processes known at the time, and above all, the efficiency of whatever conversion processes people will be able to implement in their domestic environment, will most likely be much lower than what people can achieve in research labs today, or project being able to ramp up to in large-scale industrial processes.

Just as an estimate, I'd surmise you'll need somewhere around 50-100% more land to produce any given amount of fuel in post-war Poland compared to what today's sources would tell us.
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andresk
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Re: Food, Rations, Sustainability

Fri 29 Oct 2021, 09:11

I'm not speaking of the 'lost art of farming' so much as the 'lost art of pre-industrial farming".
Things like
- How to manage horse drawn farm machinery
- Crop rotation when you don't have NBC warfare detection kits to check which fields are poisoned
- No nitrate fertilizers, just manure to fertilize the fields
- No GMO seeds to increase crop yields or make disease resistant crops
- - And on the subject of GMO seeds, many GMO seeds are NOT sexually fertile... they don't reproduce crop seed, just the edible portions of the crop. This was instituted as an IP protection from Big Aggro.

As far as the farmers being dead, most young men between the ages of 18 and 45 have been drafted into the armies. What you have tending the fields are children, widows,and old men. This leads to a lot less work accomplished per calorie expended. In the US Civil War, there was a town in Maine where literally every male who was between the age of 15 and 50 in 1861 died on active service. During the War One Battle of the Somme, every single volunteer from Canada's Newfoundland was killed, and this led to a year long famine in the Province.
There was a similar discussion on the discord a while back. With some people saying the "apocalypse" was not as bad as everyone thought. I begged to differ exactly on these points. The modern supply chains are destroyed, most if not all of the land must have returned to feudal style settlements. There's no real way of one settlement supporting a warband much larger than a company sized unit. The soldiers would have to have the reach and numbers to patrol the surrounding settlements in order to cash in on their food supplies at the end of the day, but without a steady source of fuel you can't deploy motor vehicles all the time. Add to that the fact that the number of actual farmers is much lower than would be required from a feudal society, food would need to be the first priority of any organised group, and the land without modern farming techniques can only supply so much food.
 
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ottarrus
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Re: Food, Rations, Sustainability

Fri 29 Oct 2021, 09:38

I'm not speaking of the 'lost art of farming' so much as the 'lost art of pre-industrial farming".
Things like
- How to manage horse drawn farm machinery
- Crop rotation when you don't have NBC warfare detection kits to check which fields are poisoned
- No nitrate fertilizers, just manure to fertilize the fields
- No GMO seeds to increase crop yields or make disease resistant crops
- - And on the subject of GMO seeds, many GMO seeds are NOT sexually fertile... they don't reproduce crop seed, just the edible portions of the crop. This was instituted as an IP protection from Big Aggro.

As far as the farmers being dead, most young men between the ages of 18 and 45 have been drafted into the armies. What you have tending the fields are children, widows,and old men. This leads to a lot less work accomplished per calorie expended. In the US Civil War, there was a town in Maine where literally every male who was between the age of 15 and 50 in 1861 died on active service. During the War One Battle of the Somme, every single volunteer from Canada's Newfoundland was killed, and this led to a year long famine in the Province.
There was a similar discussion on the discord a while back. With some people saying the "apocalypse" was not as bad as everyone thought. I begged to differ exactly on these points. The modern supply chains are destroyed, most if not all of the land must have returned to feudal style settlements. There's no real way of one settlement supporting a warband much larger than a company sized unit. The soldiers would have to have the reach and numbers to patrol the surrounding settlements in order to cash in on their food supplies at the end of the day, but without a steady source of fuel you can't deploy motor vehicles all the time. Add to that the fact that the number of actual farmers is much lower than would be required from a feudal society, food would need to be the first priority of any organised group, and the land without modern farming techniques can only supply so much food.

There's a lot of people out there, people who have some training and have been in some of the armpits of the world and ought to know better, who think 'The Apocalypse' is 'The Great Reboot' or some nonsense. That someone is going to wave a climatic or nuclear magic wand and all they have to do is hide out in their bunker for a couple years and all 'them lib'ruls' will be gone. Like, toilet paper will be hard to get for a few years, but if the beer supply doesn't run out then they're golden or some shit.
 
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Fenhorn
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Re: Food, Rations, Sustainability

Fri 29 Oct 2021, 11:43

Moderator Message: Please leave real world politics out of this forum. That is regardless if it is on a small scale, if it seems like an innocent reference at the time or was meant as a joke at the time. These sort of things can very easily escalate and at the end prove that Mr. Godwin was right. Thanks.
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ottarrus
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Re: Food, Rations, Sustainability

Fri 29 Oct 2021, 14:01

No problem. There's a reference to politics in the 'Food 2' thread, but I'll be more careful in the future.

Moderator Action: Removed a comment about the moderating. You can PM me for that sort of things.
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