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ottarrus
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Food, Rations, Sustainability

Wed 27 Oct 2021, 14:43

So, I'm a US Civil War reenactor and I do a lot of teaching at schools. One of the things that I really focus on when teaching is the daily life of a soldier /civilian. What they wore, what they thought, how they lived, what they ate. With that in mind, I thought I'd offer a couple of thoughts about food in a T2K environment.
Let me note right off that conditions in Central Europe and Sweden are going to be vastly different. Poland has been a battlefield for 3 and a half years in-game and has suffered repeated NBC attacks. Sweden has been a combatant for 2 years or so and the proliferation of NBC weapons has been much smaller. Of course, Sweden has less land arable land and a shorter growing season... therefore the damage warfare has done to the food supply is just as acute. I'm addressing Poland because it is most similar to the US, where I'm from. I simply don't know enough about farming in the higher latitudes to be able to comment with any authority.

First off, food is gonna be a bitch. The Referee's Book describes a Poland that is damned near as buggered up as that Gawdawful book series from the 80's, The Zone. Croplands have been NBC'd to literal death and only a major human die-back and decades of rain and weathering are going to fix it.
Now, I don't see the picture as quite that bad. I'm well aware of the poisoning spectrum [at least, that described by the US Army Chemical Corps]. The setting describes survivors that really are hanging on, with sufficient croplands to support the remaining population... barely. The problem is twofold: a lack of trained farmers and a transportation net that's thoroughly wrecked. Almost everything that's grown is consumed within 25 miles /40 km of its acreage. Then you add the problems of a barter economy, bandits, organized units of soldiers 'foraging' [or as like to tell students, 'authorized stealing'] and the need for high starch/ sugar content plants to distill fuel from.
To be blunt, society's ability to feed itself has retreated to medieval level and damned few people have any idea how to actually do the work necessary. Most communities are closer to the Stone Age hunter /scavengers, rather than the organized work of a medieval village.

So let's get down to some basics here. Let me go point-by-point...
a] the general rule of thumb is 'one acre [2.5 hectares] of grain supports one adult and requires the full time effort of one adult to cultivate'. However, this presumes that the adult has some knowledge of what they're doing and has the energy and the security to work the land. Under the conditions of 'modern' Poland, a more realistic estimate would be doubling the needed land to feed one person.
b] a healthy person consumes, at minimum, their own body weight in food per month. This presumes a varied diet of 2700 calories a day. In T2K terms, this diet is a distant memory. As 'Monk' put it in the flavor text of T2013, "I'd be willing to kill somebody I know for a bacon double cheeseburger." A realistic figure for the current diet is probably along the lines of 1800 calories a day in the sparse time of the year [December to June] and 2200 calories in the 'fat' time of the year [July to November]. Of course this will vary widely.
c] many food preservation techniques have been lost or preserved only as 'ancient lore'. The only methods of food preservation commonly available in Poland at this time are likely to be salting, pickling in vinegar, drying [jerked meats, dried vegetables], and possibly smoking. Drying and smoking require a lot of time and fuel to do, and smell of the process will draw bandits like flies to a corpse. And something that can't be emphasized enough; the most efficient fuel for fires is charcoal made from hardwoods. The knowledge of how to make charcoal in large enough amounts is largely lost. People think only in terms of dry, seasoned wood and are not at the point of cultivating wood-lots yet.

I'll discuss some solutions and how Civil War soldiers ate [which can provide some of those solutions] in my next post.
 
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Re: Food, Rations, Sustainability

Wed 27 Oct 2021, 18:03

a] the general rule of thumb is 'one acre [2.5 hectares] of grain supports one adult and requires the full time effort of one adult to cultivate'.

Could you expound on that a bit? I can't help but read that rule of thumb as anything else than that, if it takes one competent adult full-time to cultivate one acre and one acre can support one adult, then two acres can support two adults but will require both adults to work that land, full time, and so on ... i.e., one person is able to produce one person's worth of food.
As written — with a one-to-one correlation between food produced and the workforce required to produce it — the consequence would be that no-one can do anything but full time agricultural work.

I doubt that's the intention, so I'm thinking that either I'm not reading it right, or else there is a typo somewhere ... It seems to me agriculture ought to be able to produce some degree of surplus for the equation to add up.
Before you use the word "XENOMORPH" again, you should read this article through:

https://www.wired.co.uk/article/aliens-throwaway-line-confusion
 
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Re: Food, Rations, Sustainability

Wed 27 Oct 2021, 20:05

Where is all of the talk of "the lost art of farming" coming from? Are you supposing that all the farmers are dead?
 
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Re: Food, Rations, Sustainability

Wed 27 Oct 2021, 20:20

Great info -- incorporating more knowledge of how non-industrial agriculture works has been a goal I've had!

I do share Fenhorn's question though. There has to be a point where it scales up dramatically or even cities 10,000 years ago never would have existed.

A few contributions on fuels: one, central Poland has a LOT of coal. Continued control, mining and transport of that coal would be a high priority and there are a lot of people in the area that would have knowledge and expertise on that topic.

Most forests in Poland are conifers about 60-80 years old. Before the modern era, forests were dangerous hiding places for bandits, and that situation has no doubt returned. (They were also home to resistance fighters in WW2, etc)

Wood is certainly valuable as a fuel anywhere it gets cold. It's worth noting that for instance Sarajevo lost pretty much all of its urban trees to illegal chopping during the siege.
Author, Central Poland Sourcebook -- now available on DriveThruRPG
 
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ottarrus
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Re: Food, Rations, Sustainability

Thu 28 Oct 2021, 00:17

Where is all of the talk of "the lost art of farming" coming from? Are you supposing that all the farmers are dead?

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.
Last edited by ottarrus on Thu 28 Oct 2021, 07:51, edited 1 time in total.
 
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Re: Food, Rations, Sustainability

Thu 28 Oct 2021, 00:29

Great info -- incorporating more knowledge of how non-industrial agriculture works has been a goal I've had!

I do share Fenhorn's question though. There has to be a point where it scales up dramatically or even cities 10,000 years ago never would have existed.

A few contributions on fuels: one, central Poland has a LOT of coal. Continued control, mining and transport of that coal would be a high priority and there are a lot of people in the area that would have knowledge and expertise on that topic.

Most forests in Poland are conifers about 60-80 years old. Before the modern era, forests were dangerous hiding places for bandits, and that situation has no doubt returned. (They were also home to resistance fighters in WW2, etc)

Wood is certainly valuable as a fuel anywhere it gets cold. It's worth noting that for instance Sarajevo lost pretty much all of its urban trees to illegal chopping during the siege.
On fuels:
- You do NOT want to smoke meats over a coal fire! :) Cooking from a cast iron stove is fine, but those are rare. Most people, even in villages, have electrical stoves and Communist architecture isn't known for luxuries like fireplaces, so it's logical to say that there's been a serious effort to scavenge fire stoves. Otherwise, you're camping with the Boy Scouts. And that wastes a lot of fuel in non-productive heat.
- Conifers [Pine, Fir, etc.] are softwoods and don't produce the dense, hard wood that deciduous trees [oak, hickory] does. The charcoal made from deciduous trees is substandard generally.
- And few people know how to make charcoal anyway, especially in the amounts that a village is going to need. In medieval England, there was even an organized guild of Charcoalers, which was pretty unusual for time given the filthy and rural nature of the trade.
- As for Poland's forests, yes the infestation of well-armed, militarily trained, and emotionally hardened bandits in the woods is a significant contribution to lack to security to produce food. You'd have to pretty freaking desperate to head into the woods with a 'squad' of old men with double barrelled shotguns knowing that the banditos lairing therein have AK's and machine guns.
- And the bandits in the woods will have hunted out or scared off much of the game in those woods, decreasing the available calories even further.
 
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Re: Food, Rations, Sustainability

Thu 28 Oct 2021, 04:24

I'm a guy who went from being a professional in the city to being a farmer - cattle mostly - in the country.

The gamechanger in farming is a source of power greater than human muscles. If there is sufficient alcohol or other biofuel - you can cook with oil, strain it, and then use it in older diesel engines for example - then tractors may be available for plowing and havesting. Otherwise you are going to need draft animals like horses or oxen. Horses and oxen also consume food as heavy work requires feeding them grain and quality hay. Probably the biggest issue is making the harnesses and modifying equipment for animal traction. If Poland still has Soviet era farming equipment in may be better off than Germany or the UK when it comes to maintaining farming in TW2000.

One big issue will be how many horses and oxen remain. As oil based fuel became scarce the militaries would resort to draft and pack animals in their logistics columns. A horse or an ox also represents a lot of meat so many will have been eaten by soildiers or civilians (it was said that during the battle of Stalingrad the German motorised units envied the infantry using horses as the infantry never went hungry).

So any surviving community or canton will have (a) older tractors running on biofuels and/or draft animals, plus (b) modified farming equipment or equipment taken from museums or other places, and (c) managed to have assembled enough draft stock to not only farm but also breed. Thus they will have vets or medical personnel who also act as vets. Probably around 80% of the population 12 years and older will be engaged in agricultural activities, and the remainding 20% will be guards or soldiers plus specialist trades.

Assuming enough books survive and there is sufficient food to support non-agricultural workers overtime you will see blacksmiths, weavers, leather workers and other trades return as prewar materials wear out or are lost.
 
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ottarrus
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Re: Food, Rations, Sustainability

Thu 28 Oct 2021, 07:49

Thanks for the input and supporting most of my arguments, AEB. Real-world experience and references is much more helpful than 'book learnin' in this case.

As I view things it's only been 18 months since Things Went To Hell. Society has the potential of organizing itself as you describe, but hasn't done so yet. It's still in the process of getting there.
You're right when you discuss the sources of power... the amount of work per calorie or BTU expended. I still think that it'll be another couple years before things settle down to the situation you're describing.
Above all, I want to avoid SM Stirling's 'deus ex Machina' bullshit of a bunch of Wiccan hippies that 'liberate' their farm equipment from a conveniently located museum, have a wagon loaded with non-GMO seed, a convenient undamaged valley they can farm in safety and more than a dozen willing hands to do the work under the guidance of the All-Knowing Earthmother Grandma. Poland in Y2K has precisely NADA/ZIP/ZERO/ZILCH of that nonsense.
- All the males of military age are in uniform. This is your principle source of productive farm work. What remains are old men, children, and women; and most of the women likely do not have farm skills, so they'll have to learn by making mistakes. I estimate that this reduces the amount of work accomplished to about 80% or so of what it might be in pre-war times. [No, this isn't an attack on women -- it is realizing that there are very few women who are knowledgeable farmers]
- By now, ALL the woods of Poland have been denuded of most deadfall wood that can be extracted with an axe. Two 'nuclear winters' with major die backs in population, have pushed the wood lots to the point of actually cutting down trees to get heat.
- I think you overstate the availability of veterinarians in Poland. They're probably more available in the US, given our larger community of agricultural workers. Pre-War Poland has something like 10% of the population of the US and let's be honest here... most vets are capable of treating livestock, but most made their pre-war living treating dogs, cats, and hamsters. Quality of care as society re-tools itself to a pre-industrial lifestyle it gonna be a thing.
- Universities are usually located in towns. A lot of towns got nuked or gassed, or fought over. ALL cities are in ruins. Remember that scene in the movie 'The Day After Tomorrow', where a group of survivors is trying to ride out a polar vortex in the New York Public Library? They have one fireplace and if that fire goes out, they're all dead. A guy brings in a cartload of books that he just grabbed up and somebody realizes that he's getting ready to burn 'Mother Earth News' [each issue of which has sustainable food tips]... he grabs the guy and says "We got 100 years of the accumulated US tax code and you're gonna burn a book about growing food?!" Well, Poland has had two winters that were cold as Hell on starvation rations... there is a very good likelihood those books may have been burned for heat.
Last edited by ottarrus on Thu 28 Oct 2021, 12:24, edited 1 time in total.
 
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Re: Food, Rations, Sustainability

Thu 28 Oct 2021, 09:16

Poland has a much smaller community of agricultural workers than the US ... in a very small fraction of the area. Even in Sweden still in the 90's, much of the problem of small pet owners outside of the two or three largest cities was that veterinarians in general were much better trained at treating cows and sheep and horses than rabbits or mice. In the barely post-Communist Poland of the mid-nineties, I'd imagine the situation to be pretty much the same...

Funny ... I always pictured the "typical" Polish woman of the Pact era as a sturdy farm lady. The reason for this being, the Communist system was basically inefficient and corrupt. Even in cities, the average civilian could not depend on always being able to get their hands on any food other than what they could grow themselves, or barter for on the black market by using produce they'd grown in their allotments (official or guerrilla), back yards, even balconies. Everybody was a farmer, or just about, one way or another ... on the whole, it seems to me agricultural skills ought to have been fairly well spread out in the Polish population of the nineties; not least in the female portion thereof.
With this being the peacetime situation just a handful of years back ... the wartime situation ought to be pretty much just back to business as usual.

Agricultural development has gone through a number of paradigm shifting game changers over the millennia ... animal power being one to be sure, but there are many others, no less important: the ploughshare, water management (irrigation/drainage), synthetic fertiliser, pesticides, motor power, list goes on ... question is, how many of these are still available in post-war Poland. Any of them will increase yield, or conversely: the absence of any of them will decrease yield from what we'd consider the baseline.
For certain, GMO crops won't be a factor here — historically, they were just barely starting to be introduced in the mid-nineties.

If worst comes to worst, you can push a plough all by yourself — many have, even in the 20th century. If you can add another person to pull the plough, you can be that much more efficient. The total is greater than the sum of the parts. (Even today, much vital agriculture around the world is mostly manual — e.g. rice).

With woodworking skills being fairly prevalent in Poland at the time (as we in the surrounding countries came to realise very quickly in the early nineties), there should be plenty of people around with the skills necessary to build agricultural tools that humans or single draft animals can pull ... to whatever extent you can't find them already lying around at the backs of barns and farmyards.
Before you use the word "XENOMORPH" again, you should read this article through:

https://www.wired.co.uk/article/aliens-throwaway-line-confusion
 
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Re: Food, Rations, Sustainability

Thu 28 Oct 2021, 13:33

Poland has a much smaller community of agricultural workers than the US ... in a very small fraction of the area. Even in Sweden still in the 90's, much of the problem of small pet owners outside of the two or three largest cities was that veterinarians in general were much better trained at treating cows and sheep and horses than rabbits or mice. In the barely post-Communist Poland of the mid-nineties, I'd imagine the situation to be pretty much the same...
I like to add to this the notion that such discussions might benefit from statistical data and academical insight (cf. Grzegorz Węcławowicz 2016: http://rcin.org.pl/Content/62816/WA51_8 ... ent-in.pdf).. In the case of Poland, the socialist countries followed the general post-war trend in Europe of urbanization, but slower than Western European countries and only until the 1980s. During the 1990s Poland actually a net-loss of its population, even if this was comparatively moderate, when compared to some other examples. Total loss of urban populations was higher than that of rural populations, probably because of two reasons: towns and cities were hit harder by the collapse of communist centralized industry that rapidly proved to be insufficient for international competition. In addition, urban populations were better educated and had deeper financial pockets, so they found it to be easier to emigrate Poland than the majority of the rural population.

Still, not all towns and cities suffered the same. As the centralized industry collapsed and new sectors of industry and especially commerce sprung up, cities and towns began to enter an open competition with one-another, something had been averted under communism. Necessarily Warsaw as the capital profited most, the new state was not so much more centralized politically, but certainly economically, but also Gdynia - a major port on the Baltic Sea - and smaller towns in the East of the country. So, while Western Poland and Silesia saw a large emigration to Germany (mostly) Eastern Poland saw a phase of investment and imigration, as did the North - enjoying new trade routes via the Baltic - and Warsaw.
Funny ... I always pictured the "typical" Polish woman of the Pact era as a sturdy farm woman. The reason for this being, the Communist system was basically inefficient and corrupt. Even in cities, the average civilian could not depend on always being able to get their hands on any food other than what they could grow themselves, or barter for on the black market by using produce they'd grown in their allotments (official or guerrilla), back yards, even balconies. Everybody was a farmer, or just about, one way or another ... on the whole, it seems to me agricultural skills ought to have been fairly well spread out in the Polish population of the nineties.
With this being the peacetime situation just a handful of years back ... the wartime situation ought to be pretty much just back to business as usual.

[...]

With woodworking skills being fairly prevalent in Poland at the time (as we in the surrounding countries came to realise very quickly in the early nineties), there should be plenty of people around with the skills necessary to build agricultural tools that humans or single draft animals can pull ... to whatever extent you can't find them already lying around at the backs of barns and farmyards.
That should be a fair assumption in general, yes. In Western Germany it was quite common for working-class people in cities to rent or buy a small plot of land in the vicinity of their apartments (then and still the regular form of dwelling in Germany, especially for everyone below "upper middle class"). These "allotment gardens" (for the British here) were usually part of larger compounds of several such gardens with local rules or even a club running the site, regulating certain aspects of the gardens (e. g. number and size of trees or hours of quietness etc.) These gardens were used for recreation, but also to farm vegetables and salads as well as animal husbandry; mostly chicken and rabbits as they could be kept easily on these small plots of land in coops etc. Late Boomers were the first generation to drop this tradition, as meat and vegetables became readily available in their youths during the late 1960s and 1970s. The older population still kept on, however, and by the 1990s quite a number of grandfathers of working class families were known by their (millennial) grand-children to introduce them to live chicken, rabbits and home-grown vegetables as well as basements full of mixed pickles and jars full of home-made jam or even honey.

This was also a shared reality for those growing up in Eastern Europe, except that the "tradition" lingered on a bit longer out of necessity. Also, small plots of "kitchen gardens" were supplanted by actual datchas or "countryside homes" for socialist families. These were no luxury dwellings, but rather modest shacks, lodges or cottages, but with slightly larger plots of land for townsfolk to retreat to during the weekend. The idea was very much the same as in the West: A home away from home that allowed for privately grown supplies and escaping the drabness of small socialist apartments. Except in Eastern Europe this was very much state policy, as it kept the population happy and under control as well as money in country: vacations in your datcha meant, you didn't spent it in Yugoslavia or Hungary, but in Poland or East Germany.

In the end, this means that a post-nuclear Poland would see a large part of its surviving population having experience in animal husbandry (often a primarily male occupation, but often shared between husband and wife) and gardening for food. Also, many of these gardens in Europe had (often illegal) distilleries. Germany even had a law until 2018, under which private individuals where allowed to distill small amounts for themselves up to 50 l per year using especially small distilleries of less than 500 ml (0.5 l). This meant that usually at least one distillery existed per site of allotment gardens and home-made spirits - "schna(p)ps" - were readily available to everyone. They were often given away as presents, traded within the community or among neighbors and as such grey economies in these garden communities existed, where vegetables, small amounts of meat, alcohol, services and tools were available for everyone willing to participate. The same could probably be said for Poland, at least as far as I know.

These grey-market economies would likely offer some resilience during the first months after the nukes fell and probably even in the first winter to follow. Most of the small lodges of these communities were just plywood constructions, but they were often built with running water and power outlets and some even had their own wells, although concessions for these were not always cheap or easy to get. So, while nuclear blasts would destroy such a compound easily, each lodge surviving the actual explosions, would offer a small and cramped home for a family. It would not be enough land to feed the stereotypical 4 heads of a family (husband, wife, two children) of the time, but it could help a lot, especially if the community of gardeners holds together. Datcha owners might even have plots large enough to live from them completely, with the exception of grain, potatoes or other primary sources of calories.
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