Maybe the 21st Century has been a mistake.

[godhatesrepublicans]

I've been thinking a lot about the recent announcement that something like 26 million Americans live in horrible poverty from which they can't escape. The choice offered to these people is to either work 80 hours a week at minimum wage, or to somehow "get trained for a REAL job" when the fact is that there aren't many real jobs AVAILABLE any more.

Perhaps the solution is for millions of Americans to abandon the 21st Century, just as the 21st Century has abandoned them.

Instead of being trained for modern-era jobs that simply don't exist, maybe these people need to be trained for 15th Century jobs that will always exist; perhaps they should be trained how to be self sufficient farmers. According to home gardening enthusiasts and survival experts, a family of four could grow all their own food on a plot of land measuring under one acre. Using a greenhouse and some basic fish farming, that area can be reduced to a quarter of an acre according so some articles I've read.

Maybe a Christian solution to entrenched poverty and a permenant underclass is to give them all some land, some seed and equipment, and 12 months worth of training in living like an Amish family. All things considered, it doesn't seem like a bad life, and billions of humans have been farmers growing their own food over the centuries.

Since there is no such thing as an original idea, I'm going to spend a few weeks seeing if anyone else has thought out what it would take to train 26 million people how to sustain themselves in an environmental, self sustaining fashion. If no one else has, I may as well step up to the plate and start developing a plan.

I'm not an expert in any of the required fields, but as I see it this project requires taking the experience and published works of countless experts and putting them in some sort of logical order. I'm as qualified to do that as any other college graduate in the world at least, and this "term paper" could really lead somewhere.

If anyone reading this happens to BE an expert in any applicable fields, please feel free to write me with anything you care to tell me that may point in a good direction. And if anyone knows of anyone already working in a similar vein, please let me know so that I can shift gears and support their work instead of wasting time "reinventing the wheel" as it were.

originally published at http://blog.myspace.com/godhatesrepublicansdotorg, reprinted here so that more than my hundred or so occasional reader will see it. :-)

[eallen]

1. LOL! Few will trade "horrible poverty" for dirt farming.

Especially farming as it frequently was done just a couple of centuries past. Imagine someone living in a small shack with a dirt floor, no plumbing, no electricity or powered applicances, growing most of your own victuals from a plot, another for some cash crop, butchering your own meat. Many will romanticize this. Most modern Americans made to live it would quickly view it a large step backwards, much worse than the "horrible poverty" you decry. Think: you made your dinner in one pot over a wood stove. What do you do with the leftovers? No electricity means no refridgeration. Do you know what will keep a few days in your cellar? What happens if you're wrong? There's no grocery on the corner, if your cupboard is bare, and in any case, the money you make selling your cash crop has to be saved for precious hardware and clothing and other goods you can't make in house. No running water means carrying it every day from a well or creek. Do you know that your well water is sanitary? Of course, boiling it means chopping more wood, and that stove makes the shack miserable in the summer, without AC or even fan.

People who think that today is somehow particularly disadvantaged, even for the poor among us, have a poor sense of history. It's too bad there's no time machine to take people back to where they can observe dirt farming two centuries past. Or the slums in major cities then.

Poor is always going to be bad, because it always means being on the bottom rung. But that doesn't mean there has been no progress.

[Viva_La_Revolution]

5. sod houses are a better choice than shacks.

especially half dugout/ half sod.

dig about 4 ft down, build walls up 4 feet, and lay a wood floor. Line the roof inside with canvas, so little buggies don't drop on you. Cool in the summer, warm in the winter.

leftovers stay in the pot over the fire, and that's all you eat till it's gone.

cook outside in the summer, learn to kill critters or eat beans, etc. instead.


The water issue I haven't worked out yet. :(

[cornermouse]

8. Old fashioned well with a hand pump inserted.

They even used to have hand pumps inside houses. But if you think many women are going to live in a house where you have to line the roof with canvas to keep bugs and spiders from dropping on them, you're not thinking very clearly. Same thing with the leftovers cooking in the pot till they're gone idea.

[Viva_La_Revolution]

9. squeamish women will die off...

I will survive.

The hand pump, of course. I'm just worried about the well water not being safe, with all the chemicals and ick that have been leeching into the water tables from modern agriculture and corporate farms.

[FloridaPat]

2. One of my suggestions to several people for NOLA was to have

all those unemployed youth and anyone else interested to learn how to build homes. They could get their homes built sooner than later, a lot of people could get some great training that will give them a career to last a life time and not be exportable. And the community would get close together and survive.

And since it looks like the USA is in for a collapse, anything that would help people survive would be a great career.

The number one job for the future seems to be - cahsier. That what my place of work told us when they suggested everyone get as much education as possible.

[MoseyWalker]

3. K & R

good post. Thanks

[Viva_La_Revolution]

4. facinating idea

unfortunately, I think Climate change is going to throw a monkey wrench into it.

[cornermouse]

6. That self sufficient farmers thing is going to be a little hard to put

into reality, isn't it?

I'm not an expert but common sense tells you that if you have minumum wage job; little or no money its hard to get a loan to get land. Greenhouses are not cheap and neither is other equipment, new or used, unless you're talking about something like a small personal garden tiller. And if everyone jumps ship at the same time, prices of these items are going to go up, way up due to increased demand.

There's also the question of how you plan to store the food over the winter and how much preparing it for storage is going to cost you. Drying, freezing, canning, or wrapping and storing in a cool room for as long as possible? Drying, freezing, and canning are going to cost extra. And then there's always the potential for crop failure.

Fish farming doesn't sound particularly cheap to me either unless you happen to have a pond tucked away on your 1 acre.

Perhaps its best to look at how people survived during the Depression.

[Nevernose]

7. Look into Cuba: agriculture, organic farming, etc.

Apparently everyone there is required to grow at least some of their own food. Even the people living in apartments in the cities grow at least some of their own food.

Their organic farming is also cutting-edge and leading the world. W/O the petrochemicals needed for fertilizer and the "Green" Revolution of the 60s, they have begun mastering the science of organic farming.

I think it's a great idea, and also illustrates my love/hate opinion of Cuba. Ideas, values, and culture? Good. Totalitarianism? Bad.

While your post seems a little over-the-top (were you serious, or was it an "eat the poor" Jonathon Swift essay?), I think all of us could benefit from growing more of our own food. Besides the spiritual aspect of being in tune with nature, which I think is a crock of manure but others take very seriously, it is a relaxing, interesting hobby. Useful skills are learned, valuable commodities are produced.

My perfect city would have community gardens everywhere, with the excess food going to the poor and homeless. Everyone would have in their outdoor space at least a couple of large terra cotta pots with tomatoes (easy) or tubers (also easy). Even windowsills can be used for growing.

[godhatesrepublicans]

11. I'll have to google that, it sounds very promising.

I have a hunch that there have been all sorts of new developments in small scale farming that are waiting to be exploited OTHER than relying on huge factory farms of genetically modified terminator seeds.

I wasn't going for Johnathan Swift so much as lateral thinking. None of the current plans on the books are doing anything to help people, so I'm trying to find a solution completely outside current discussions.

[FoxOnTheRun]

10. It doesn't look good for the US

Then there is the animal ID act, which will make it very difficult for small farmers to survive.
http://leahy.senate.gov/press/200401/012104b.html
http://www.thecountycourier.com/index.php?option=content&task=view&id=2859&Itemid

USA isn't practically anymore as Lou Dobbs said

"DOBBS: Lisa, thank you very much -- Lisa Sylvester.

The Bush administration's open-borders policy and its decision to ignore the enforcement of this country's immigration laws is part of a broader agenda. President Bush signed a formal agreement that will end the United States as we know it, and he took the step without approval from either the U.S. Congress or the people of the United States.

http://www.chuckbaldwinlive.com/Lou_Dobbs_transcript.html

Then there is the NAFTA Superhighway


with it's land grabbing imminent domain

[godhatesrepublicans]

12. The animal ID act seems designed to annoy small farmers.

But from what I've been reading the past 2 days, much of the aggie department's output exists to reward agribusiness and wreck the little guy. The whole federalization of the term "organic" is shocking from what I've been reading.


Thanks for the links, it gave me material to fume about...

[FoxOnTheRun]

14. I hope I didn't upset you

[JeffR]

13. 40 acres & a mule

Bushworld style.

[godhatesrepublicans]

15. a follow up.

I found an applicable article to this topic, about what happened to Cuba when they ran out of cheap oil in the 1980s when the Soviet Union collapsed. It's like a look into what we in the U.S. are in for when our energy costs start to double and triple in a few years.

Laura Enriquez, a sociologist at the University of California-Berkeley, who has written extensively on the subject of Latin American agriculture, said: "What happened in Cuba was remarkable. It was remarkable that they decided to prioritize food production. Other countries in the region took the neo-liberal option and exported 'what they were good at' and imported food. The Cubans went for food security and part of that was prioritizing small farmers."

In the late 1980s Cuba's economy was extraordinarily reliant on subsidies from its political older brother, the Soviet Union. Its agriculture was designed with one aim in mind -- namely to produce as much sugar cane as possible, which the Soviets bought at more than five times the market price, in addition to purchasing 95 percent of its citrus crop and 73 percent of its nickel. In exchange, the Soviets provided Cuba with 63 percent of its food imports and 90 percent of its petrol. Such a relationship made Cuba extraordinarily vulnerable.


With the collapse of the Soviet Union, such subsidies halted almost overnight. Suddenly, the future looked bleak.

Now this plantation style "grow a lot of one crop and trade it" farming works fine if there is cheap oil. Without it, bringing wheat from half way around the world just isn't economical. When oil hits $150 a barrel, will the United States still be able to feed millions cheaply from remote huge farms in the midwest? I wish I knew how, it seems unlikely. And what about when oil hits $200 a barrel?

Nowhere was the effect felt more strongly than in the stomachs of the ordinary people. Figures produced by the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization suggest that the daily calorie intake of the average Cuban fell from about 2,600 calories a day in the late 1980s to between 1,000 and 1,500 by 1993. Essentially, people had to get by on about half the food they had been eating.

Did you get that? "people had to get by on about half the food they had been eating." I've seen people in line at Burger King pitch a fit when they got the regular instead of the super size fries they ordered. They'd lose their minds on a 1000 calories a day.

Perhaps I should frame this idea of mine as a "survival for the poor" option as opposed to a "better life for the poor" issue. When energy costs increase, rising food costs will totally wipe out those barely making it now.

With no subsidies and limited resources, the Cuban regime took the decision to look inward. Ceasing to organize its economy around the export of tropical products and the import of food, it decided to maximize food production. By necessity, this meant a back-to-basics approach; with no Soviet oil for tractors or fertilizer it turned to oxen, with no Soviet oil for its fertilizer and pesticide, it turned to natural compost and the production of natural pesticides and beneficial insects.

Remarkably, this organic revolution has worked. Annual calorie intake now stands at about 2,600 a day, while UNFAO estimates that the percentage of the population considered undernourished fell from 8 percent in 1990-92 to about 3 percent in 2000-02. Cuba's infant mortality rate is lower than that of the U.S., while at 77 years, life expectancy is the same.

Remarkably, this organic revolution has worked. Annual calorie intake now stands at about 2,600 a day, while UNFAO estimates that the percentage of the population considered undernourished fell from 8 percent in 1990-92 to about 3 percent in 2000-02. Cuba's infant mortality rate is lower than that of the U.S., while at 77 years, life expectancy is the same.

Now how did they solve their problem? In a way not too different from what I was pondering. I feel somewhat surprised, I usually don't have good ideas according to most.

The solution it chose -- essentially unprecedented both within the developed and undeveloped world -- was to establish a self-sustaining system of agriculture that by necessity was essentially organic.

Laura Enriquez, a sociologist at the University of California-Berkeley, who has written extensively on the subject of Latin American agriculture, said: "What happened in Cuba was remarkable. It was remarkable that they decided to prioritize food production. Other countries in the region took the neo-liberal option and exported 'what they were good at' and imported food. The Cubans went for food security and part of that was prioritizing small farmers."

Cuba is filled with more than 7,000 urban allotments, or organoponicos, which fill perhaps as many as 81,000 acres. They have been established on tiny plots of land in the center of tower-block estates or between the crumbling colonial homes that fill Havana. One afternoon I visited a small garden of tomatoes and spinach that had been dug just a few hundred yards from the Plaza de la Revolution, a vast concrete square where Castro and his senior regime members annually oversee Cuba's May Day parade. More than 200 gardens in Havana supply its citizens with more than 90 percent of their fruit and vegetables.

Neat, huh?

My research continues.

[cornermouse]

16. You might want to make a note that Cuba's winter is

very, very, very short.

[godhatesrepublicans]

17. true, but that's where using tools comes in.

I'm reading a person in New England's account of using cheap plastic sheeting and bamboo sticks to make small cold frames and greenhouse tents that he claims gets him pretty much year round growing time for pocket change. Dying to try it myself this winter. I'll write up a summary later for the curious.

Greenhouses don't have to be made of $10,000 worth of glass apparently. Who knew?