F.A. Farm

This is the second part of a series. The first part was "What Will I Eat?" and focused on food available locally and in-season, even at the end of winter. The idea is there are plentiful resources right in front of you that you may not have considered. Now I would like to focus on where you (and I) will get our food once normal supply infrastructure has broken down.

Let's ask a simple question, "Where will I get my food?" The simple answer is usually something along the lines of, "I will go to the grocery store and buy food with money." This is what we are used to and most people don't even think about what might happen once war hits close to home, or we have to deal with famine or pestilence. Nevertheless, it is wise to deconstruct the usual answer. There are four parts to this answer: 1) go to the 2) store and 3) buy food with 4) money. All four components assume a functioning infrastructure - something that might not exist in the future.

1) Normally we go somewhere to get our food. We get in our cars or ride a bus or use our bicycle or sometimes even walk. For most people in the US, the mode of transportation is the automobile. Very few of us do our shopping via public transport or bicycling or walking. This is a problem as gas prices increase, and we will either have to reduce our automobile trips or make accommodations such as carpooling and loop transport. It is unlikely mass transit will be able to take up the slack in the US, simply because of the incompetence of government and the sheer scale of getting buses or trams to every nook and cranny of where we live. In short, there is no good substitute for getting in our cars and going to a store to buy food.

What we will have to do is either get our food within walking or cycling distance. For most fit people, a travel distance of 25 miles one way by bicycle (50 roundtrip) is about the limit for buying food. This makes the concept of local more restrictive than previously thought. In essence, local would be 25 miles from your home, rather than 100 miles or within the county or within the state borders.

2) Most people buy their food from a store that is specifically designated for this purpose. Whether it is a convenience store, a mom-and-pop, a co-op, or a supermarket, the store has overhead, a payroll to meet, and a need for profit for the owners. If the store cannot turn a profit, it is unlikely the store will stay open. This bodes ill for stores in a time of uncertain oil supplies and higher prices at the gas pump. When people have to make house payments and get to work in their cars, they will try to skimp wherever they can and food is one of the first places people try to cut costs. This translates into greater pressure on a store's bottom line from the customer. Add this pressure to the greater costs associated with a rise in oil prices that percolates through the whole supply/distribution chain and stores will have a tighter profit margin. The inefficient stores will go out of business, leaving fewer places to buy food.

Unlike a grocery store, the farmer is well used to operating at below minimum wage levels and often at a loss. In the future, buying direct from a farmer is likely to remain a viable alternative for just this reason.

3) Nowadays, most people buy their food. Although there are a few people who garden, less than 1% of the US population grows food as a business. This will be a problem when higher gas prices start interrupting supply/distribution chains. People may then be unable to buy food. It will likely be sporadic at first, like the gas stations sporadically out of gas during the fuel crisis of the early 1970's. However, a little bit of supply disruption goes a long way and people are likely to panic and hoard food when they can get it. This will exacerbate the problem, as it did in the 1970's.

The obvious solution here is to grow your own food and store staples in your own storage facilities. You can also contract with your neighbors to grow certain items and trade with each other. You can even contract directly with a farmer and pay him/her ahead of time to provide food for you.

4) Right now, people buy their food with money, but this may have to change. Unemployment is still high in this country and there are a lot of people who could be working growing food for each other. The reasons this is not being done are several: high-priced land, land locked up by selfish or deluded bureaucracies (like vacant lots), corporations and even so-called "sustainable" business organizations protecting their niches, laziness, and just plain-old inertia. People don't question the system they grew up in, even when it becomes clear the system itself is killing them. Thus they continue to focus on getting money somehow and then exchanging that money for something to eat.

The solution here is to exchange labor directly for food. This can be very simple, but it requires a commitment to work. If you want to learn how to farm or even how to garden, there are plenty of people who can show you the way. However, you have to be on-time and reliable, which is hard for most people to do. Another solution is barter or alternative currencies. These solutions are part of an overall change in business that will become increasingly necessary, but many people are reluctant to jump on a new bandwagon. Simply working for food is readily available to anyone.

The bottom line in this post is that we can take our usual response to a question and break it down into its component parts. This makes it easier to formulate solutions to our basic question as we reassemble the component parts along with their simple solutions.