I was indeed a documentary! It’s where I learned what the original meanings of “All mod cons” and “Cheap Day Return” were!
Actually the grain mill looked kinda easy to me. I was watching an episode of how things work, I think it was and they were building a grain mill whose design was 2000 years old , they claimed. Some of the components were adjusted for modern materials but the basic idea seemed simple and it sounds like you have about 90 percent of the required knowledge in your apocolyptic resume.
Simply put, they took two pieces of granite that were about a foot in diameter each, drilled a hole in the center of each, with a bevel on the top stone, and channels grooved into the top of the bottom stone. These were connected via a wooden rod that looked about an inch in diameter.
Obviously something on the top stone was different, as it was fixed in place, Id have to watch the show again to see exactly what was done, but the bottom stone was set onto the rod, and canvas sails were affixed to the rod for propulsion. The entire fixture was set inside a wooden enclosure that was up to 7 feet tall, with large holes, possibly a foot in diameter each, they had three holes which were located along the lines of the prevailing wind, along with an opening on the opposite side for air to escape.
I’ll see if I can find it on youtube
Declan
But oil isn’t going to vanish overnight. Even if peak oil is correct, all it means is that oil gets more and more expensive. When it gets too expensive to use for shipping food, we’ll have to have changed our ways. That will be a gradual process (if it ever happens at all). So the OP’s scenario is nonsense.
:rolleyes:
What’s betting your engineering skills don’t extend beyond building with Lego blocks?
So on the basis you can find two, flat 30cm circular pieces of granite, can pierce, bevel & channel them using hand tools, rig up a wind turbine and have access to youtube, come the apocalypse you will feast on cake and croissants eh?
If it wasn’t for the reality that 75% of the population would likely also stave in the OP scenario I’d nominate you for a Darwin Award.
I blame it on SUV-driving terrorists.
There are many nightmare-scenarios that could cause something similar… an asteroid collision, a nuke attack, a pandemic. It’s hard to give anything resembling a realistic answer to the OP, since we don’t know what caused the breakdown, what time of year it happened, or how many people are left. Is there radioactive fallout? Is there an ongoing plague? Are there any major cities left or are they all smoking craters? Are there zombies?
But in the event of a nuclear attack, or a plague, or what have you, people are going to spend their energy figuring out how to get modern technology working again, not abandoning it. The laws of physics won’t change. And the people that survive will be those that re-establish social order and work together to rebuild, rather than those that hide out in the wilderness.
That, of course, is the key question.
The problem is that that remaining 10% might be the difference between life and death!
Have you ever tried to work granite? It’s not the easiest stone to work with!
Frankly, I’d probably wind up using some sort of metate and mano as that is much more of an option for the lone/small homestead survivalist. But, man, that’s backbreaking and slow!
Of coruse, the slowness and inefficiency of such is why mills were invented…
There are also handgrinders available for grains that operate with a crank, but most people aren’t going to have the foresight to order those.
Sure, eventually. But there will be a critical period where people just want to survive from one right now to the next, and people need to eat.
I don’t think I buy that. If I somehow survive a major plague, I’m going to want to be as far away from any potential carriers (and all those diseased dead bodies) as I can.
In the short term, that might be a valid survival choice. In the long term it is suicide. As a group, you have the labor necessary to do the work of farming. Alone, you don’t. Take the grain mill problem, for example. If I have to grind grain for myself, I’m likely to starve because using a metate is a bitch. But if there are 20 people in the group, I can fabricate a functional (if not that efficient) mill out of scrounged parts that can be powered by 3 people pushing it. Everybody eats.
I’m going by the OP’s “backyard farming” specification, in which I assume that large fields are (for whatever reason) not locally available. How much food would a backyard full of wheat yield? More or less than a backyard full of potatoes, carrots, or beans? (Not being snarky or anything; I really don’t know.)
Much less, in fact. As far as survival goes, the best thing to grow would probably be a yard full of potatoes, as someone noted above. But you aren’t going to be able to grow enough in the average yard to sustain one person, let alone a family. You are going to have to utilize other open spaces to grow crops.
I dibs the country club!
And yet it seems like the most common fantasy scenario along these lines is always the single family unit inside a compound, keeping everyone else out. I can’t think of any human society that has survived long-term along these lines.
As others have said, as an experienced gardener the agricultural skills I’m sorely lacking for this fantasy are seed saving (only done it here and there), winter storage, and growing (and processing and storing) any grain en masse. If we were given time to prepare, though, I have no doubt my town could survive – tons of tilled fields being used for just hay, plenty of open space for animals, water everywhere, a lot of skilled gardeners … maple trees for sugar, even. (And we could send wheelbarrow teams into nearby cities to grind the bones of the dead for fertilizer!) There’d be a lot of hungry people towards the end of winter, though.
Depends hugely on the backyard and the climate. You can get a lot of garden vegetables out of a quarter-acre if you’re clever, but in most of this country you’re only harvesting a few months of the year. A lot of stuff that can be stored over the cold months, like grains and even big squashes, are not practical in tiny plots. Corn, for example, is wind-pollinated and doesn’t do a great job of this in small quantities even if you try and help it out – you can’t just plant four corn plants to feed yourself.
Actually… depending on the size of the yard you might actually be able to grow enough potatoes for an entire family to survive on. It will be monotonous as hell, but it will keep you alive.
Supplementing with other things, and some hunting, might be worth the effort.
I’ve heard estimates as low as 1/8 of an acre to feed one adult for one year - but boy, you’d better know what you’re doing! And spend a LOT of time fending off pests!
I acre is 43,560 square feet. 1/8 of that is 5,445 feet. A 50 x 100 foot lot, basically (of course, there would to be no houses or such on it). I know people with backyards that big. But… that’s for one person, and you’ll be eating mostly potatoes.
If whatever the disaster was killed off a lot of your neighbors, well, you can take over their backyards and use their empty houses for storage. IF you know how to process things for storage.
There are other things you can do to supplement that diet, of course. Acorns are edible with some processing, and oak trees are pretty common. There is small game - assuming the DNR is out of commission along with everything else you can set all sorts of traps that would otherwise be illegal and hunt whenever you want as there will be no set season. Dandelions can provide valuable vitamins, and I"ll assume no one is spraying toxic crap on them any more so they’ll be safe to eat (best harvested just before the flowers open - I have some experience with this), various berry bushes, fruit trees are planted as ornamentals in many places…
If you get really ambitious, AND you find spare time in your struggle for survival, you can build stuff like a greenhouse to grow some food/herbs n winter, get a head start on spring planting, maybe a chicken coop IF you can find a source of chicken, or a dovecote…
It’s a crapton of work, though, and if you get injured/ill you are truly screwed.
Orchards and grapevines would probably be too ambitious in the near term.
Near term can be dealt with by scavenge. Lose 75% of the population and there will be lots of spare food around. Most of these sources will require little to no effort on the part of the survivors other than picking it up or plucking it from the tree. The local apple orchards will continue to fruit prolifically whether their owners tend them or not, at least for a few years. By then, the new population should have a handle on things. Mid-term can then focus on clearing, converting, cultivating and planting available seeds, tubers and shoots.
Alas for a lot of people as well, those that cant boil water, bake bread , skin animals. But they can do other things and trade, sooner or later lines of communication will re-open and some form of economy will return.
Not me personally , I work metal and weld. The show used granite for what ever reason they chose, but the shop that did the work used some sort of miniature jet engine to form the grooves and such.
By way of comparison, they used six rugby players using wooden staves to pound a bowl of grain into flour, the mill outstripped their output in five minutes and the quality of the flour that the rugby guys did produce, was inferior.
Declan