How Scientists Plan to Feed Billions Without the Help of the Sun

Our most recent article about the most recent minor eruptions at Yellowstone briefly touched on the mitigation process this type of disaster entails and the evacuation efforts that would need to be made for millions before a supervolcano were to erupt. This brings to mind an even greater question of how the world governments would be able to feed and care for citizens without the help of the sun.

Following a massive volcanic eruption, and especially in the case of a supervolcano erupting, the eruption would blast 240 cubic miles of rock, dust and volcanic ash into the sky. This would spread throughout the world and lower global temperatures by up to 28 degrees for years and cause what scientists refer to as volcanic winter. Due to the debris and ash spewing into the atmosphere, the sun will be blocked, and crops would not be able to grow. As a result, this would cause worldwide famine. Additionally, abnormal rainfall will cause major rivers around the world to flood.

This Has Happened to the World Already

In 1816, a similar situation arose when the world experienced a decrease in global temperatures caused by a volcanic eruption and caused major food shortages and famine. The anomaly was predominantly due to a volcanic winter event caused by the massive 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora in the Dutch East Indies. This event was exacerbated by a previous eruption in 1814 of Mayon in the Philippines. Adding to this dire time, the world was already in a centuries-long period of global cooling that began in the 14th century, and the volcanic eruptions in the early 1800’s only added to the agricultural distress in Europe. Failed harvests were widespread and deeply felt.

“Food riots broke out in the United Kingdom and France, and grain warehouses were looted. The violence was worst in landlocked Switzerland, where famine caused the government to declare a national emergency. Huge storms and abnormal rainfall with flooding of Europe’s major rivers (including the Rhine) are attributed to the event, as is the August frost. A major typhus epidemic occurred in Ireland between 1816 and 1819, precipitated by the famine caused by the Year Without a Summer. An estimated 100,000 Irish perished during this period.”

A Blueprint For Surviving Volcanic Winter

To prevent history from repeating itself, scientists have been searching for ways to feed the world without the help of the sun.

“At least two scientists have already sketched out a blueprint. In their 2015 book Feeding Everyone No Matter What, David Denkenberger and Joshua Pearce propose several ways to feed billions of people without the help of the sun.

Denkenberger, an architectural engineer at Tennessee State University in Nashville, started moonlighting as a catastrophe researcher a few years ago after reading that fungi may have thrived after previous mass extinctions. If humans ever face a similar threat, he thought, ‘Why don’t we just eat the mushrooms and not go extinct?’

Indeed, people could grow mushrooms on leaf litter and on the trunks of trees killed by the disaster, Denkenberger says. Even better would be raising methane-digesting bacteria on diets of natural gas, or converting the cellulose in plant biomass to sugar, a process already used to make biofuel. Denkenberger and Pearce—an engineering professor at Michigan Technological University in Houghton—calculate that by retrofitting existing industrial plants, survivors of the catastrophe could produce enough of such alternative foods to feed the world’s population several times over.

Of course, a few other ingredients would have to survive as well: infrastructure, international cooperation, and the rule of law. Whether human society endures or snaps is the unknown on which everything else could hinge, says Seth Baum, executive director of the Global Catastrophic Risk Institute in New York City, a nonprofit think tank whose researchers include Denkenberger.

‘How would we fare? I think the only reasonable answer one can give to the question at this time is that we have absolutely no idea,’ Baum says. To him, social resilience after a catastrophe is just another question for scientists to address, instead of leaving it to dystopian writers and doomsday preppers.

Not that he has anything against survivalists. ‘As much as they might seem silly on television, I’m actually a little happier knowing that there are people out there doing that stuff,’ Baum says. He quickly adds, ‘Hopefully, it’ll never come down to just that.’”

Source: ScienceMag.org

Fortunately, there are scientists and teams of individuals looking out for the human population and finding ways to keep us alive during the worst possible circumstances. But, as Seth Baum remarked in reference to preppers and survivalists, it is a relief knowing there are people out there doing stuff to get ready and are preparing for the worst-case scenario.

 

The post How Scientists Plan to Feed Billions Without the Help of the Sun appeared first on The Sleuth Journal.

What Will You Eat When Your Garden Is A Flop?

I love growing my own vegetables. I spend many fulfilling hours outside every summer, tending to my plants, nurturing my soil, and babying things along, with the birds for music and a basket full of delicious organic food to show for it each day.

Except this year. This year, my garden is a flop.

Daisy’s 2015 garden catastrophe

It’s pretty embarrassing to admit on my own website that my garden is not doing diddly squat this year. I am normally pretty good at growing food (or just extraordinarily lucky) but this year, circumstances beyond my control have thrown up one challenge after another.  First of all, we moved July 1. I started my garden in containers, earlier in the summer, and then transplanted them into my lovely new fenced garden full of raised beds.

Only, the fences weren’t high enough, and unbeknownst to me, I had set up a deer buffet with a low hurdle. Garden #1, GONE. Decimated. Wiped out. And I didn’t even get venison in retribution.

So, I went and got some new plants and put them in. Better late than never. I deer-proofed and nurtured my soil and paid top dollar for plants that were a bit more advanced, since by now it was the first week of July.

And then a heatwave hit the day after I transplanted them. 107 degrees. Most of the plants withered immediately and no amount of TLC would bring them back.

I was determined that I would have at least SOME vegetables and bought even more plants. I added some shadecloth to protect them from the sun. I fed them some white sugar to help them recover from the transplant shock. They’re growing but not providing me with a whole lot of produce, for numerous reasons, including heat, a late timeline, and slightly low phosphorus in my soil.

Aggravating. I’m a wannabe farmer shopping at the farmer’s market to get my summer veggies. Not cool.

But, like everything in life, there’s a lesson here. It got me thinking about all of the folks whose master plan for survival is a big stockpile of seeds. While this is a very important part of a long-term self-reliance plan, there are some years, no matter how many silver bells and cockleshells you put out, your contrary garden just won’t grow.

It’s going to happen. One year, your gardening season is not going to live up to your expectations. Have you thought about what you’ll eat when your garden flops?

Troubleshooting a garden that is not thriving

I’ve written a lot about adaptability as a survival mechanism and this holds true with your vegetable garden as well.  When a major part of your survival plan is growing your own food, being able to identify and overcome issues with your plan is vital.

Experience. The number one key to troubleshooting your iffy garden is experience. Many people make a survival plan without any practical skills to back it up. Have you gardened before? Have you gardened in the area in which you intend to survive? If you haven’t, you aren’t going to be able to predict the pitfalls, like deer fencing that isn’t high enough, too much direct afternoon sun, not enough direct afternoon sun, etc.  This is the major reason for my gardening failure this year. All of this stuff is learned by (often painful) experience. Keep a gardening journal to help avoid repeating those mistakes and to keep track of trends, like late frosts, etc. So get out there and get dirty. No excuses. If you don’t do it now, you can’t expect to survive doing it.

Soil testing.  A huge part of successful gardening happens before you ever plant a seed. You need to know all about your soil so that you can amend it and provide the right foundation for growing. It’s best if you amend before planting but you can still have some success after the fact.  Every bit as important as your seeds is a soil-testing kit. Get a kit that tests for soil pH, nitrogen, phosphorus and potash content.  I like this kit because it has 10 tests for each substance. The price is very reasonable (it’s geared towards classroom instruction) so get a few for your stockpile. This way, if the S hits the F, you can still have access to the science that you need to troubleshoot  successfully.

Soil Amendments.  Once you’ve done your testing, you will need the supplies to amend your soil to optimum nutrient levels.  Find some books on DIY soil amendments and stock up on supplies that you might need to adjust where your soil is lacking. If your goal is gardening for survival, it’s very important to learn to amend your soil without a trip to the garden store. For example, blossom end rot is caused by a lack of calcium in the soil. This can be improved by adding milk to the roots of your plants, then deeply watering them, or making a tea from crushed eggshells. Learn about the safe management of manure, composting, and the use of cover crops.

Access to information.  Right now, we have the luxury of the internet. With the help of Google and YouTube, we can find the answers to nearly any gardening question we might have. But in a long-term survival situation, it won’t be that easy. It’s almost a guarantee that if you are in a scenario during which your vegetable garden is all that stands between you and malnutrition, you aren’t going to have access to the internet.

My bookcase is loaded with reference books on topics like gardening, herbalism, and other old-fashioned skills. Join me by going old school. Get yourself some well-reviewed gardening books. These are some of my very favorites:

Also, check out the highlighted links in the soil amendment section above for more excellent books. (Some of them are available for free on Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited program, but I strongly recommed hard copies of books that you find useful.)

Make sure you have back-ups for a bad season.

While my plan is to eventually be able to grow much of what we need for survival, I’m also prepared for a bad year. While the items above will help you through many gardening issues, there are some things that are completely beyond human control. Things like:

• Bad weather, either too hot, too cold, to rainy, or too dry


• Pests – who remembers that book in the Little House series where Pa’s fields were descended upon by a horde of hungry locusts?


• Natural disasters – wildfires, terrible storms, tornadoes – all of those can wipe out a garden

There’s absolutely nothing you can do about certain events. And that’s why you must have a Plan B. A stockpile of long-term food is essential for surviving when the deck is stacked against you.

There are numerous different ways to go about building your food supply (which I go over in my book, The Pantry Primer), but the basics are:

For more information, check out this article: 12 Strategies for Creating the Perfect Pantry.

Have you ever had a bad garden year?

This year, I’m very thankful that I have lots of homesteader friends and an excellent farmer’s market, as I navigate my new gardening environment. (You can find a local farmer’s market HERE.) I still have some stuff left over from last year’s harvest, and of course, my stockpile, but this year’s harvest is looking like it’s going to be disappointing.

As with any preparedness scenario, thinking through it ahead of time can help us maneuver through the situation more easily if it happens in the midst of a crisis. Have you ever had a similar bad gardening year? What are some of the causes I may not have covered? Pests? Weather? An act of nature? Were you able to overcome it, and if so, how did you do it?

Please share your answers in the comments below. You just might be resolving someone else’s garden issues!

4 Secrets to Becoming a Successful Gardener

Gardening is a skill and anyone who tells you something different is not being totally honest.  That being said, having a successful gardening experience depends on many outside factors including, but not limited to soil conditions, available sunlight, the length of the growing season, seed quality, pest control and even a bit of luck.  Still, many of these factors can be overcome with skill, perseverance, and experience.

In this article, Dan Chiras shares his time-proven tips on what it takes to become a successful gardener.

If Dan’s name sounds familiar, it is because he is the author of two Prepper Book Festival titles, Survive in Style: The Prepper’s Guide to Living Comfortably through Disasters and Power From the Sun: A Practical Guide to Solar Electricity.  Today, however, the focus is on gardening and on acquiring a much-converted green thumb.

Growing a Green Thumb

Over the years, many people with whom I’ve discussed gardening confess to lacking a green thumb. My response is always the same: gardening is a lot easier than you’d think. With a little knowledge, anyone can graduate into that elite cadre of green-thumb gardeners.

If you’d like to be one of them, read on. I’ll let you in on the main secrets of successful gardening.

Green Thumb Gardeners are Soil Builders

Individuals with the greenest thumbs are typically those with the richest soils. Although a gardener may have purchased a home that came with a yard endowed with rich topsoil, the excellent soil in which they grow their fruits and vegetables is most likely due to the fact that they’ve spent several years building it. That is, they have enriched their soil with good old organic compost.

Great gardeners are also avid “mulchers.” Mulch is a layer of organic material like straw or bark that reduces the evaporation of water from the soil. This, in turn, helps plants meet their needs, even on blisteringly hot days. It also helps you by reducing the amount of water you need to apply to your garden. It saves energy, water, and time.

Mulch also helps hold weeds at bay. If you’ve applied a thick enough layer, mulch will prevent weeds from growing. They can’t get the sunlight they need. Those weeds that do manage to pry their way through the mulch are much easier to pull. Weeds come up more easily when yanked from moist soils.

Moist soils also increase the likelihood you will remove most, if not all, of their roots when you pull them out. If severed, roots of weeds often give rise to new plants. Whatever you do, don’t cut weeds off at the base of the stem and leave the roots in place. Some weeds (like Russian thistle) come back with a vengeance. So, be sure to pull weeds root and all.

Mulch decomposes over time, adding to your soil’s fertility. There’s no need to dig it in. Just keep adding mulch on top of old mulch that’s breaking down and becoming part of your topsoil. That’s the way Mother Nature builds soil.

Remember this green thumb aspirants: nourish and protect your soil with compost and mulch and it will return the favor many times over.

Here is a photo showing Dan’s bountiful green garden.

Green Thumb Gardeners are Vigilant

Another key factor that contributes to a green thumb is vigilance. In my experience, the most successful gardeners are the most attentive. They’re in their gardens every day or two pulling weeds while they (the weeds, that is) are still young. They also keep an eye on their plants for signs of disease or insect damage. When they spot a problem, they address it quickly.

Attentive gardeners also pay close attention to weather and soil moisture and use these parameters to determine when watering should occur. They don’t necessarily follow a watering schedule. That’s because how often you need to water your garden and how much water you need to apply depends on many factors, such as the temperature, rainfall, and humidity, the organic content of your topsoil, the water requirements of plants, and how much mulch you have applied.

An accomplished gardener doesn’t water because it’s been five days since he or she last hauled out the sprinkler. He or she waters when the soil and plants say “How about a drink?”

The best way to determine when it’s time to water is to dig into the soil with your hands or a trowel. If the soil’s moist an inch or so down, and your plants have established deep root systems, you can probably hold off on watering. If the soil is dry, retrieve the hose and sprinkler from your garden shed and take care of things.

An ever-vigilant gardener pays attention to his or her plants for wilting leaves. They are a tell-tale sign that the soil is drying out. Water immediately. Better yet, pay closer attention to soil moisture content and weather so plants don’t have to cry out for emergency action.

Vigilance is important at harvest time, too. Overlook a zucchini for a day or two and it will transform into a log suitable for building a small log cabin or carving out a dugout canoe. If you don’t check your green beans during the harvest season very often, you’ll find those tender green beans have grown large and become leathery.

A Green-Thumb Gardener Knows Plants

Successful gardeners understand that not all plants are created equal. Some like acidic soil. Some like sandy soil. Some like lots of sunshine. Some thrive in partial sun or shade.

While that seems like a lot of information to hold in your cranium, it doesn’t take long to understand the requirements of common vegetables and flowers. Seed packets can help you learn about the requirements of fruits, vegetables, berries, and flowers you’d like to grow. Read the information that comes with seedlings you purchase at your local nursery. Books on gardening also contain a wealth of information on the topic.

Armed with this knowledge, head to your garden to plot a strategy for successfully planting sun lovers and the rest of the gang. Veggies that grow well in partial sun, are typically delegated to the less sunny locations in a garden or are planted in the shade of taller plants like tomatoes and corn.

It’s Not about the Tools

A green-thumb isn’t about owning a lot of fancy tools or the latest garden gadgets. You just have to build great soil and then continue to replenish it with compost and mulch each year until you hang up your gardening gloves one last time.

You need to be vigilant, as well, paying attention to weeds, disease, wilting, insects, and soil moisture. A two-minute stroll through your garden each day is all that it takes. It’s a great time to have that evening glass of wine.

A great gardener watches the weather and tends to her garden as dictated by temperature, rainfall, and humidity. Lest we forget, a great gardener plants according to their plants’ needs for sunshine.

There’s more to being a successful garden, but that’s it in a nutshell. If your life is too busy to start a garden, consider hiring someone to help out. Or, enroll your children and/or spouse to help with this task. Kids often love to garden alongside eager adults! If the world goes to hell in a hand basket, your garden will be up and running.

To learn more about food self-sufficiency through gardening, check out my book, Survive in Style: The Prepper’s Guide to Living Comfortably through Disasters.  It is available on my website and also at Lehman’s along with all of my other books.

Additional Resources

There are plenty of great resources available for free on the internet.  Here are a few.

For more information on composting, log on to http://www.howtocompost.org/.

For mulching, visit http://www.diynetwork.com/how-to/outdoors/landscaping/mulch-your-way-to-better-landscape-design.

And for tips on irrigating a garden go to https://cals.arizona.edu/pubs/garden/mg/vegetable/irrigating.html.

The Final Word

In my younger years, I had a reputation for having a green thumb.  It came naturally, or so I thought.  Initially, I did all of my gardening in containers.  Later, as I expanded to raise beds, I realized that having a green thumb was not a natural trait. It was a skill.

Whether you have gardened successfully in the past or are just getting started, Dan’s secrets, and especially his emphasis on building up the soil, are well taken.  I don’t know about you, but I am ready to get started!

Enjoy your next adventure through common sense and thoughtful preparation!