Quote:
Originally Posted by Legbreaker
As for agriculture, the big issue is moving the water for irrigation. Without fuel many pumps will be useless, and without electricity, the rest won't be any good either.
That said, there's been ways of shifting bulk amounts of water for nearly as long as organised agriculture has existed. The more modern methods are just a lot more efficient than a chain of buckets or windmills.
Certainly some areas would have to be abandoned at least in the short term for crops, although may still see some use as pasture, provided water could be provided for stock. Establishing a low elevation stock watering point is definitely a lot easier though than irrigating the entire field.
Realistically, it doesn't take much to work out what the Lakes would look like post nuke - only have to look back to the first half of the 20th century.
I'd imagine there wouldn't be too many refugee camps in the area either - all able bodied people would quickly find work tilling fields, digging irrigation ditches or refurbishing/making old style farm equipment. Many may even be put to use pulling plows and other equipment given the limited number of suitable draft animals compared to even the 1950's.
The big problem is feeding and housing the influx of people in the first twelve months or so.
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You really need to look at Northeastern Ohio and Northwestern PA and you will see that NO issues with water exist. In Crawford County where I live, there are FIVE large (miles in length) freshwater lakes and THREE Creeks with a size ranging from 20 to 30 feet across and depths of lows in the 3 foot range to more than 30 feet deep depending on the time of year. We AVERAGE 100 INCHES of snow every winter. We are 50 miles from Lake Erie and are subject to "Lake Effect" weather. Water is NO ISSUE here (except when there's TOO MUCH of it... like last week).
Crawford County is also home to nearly 18 THOUSAND Amish Farmers across 7 distinct "Churches/Congregations" (which is how Amish Communities identify themselves). Many of the survival skills I have talked about here like my posts on tanning and rendering fat were learned from my Amish neighbors. The manufacture of "old style" farming equipment is ALIVE AND WELL here. The Amish have plenty of draft animals and so do their "English" neighbors. This is because some things are just easier to do using large animals like draft horses. Forest logging comes to mind immediately. So does plowing wetlands where a tractor would just bog down. There is NO SHORTAGE of "old school" farm equipment in this region.
Our farms are also divergent from the large farms seen in the midwestern US. The average farm is less than 500 acres and is farmed by a single family. These "hobby farms," as the US dept. of Agriculture calls them, often use older equipment that was handed down to them. When I farmed, I used a 6-cylinder diesel Cockshutt (made in Canada) and a 2-cylinder gas Farmall both from the 1950's (a 1956 and a 1958). They were easy to fix with screws and baling wire and ran just fine since the days when my GRANDFATHER bought them. All of my equipment was from the 50's and 60's and it was NOT THE EXCEPTION in the county. Those old two-strokes will burn ANYTHING (including fuel oil). Most of our residents don't have access to cable TV (which is why Dish and Direct TV figure prominently here) or internet beyond the likes of Hughesnet or Windstream Dial-up. I'm lucky to have Armstrong Cable (I'm at the end of their line) and my neighbors come here IF they need broadband. The Gas company STOPS three houses down from me and most of my neighbors use Fuel Oil or Propane to cook and heat with. Almost ALL of us have wood burning stoves to heat our houses (because other fuels are too expensive to use all winter). Our power fails during the winter storms and it can take DAYS to restore so we all have generators. Most of them are multi-fuel, running on propane but switchable to diesel in a pinch. Mine is Natural Gas with Propane Backup.
If you consider all of these things, you can see that we will fare better than the average during the Twilight War.