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Originally Posted by kato13
I agree that significant crop losses would occur if we saw an increase over the worst months of 1934 and certainly if it ran into multiple years (HW has it all happening in one year) but even a long term drought would not effect all regions of the US equally hard as HW suggests (excluding the NW). There would probably be some areas with enough rain for stable crops, but that generates it own set of problems between the haves and the have nots.
One note though the US was insanely good at producing food prewar, with inefficient conversion (livestock feed/ethanol/cornsyrup) and exports totaling well over 50%.
A thread lost from our old site (before I was running things and everything gets backed up religiously), had data I spent about a week researching on what the overall calorie generation if we just had 10% of prewar US production (and remember this was with government incentives not to grow).
Counting only the 6 most productive grain crops the generation was 3100 calories per day per person. This excludes all fruits, vegetables, nuts, fish, game, etc. I know there would be losses and inefficiency everywhere (which is why i started at 10%), but there also would be expanded victory gardens, growing crops in parkland and similar expansion of agriculture. (Remember this is the 4th summer after the nukes so many issues of the initial food production issues would have been addressed - hybrid seeds for example).
Because of this and the fact that the drought (due to weather physics) cannot be everywhere, I still have a problem with the HW projected starvation rates.
If you want to throw in a blight or two (soviet bioweapons anyone?) you can probably hit the original numbers, but it is something again the I feel should be rethought if someone is looking closely at the details of HW.
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One of the things I've been reading up on recently is the early history of rail transportation. Prior to the development of railroads, there were cases where famine and plenty were separated by only a few dozen miles, because food couldn't be easily transported more than a very short distance unless conditions were just right (being on the same river system, mostly). Using Florida as an example (since I grew up there), the coastal communities should mostly survive; fishing and trade along the coasts will let most of them do OK. Orlando will shrink dramatically; the only port within 50 miles is Sanford, which is 24 miles away and is about 150 miles from the ocean along the St. Johns River, which would become difficult to navigate as the dredged channels silted up. There's no good way of transporting food there without motorized rail or road vehicles.
On a grander scale, the ease of transporting goods in an industrialized society has led to extensive specialization predicated on being able to move goods from where they're concentrated to areas where they're needed. Without that transportation network, it becomes a crippling overspecialization. Corn and animals from the Great Plains can't reach the northeast, citrus and celery and cotton from the South has difficulty reach the Great Lakes, and the Rocky Mountains are basically a wall preventing any significant trade across them. Being able to grow crops isn't enough on its own; they need to be able to be transported where they're needed.