Quote:
Originally Posted by robj3
dragoon500ly wrote:
Tony Stroppa wrote:
What are you feeding people with? 9 containers of rice or corn will provide the required amount of calories - bland, but it's an emergency diet. If you don't need to eat it directly, plant it or feed livestock with it.
Industrial infrastructure?
Are cattle feedlots and high intensity piggeries/battery farms 'industrial infrastructure'? I think a fertiliser plant counts.
Do Agricultural teams make plows, combines and tractors?
Agricultural teams help people grow food. Mechanisation is a small (but highly visible) component of modern high-yield agriculture.
At a minimum, Ag teams need skills in agronomy, pedology, climatology, applied climatology, entomology, environmental toxicology, microbiology, mycology and veterinary medicine.
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Rob,
If you page back, the information I was using came from Post #11 by Lee Yates' on possible food requirements.
"Assuming that you provide bulk foodstuffs, the requirements get worse, that's 2kg per person per day (6,000kg) with a 180 day supply [for 3,000 people] running or 1,080,000kg; that's 27 standard cargo containers..."
Nine as opposed to twenty-seven 20' ISO containers is a lot more reasonable, but still, how many people is the Project supposed to feed, and for how long? Let's take a token amount of the American population, 300,000, for the suggested duration of 6 months. That's 1,800 containers needed to feed a token population scattered across the USA, containers that can't hold anything like components for a fertiliser plant, materials to build or repair plows, agricultural machinery of any kind. It's not even a farm-in-the-box, just the seed stock (which is still important, of course).
Certainly, dual-purpose food-seed stock makes sense, but it would be most useful really in a narrow range of circumstances. That is, there is starvation but not so that it overwhelms Project food stocks, and not where there's already enough of a yield for sustainable agriculture that the food/seed would be redundant and therefore wasted space/resources. Not that there's no use, but it seems that the space and resources could be better used for something else.
Speaking of something else, saying "Mechanisation is a small (but highly visible) component of modern high-yield agriculture" is kind of like saying mechanism is a small (but highly visible) component of modern high-speed transportation. More seriously, your suggestions about agricultural components, technology and skills are well-taken. While the obvious thought about Ag teams is they would be slaving out in the fields (and there would still be lots of that) but they are most useful as a cadre and knowledge base.
As a side note, I figure that 1 20' ISO container (1 Twenty-foot Equivalent Unit) will store 28,119kg of maize/seed corn (at 721kg/cu.m, 39 cubic metres per TEU). This amount of seed will plant 1313 hectares (21.4/kg seed/hectares) with a yield of 6.6 tons per hectare or 8672 tons total.
Tony