Quote:
Originally Posted by The Dark
Given that the much smaller reductions that occurred in the 1930s were enough to drop Great Plains crop yields by 75%, the higher drought numbers seem unnecessary; a 10-15% drop sustained over a couple of years would cause the crop shortages that are mentioned in HW.
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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.