Nature May be the Main Obstacle to Surviving Full Collapse
Kevin Felts 06.07.18
To listen to the prepping community, one of the main obstacles to surviving a long term full collapse will be other people. For some areas that will be true. The cities will probably be filled with starving people, just like what happened in the Middle Ages during outbreaks of the plague.
Once the packaged food is depleted, people will turn to nature – fishing, hunting, and gardening, which means the people have to flee most cities.
Traveling into the countryside city dwellers will be unprepared for the physical demands, heat and cold. Exposure, dehydration, and disease will start to take their toll.
For people living in the country, they will use their garden tools to plant their crops. As the crops start to grow, the local wildlife will have a feast.
Deer, Rabbits and Wild Pigs
Here on the farm, there have been several years where I planted rows of beans and peas 100 feet long. As the plants were growing and getting ready to producing, the local wildlife (deer and rabbits) mowed the plants down to the ground.
One day the purple hull peas would be a foot tall, the next day they were just a couple of inches tall. A couple of days later, nothing remained. When the deer did not eat down to the ground, the rabbits did. Due to the time of year and it not being hunting season, there was very little could do about the deer. My dogs have been helping with the rabbit population.
Why don’t the dogs help keep the deer out of the garden? The dogs sleep inside at night, and the deer move a lot at night.
Then there is the issue with wild pigs, which already destroy an estimated one billion dollars in crops yearly.
All of the peas and beans I had growing for my spring 2018 garden were eaten by either deer or rabbits, or both.
The Weather
If the animals do not clear out the crops, the weather might. Here in Texas, typically around the end of May, a ridge of high pressure moves over the state and that means little to no rainfall.
In the spring of 2018, we had an unusually high amount of rainfall, which caused the seeds to rot in the ground. Even the potatoes rotted in the ground. When the rain stopped, so did the rot. Replanted seeds did not have enough rain for the plants to grow. If it had not been for irrigation and water pumped from a creek here on the farm, the garden would have died weeks ago.
In other words, without artificial means the spring garden for 2018 would have been a bust.
Bugs and Crop Diseases
If the crops do come up, there will be a hungry horde of bugs and various crop diseases waiting on them. There have been times when my tomatoes were swarmed by various types of bugs. In the past few days I have killed numerous stink bugs which were crawling on my tomatoes.
Several years ago, an associate of mine made the mistake of planting turnip greens in the spring. In a matter of just two or three days, his entire crop – two rows around 100 feet long each – was wiped out by bugs.
What bugs do not damage, crop diseases may lay waste to. Mono-cropping on small pieces of land would promote disease growth. The people who have access to a limited amount of land may plant the same crops over and over, which depletes various nutrients the soil and promotes disease growth.
Once established, certain crop disease can stay in the soil for years.
Final Thoughts
So far we have only talked about gardening. We have not touched predators killing livestock, such as chickens and goats. In 2018 I lost around half my chicken flock to a couple of new dogs my wife and I rescued.
The good news, there are three hens sitting on eggs. The bad news, one rooster is not enough to keep 24 hens fertilized, so some of the eggs may not be fertile.
If it is not one thing it is another. I would hate to see how things would fair during a full collapse.
