It's said, justifiably, that in the Pentagon, light birds are the coffee bitches.
I was a fucking major. A very junior one. On temporary duty no less. I carried the piss-pot.
It didn't matter that I was "Centurion." The REMFs were just jealous and pissy. The warriors who were stuck in durance vile knew it was all a crock, anyway.
I thought they were just hiding me out. Oh, no. They were putting me to work.
I got stuck in "The Department of Emergency Supply Methodology."
Okay, an "oxymoron" is when two words don't go together. Jumbo shrimp. Happy marriage. (Wife edit: HEY!)
What is it when three words don't go together?
In an emergency, plans always leave out the emergency. So no matter what method you'd planned on using, you always end up finding out it don't work. "No plan survives contact with the enemy" or the disaster as the case may be.
And supply is always short.
Troxymoron?
So what was the "Department of Emergency Supply Methodology"?
It was the Army's Department of the Agriculture and FEMA combined.
USDA was just about the largest department in the government. It had, I shit you not, more county farm agents than there were total counties in the U.S. The one thing that is eternal, forget the stars—they burn out in a few million to billion years—is a government program. The USDA had programs that went back to the horse and buggy days. It had programs that were designed to "ensure critical military supplies of . . ." stuff that the military hadn't used in decades. Like, say, mohair wool. (I think that one actually finally got cut in the '90s.)
Were farmers at least in part to blame. Oh, hell yeah. We'd been major lobbyists since it referred to some hotel in DC where guys would hang out in the lobby to snag the arm of visiting congressmen. Back then, nobody stayed in DC if they could possibly avoid it (it was listed as a "hardship post" by the State Department) and most of Congress stayed in various hotels. The most powerful stayed in one in particular (damned if I can remember the name. The Lafayette?) and guys hired by various interest groups would hang out in the lobby hoping to snag them. And Farmers were one of the interest groups.
Am I gonna justify it? I could try. People that lived through 2020 and 2021, though, can probably justify it better by the results of farming "special interests" NOT getting their way in 2019 and 2020.
The point is the links between the USDA and the Army went waaay back. Back before the Civil War when it was the Agriculture Bureau of the Department of the Interior.
Here's a thing for you. Army veterinarians and vet techs (yes, the Army has both) were also the Army's food safety inspectors. Why?
Because the Army used to buy most of its meat on the hoof. And then slaughter same. You didn't used to be able to store beef and pork for very long. If you wanted meat, you slaughtered a steer and ate it. Vets made sure the beef wasn't ridden with diseases. Ergo: Food inspectors.
When storage methods improved big companies started supplying in big ways. ("Uncle Sam" actually came from the Civil War. One of the main suppliers of Union Forces was owned by a guy named Sam. The stuff was stamped "US." "We got another food delivery from Uncle Sam.") But the food still had to be inspected. Companies did then and do now occasionally cut corners a little too close.
Thus vets were the food inspectors. End of history lesson.
But, generally, the Army kept out of agriculture and the USDA didn't tell us how to fight wars. As long as USDA kept up the supply of food for the troops and we kept people from invading, nobody tread on each other's turf.
Problem was, in 2019 the USDA wasn't keeping people fed.
Don't get me wrong. The USDA can't feed a damned person. They're not farmers or distributors or processors. But they can, and their mission was, to "create a favorable environment for American agricultural production."
The problem being . . . the Bitch. And all the thousand of appointees she'd brought in.
Look, the Bitch wasn't, essentially, an environmentalist. I don't think so anyway, not beyond the "I won't throw stuff out my window cause that's littering" level of environmentalist. She contributed to some environmental groups, sure, but that's just feel good stuff unless you give all your money to them and live in a hut and a ragged shift.
But she had had to make a lot of political deals to get elected. And more notably to get the nomination because she was not what the hard left considered "a true believer." And while she'd packed important posts like Justice and Commerce and Defense and State with her more core supporters, mostly lawyers, she'd had to give stuff to the wackoes to keep them on her side.
Where did they go? All those departments they'd been feuding with for decades. Interior, USDA, Met Service (where there was too much support of "global warming deniers"), EPA of course. Anything that had to do with keeping the "environment" in that pristine state of pre-Columbian U.S. You know, where the Indians wiped out the mammoths and horses and used to run giant herds of buffalo off cliffs to get a few cuts of meat and a really cool blanket.
Logging had gotten to the point of "well we're shut down," CO2, which is produced by every living thing on earth and the oceans and volcanoes, was a "pollutant" and under strict regulation. Taxes had been imposed for "excess carbon generation" and things were already starting to get hard in industrial farming before the Emergency Powers Act.
But before the Act there was only so much they could do. Congress knew that the farmers were a massive lobby and huge income, tax and jobs generator. Hell, about the only major export you could put your hands on from the U.S. anymore was food.
They hadn't thought the Bitch would use the Act to screw up the one thing that was sort of working post-Plague. But she did.
USDA cannot produce food. What it's supposed to do is create a favorable environment to produce food.
What it can do, easily, is create an unfavorable environment to produce food. It had detailed knowledge of the American farming industry. It knew where all the levers were.
The long-service people in USDA fought back, passive aggressively, as hard as they could. They, I'm told, tried like hell to keep the damage to a minimum. But they couldn't stop it.
And USDA had been being infiltrated, if you will, for years by the tofu-eaters. Why?
Most things that county agents used to be used for were pretty much gone by the 1980s. Back in the 1930s, say, county agents conducted classes in things like proper tillage to reduce soil erosion, better crops for the local soils, how to use modern fertilizers, soil chemistry, etc.
By the 1980s, you'd better have had classes on those and lots of experience before you were making decisions on a real productive farm. Or you were going to go out of business.
But you couldn't get rid of county agents. They were county agents! Besides, they were the eyes and ears of the USDA. They were the guys who compiled all the local crop reports.
But as the need for county agents to be expert in real farming decreased, there was an upswing in their need as "alternative farming" experts. Tofu-eaters were moving away from the cities because their "little brown brothers" were making them harder and harder to live in. Rich tofu-eaters would move out to the country, buy a small farm that was going under anyway and then not know what to do with it. (See Green Acres and multiply by hundreds of thousands and both members Eva Gabor. But crossed with Karen Carpenter and take away all shreds of common sense.)
Well, the tofu-eaters wanted to grow grapes or broccoli or whatever, but not using those icky and "should be illegal" methods. They wanted to be "all natural."
My dad didn't talk much but when he did get to talking he could tell a hell of a story. I recall one time he'd come back from a convention (yes, farmers have conventions) and was talking about a group of "old time" county agents, old guys who were actual experts in mass production of huge quantities of food using every method that was currently available, talking about the "Green" invaders they were encountering more and more. Very heavy along both coasts, less so in the Midwest but still some. But the tofu-eaters invading in Virginia were a particular source of amusement. And the old guys were just shaking their heads. Whatever. "They're not real farmers."
But they were, increasingly, the county agent's main customers.
So the old guys got out as fast as possible. They didn't want to deal with the airheads who couldn't understand why their corn was getting eaten by grasshoppers and worms and fields that had been pretty clear when they got them were cropping up with weeds.
Enter the new generation of county agents. Their mainstay was helping out the tofu-eaters. The "urban immigrants." They'd conduct seminars on organic methods and quite happily explain "alternative methods" that were "fully organic." Didn't stop the pests and weeds but it made the tofu-eaters happy that someone from the government, which was Good, was there treating them like adults. Actually, they were being treated like children but they had been their whole lives and didn't know the difference.
Treating like an adult: You're fucking up. Here's how to fix it. Now fix it.
Treating like a child: You're trying really hard! Good job! It's not the result that matters, it's just that you try!
(That's actually a functional way to deal with children up to a point. In most cases they can't do a real job. But when they get to the point they can, when they're ready to learn to be adults with adult responsibilities, "it's a good try" should never cut it.)
The old guys treated them like adults and it "hurt their feelings." The new guys treated them like children and they were happy little tofu-eaters.
So by the time of the Big Freeze, the stage was set. Most county agents couldn't explain industrial farming methods or modern farming tech if they were held over a fire and interrogated. That's the ground troop level. The "generals" and "colonels" were people so dead set against modern farming techniques they'd rather the country starve to death than support them. And the guys in the middle were just getting squeezed out. If they opened their mouths, well, there were the bread lines. Go get in them.
Farming depends on weather. The Met Service, which should have been beating the drum and sounding the alarm about the upcoming weather cycles, was also in a bind. Lower level employees had grown up on a constant drumbeat of "global warming, global warming." One of the big environmentalists sounding the drumbeat had actually said once: "Global warming, global cooling, it's all the same thing." And it was all caused by man.
Various bad hypotheses had been advanced over the years about what drove long-term fluctuations. They'd all been debunked, one by one, but the New Breed of meteorologists knew that they were True and they were Right no matter what the science said.
Look up (during the daytime). See that big burning ball in the sky?
That's what drives temperature. Always has, always will. Eventually it will cool down then expand and we'll be absorbed into its arms and the Earth will become more iron in its dying furnace. It won't be as hot then, but it will be very big. And then it will either explode, not too violently all things considered, or die down to go to a long slow bake until it's not much more than a big, fairly hot, metal planet.
Guys and gals further up the chain knew better. They knew that things were cooling off, fast, and that it was old Sol driving it and that things were going to a very hell in cold handbasket.
But their bosses knew better than they did. They knew it was all "global warming." This was just a temporary fluctuation then things will get hotter and hotter again until we all burn up! Seas will rise! Dogs and cats will be living together!
So the forecasts for weather conditions, which were based on "climate models" that ignored solar activity, were all for a long-term warming trend. It's cold right now, but it will be hot next spring. Expect droughts and hurricanes and terrible tornadoes! (Well, we had those but for all the wrong reasons.)
Real farmers knew there were more prediction groups than the U.S. Meteorological Service. Most of them had gone down in the Plague but a few were still up. And their forecasts were dismal. But even in dismal weather, good farmers can react, adapt and overcome. They'd started to.
Then came the Big Grab. Most major farms, including those run by massive farming corporations like Arthur Daniels Midland and Con-Agra, were seized. The tofu-eaters in the USDA had lists and lists of fellow-travellers, many of whom were standing in bread lines, who were ready to "assist in this time of need."
Out they went to the farms. Taking the place of experts with decades of experience.
In Zimbabwe it had been "veterans." Most of them weren't; they were just violent psycopathic supporters of the president. They had gone out, thrown out the (experienced, professional) owners and been settled on high function farms then run them into the ground.
In the U.S. it was reluctant sheriffs going to farms and telling the managers-owners that this is the new boss. You obey his/her orders, now.
I don't have much charity in my heart for those tofu-eaters but there is some. They'd been going to soup kitchens and lining up for their bowl of gruel in the snow. Suddenly, they're plucked up and whisked out to a fucking farm and told to run it.
These were people who had written pamphlets on the proper care and storage of your organically grown vegetables. How to run an organic garden. Some of them not even that, just people who subscribed to those journals in the hopes that someday they, too, could be expert organic farmers.
They're dropped off on a massive farm in the beginnings of a killer winter and told: You're in charge.
Ever seen a combine harvester? Even the small ones are fucking huge. They look like a cross between a dump truck and an insect.
Most of the managers had already been told their services were no longer required. They'd stuck around long enough for the "government nationalization management personnel" to turn up then waved goodbye. Most of them didn't live on the farms. The ones who did had family they were going to. There were houses, with small acreage, up for grabs. Might be some trace of the dead residents but that's okay. They'll understand.
They were planning on setting up for the winter as well as they could and using their long experience to provide enough food for their family to survive. Most of them were thinking greenhouses, most efficient production method thereof. Where can I get a whole bunch of plastic sheeting and some iron tubes?
Ranches. Here's how the majority of the beef in the U.S. is produced.
Cattle produce males (bulls) and females (cows) at the same rate as humans, pretty much 50/50. Cows have a long-term economic benefit; they provide more cattle. In the dairy industry, well, you don't get milk from a bull or a steer.
The majority of males, 90%, do not. They are useless for providing more cattle. One bull and ten cows is a decent ratio. You can go with one in fifteen or so.
The rest are deballed at six months, generally, and spend the next few years, three normally, eating grass on big spreads. (These are steers. Males without balls. Also what farmers call male tofu-eaters.) People think they're all in Texas. They're not. Florida had more beef cattle than Texas. More rain equals more grass equals more steers you can run on an acre. Average in Florida was three head of cattle per acre.
Out west, Wyoming and such, there were areas where it was three acres per head. But they had lots of room. And there wasn't anything else you could do with the land. (Unless you were a tofu-eater and then you just left it "pristine." And killing cattle is murder. Fine. You eat your tofu. I'm going to be over here with a nice juicy steak.)
They get up to a certain age and they're then moved to feed lots. Cattle that eat nothing but grass are a) very very tough meat and b) taste "gamey." (I don't really mind gamey meat but most Americans were pansies about their eating. I do mind tough.) There they sat on "feed lots" with piles of corn and mixed foods (to give them that perfect taste) and fed up. Also various additives to speed up the fattening process.
Last they were moved to slaughter houses and turned into steaks, hamburger and all the rest. Bits that American humans wouldn't eat became pet-food.
Comes the Big Chill. Professional ranchers are looking at the real weather forecasts and going "oh, my God."
See, even in good winters the grass falls off. You've got, say, one head per acre. That works in spring and summer and into fall. But come winter you've got to lay out hay (cut grass) for the cattle so they can make it through the winter. Harsher environments you have to lay out more than nicer environments. But in both you've got to lay out some.
Hay harvests had gotten massively fucked up by the weather. Storms were coming in all through the summer, what there was of it. To get hay, you have to cut it, let it dry and then harvest. If it gets rained on after it's cut, or if it's still wet from the rain when you cut it, it "sours" and gets fungal infections. Even cows can get sick from it. (Horses will die.) Ever heard the term "hay-making weather." Hot, dry and stays that way?
We didn't have much of that in the summer of 2019.
Hay was short. And they were looking at the most fucked up winter in recent history.
Way up north, cattle will die if it gets too cold. And it was predicted, by everyone except the Met service, to get really fucking cold. That meant the only cattle they could run were those they had shelter for. Which meant nothing but "base stock." Those ten cows and one bull.
Ranchers were calling feed lots all over the place, trying to get their cattle sold. Nobody was buying. There wasn't food to feed them. The slaughter houses were overrun and everyone was trying to recover from the Plague.
The USDA probably couldn't have been any help. But even if it could, the bosses didn't see the issue.
"The forecast for the winter is not that severe. And killing cattle is murder, anyway. Let them graze in happy peacefulness. It's good that they can't be industrially slaughtered."
Are you grabbing your hair in fury? You should be. The famines of 2020 and 2021 weren't because of the farmers or the evil farm corporations. Hell, they weren't in charge of food production. The "rationalizers" were in charge. When the farmers got back in charge, they proved they could react, adapt and overcome. 2022 wasn't a bumper crop year, but it fed not only the U.S. but various other nations.
Ranchers, too, were getting pushed out. Nationalization of the farming industry was the Hero Project of the latter Warrick administration. People could sign up at the soup kitchens. A lot of people figured that being on a farm was going to be a better place than in a city come winter. And how hard could it be?
The county agents were overwhelmed. They were supposed to be "organizing" the local "farming cooperative groupings" to "produce maximal output for the upcoming season" and they knew they were in deep shit. They might like organic methods but they knew that industrial was more efficient. And most of them were smart enough to know that the shit coming from the Met Service was so much baloney.
Enter the U.S. Army.
We'd gotten, in most areas, the food distribution, what there was of it, under control. We'd gotten local groups, "voluntary associators" and even companies to handle it. We couldn't turn it over to corporations because they were "bad." (Bechtel, by the way, handled something like 90% of the recovery from Hurricane Katrina. It was defunct but another would have started up, from pretty much the same people, if we'd put out bids. We couldn't let bids. Neither could FEMA.)
But the point was, we were distributing what we could and turning most of it over to local control. However, we also knew we were going to be fucked come winter. Because our meteorologists were going "holy FUCK."
USDA was acting like a tofu-chicken. "Nationalization" was hammering what production there was. Something had to be done or the nation we were sworn to protect and serve was going to starve to death. Not just over the winter, but the projections were for widespread famine by next May.
"Emergency Supply Methodology" was a department that had gotten formed when the U.S. Army had to try to supply food to a famine in Somalia. What was absolutely evident to anyone who was there was that there was no reason for the famine. Yes, there was a drought. All a drought means is that you get less food from an acre. There were enough acres and enough acres that could be irrigated, that Somalia should have been able to feed itself.
It couldn't because of the security conditions. Farmers were being killed and driven off their lands because of the militias. That was what caused the famine. And in many areas it was intentional. See also Darfur, the Kulak famine and the Great Leap Forward. Starvation is a good way to enact "ethnic cleansing." Starving people is easier and cheaper than shooting them.
It got started as a think-tank to figure out how to do the best job you could in a fucked up situation. Most food distribution was done by Non-Governmental Organizations. (By the way, "random associators" are NGOs. Just very small ones.) One thing that was noted was that some NGOs were "better" at distribution than others. There were a huge number of apparent factors but it really came down to which were the most functionally pragmatic. That is, if the mission was to feed a population that was enemies with the local strongman, turning the food over to the strongman was non-functional for the mission. It would feed him and his henchmen and the people they liked. It would not feed the populace he was starving on purpose.
The way to avoid this was to use some of your precious NGO funds to hire enough "security" that the local strongman left you alone. And you could feed whoever you wanted. If you could also get some of the farmers farming again, that was a benefit.
If your personal opinion of violence was "nothing is ever settled by violence" then you lost your food to the strongman and therefore failed in your mission. It didn't matter how "actualized" you felt as you flew back to your hippie commune in California. You'd failed in your mission.
It was an unfortunate fact that the most "functionally pragmatic" groups tended to be Christian missionaries. Tended. Some of them were not "functionally pragmatic" and some of the secular NGOs were. But it was a general trend. It was a conclusion that was very quietly distributed, though. The Army had too often been accused of being friendly with Christian Fundamentalist groups.
They also looked at factors like "throughput." That is, if a group was given ten tons of relief supplies, how much of that actually got to the refugees or whatever. Again, Christian groups tended to have the highest throughput.
Here's an example of throughput in money. It involves charities pre-Plague. One of the richest charities in the U.S. pre-Plague was the March of Dimes. Every March people all over the country would walk around raising money for "childhood diseases." The March of Dimes would collect the money and then send it on to "worthy researchers."
MoD would never release its records to anyone but the IRS, but outside analysis indicated that only about 30% of the money collected actually went to "researchers." The other 70% went to "support" of . . . The March of Dimes. For every ten bucks some poor "marcher" collected, seven went to the MoD and only three went to researchers. The leadership was not volunteers. Indeed, above the "street" level there were no volunteers. Salaries for the upper management were astronomical. The president of the MoD had a private 737!
By the same token, one of the largest Christian charities in the world, Christian Children's Fund, would release its records. (As did many others, secular and religious.) They had an average throughput, every year, of over 90%. Nine bucks out of every ten reached the children it served.
Ninety percent throughput vs. thirty percent throughput. If you're going to contribute to a charity, do the math.
The U.S. Army did the math. They couldn't always pick and choose what NGOs they supported, but when they could they looked at the functionality of the NGOs and chose them on that basis. Yes, that tended to be Christian groups but the reality was they didn't care. They just wanted the stuff they were distributing to get to the people who needed it.
ESM was the first department to look at that methodically and come up with "key factors" for commanders to consider when choosing which NGO to support in their areas. They also expanded into producing pamphlets for commanders and staff on "key secondary response methods" in emergency and humanitarian relief missions. That is, how to get a country back on its feet. Especially agriculture in a famine.
But with first the Plague then the Chill, ESM became big doings. That had caused some problems as the minor little department suddenly became a focus and every fucking Fobbit wanted to jump on the bandwagon. For a while in the summer, I was told, "ESM" bumped out "transformational" as the big buzzword. Somebody pitching a new weapons system had to throw "ESM" in on the PowerPoint presentation to get it even looked at.
"This new super-duper artillery system is the killer app for ESM. ESM cluster systems can provide wide-spread terminal coverage of ESM priority materials . . ."
In other words, we can shoot the food out of the cannon at a high rate of fire and hope it doesn't knock anyone out when it gets there.
And, yes, that's from an actual presentation.
When I got to the department some of the hoo-hroo had settled down. Yes, it was a bigger department with a general in charge instead of a colonel. But some of the vampiric Fobbits that had grafted to it over the summer had been sent back to wherever they came from (PIO, Morale and Welfare, Systems Procurement) and the core guys were back in charge.
Its mission had changed, though. Use actual ESM to look at what was happening in the U.S. and "react, adapt and overcome" wherever the Army could be a benefit.
Bunch of smaller departments in the department, now. I was in the "Agricultural Emergency Response" department. I was a farmer. I had a degree in agronomy. I don't know what fairy godmother thought I could do anything there, but there I was.
And at first I couldn't do anything. I was a major. I carried the piss bucket. Meetings on "agricultural emergency response" involved colonels and generals. (None of whom, as far as I know, had agronomy degrees. But they were doing their best.)
My particular piss bucket was to be put in charge of the "Midwatch Phone Response Center."
That was not some sort of switchboard. It was a call center. It was a call center that commanders in the field could call for help when they were dealing with "agriculture emergency issues."
Okay, here's the thing about an agricultural emergency. Most of the time, by the time you realize you have an emergency, you're already fucked. Farmers have huge lead times. Go back to my dad telling me he was investing in triticale because the forecast for six months later was for "cooling regimes."
The decisions that were being made in 2019 were going to affect 2020 and 2021.
2020's a no brainer. By November of 2019 farmers would have been planning what they were going to do in 2020. No brainer.
But 2021? Why 2021?
Hello! Seeds!
The seeds for 2021 crop cycle were produced in 2020. And they were based on really long-range forecasts by the major seed companies. They'd have to guess what the major crops were going to be two years in advance and lay on the right seed stockpiles.
But most of those companies had been "nationalized." The seeds they were considering were not being based on the long, long-range forecasts. Not the right forecasts, anyway. And genetic modification? I don't think so. Genmod was bad. Evil. Wicked.
But the emergency that was going on right then was cattle. There were too many. And no way to feed them through the winter. Most of the tofu-eaters who had taken over as ranchers didn't even realize that. And you couldn't tell them.
Some of the people moved out to ranches, though, weren't idiots. They asked the locals what the hell they were supposed to be doing. Mostly the locals told them to push off. But occasionally they'd get a bit of "you're going to lose them all come winter."
Everybody "culled" in the fall. It was the whole point of Thanksgiving and all the other harvest festivals in history. You fed up certain animals during the summer and culled them in the fall. That way you didn't have to feed them over winter. Pigs especially but also cattle. See Charlotte's Web.
Oh, yeah, pigs. Most pigs were raised on factory-farms. Ever seen the movie Babe? That big warehouse looking thing where all the piglets are? That's where most pork comes from. You don't turn out pigs to feed. (Not since the Middle Ages when they used to be herded through oak forests for acorns.) They have to be fed continuously. And there wasn't any feed.
So we'd get calls from local commanders. They were out there doing whatever mission and as one of their "corollary missions" they were supposed to provide "support" for "emergency agricultural situations."
So, you're a sergeant in charge of delivering a "packet" of emergency supplies. Let's say that it's to Lamoille County since we've talked about that before.
You go to the "random associator" which is the NGO you're favoring at the time. Say the Lutheran Church. And you drop your packet. But there's this guy trying to get your attention.
He's in a quandary.
"I'm an accountant. I worked for Smith Barney. They went under in the Plague. I signed up for this 'agricultural nationalization' program cause it had to be better than eating soup on the lines. I thought I'd be sent out to work on a farm not run it. My wife and I got put in charge of a dairy farm. I figured out how to hook the cows up to the milking machine and even found a guy who's still collecting the milk. But he tells me that I don't have enough feed for the cows for the winter and the feed I do have is running out and I can't find any more for love or money. The county agent's never answered my calls. I know you're Army but do you have a clue what I'm supposed to do?"
You had to be, at first, pretty desperate to ask an Army sergeant a question like that. After a while, though, people started doing it all the time.
So the sergeant says he has no clue but he'll ask around. And he asks his platoon sergeant. And the platoon sergeant remembers something about a department that is supposed to be handling shit like that. And because he's devoted to his job he dips into institutional memory and finds a number to call.
And, late, he calls the Emergency Supply Methodology, Agricultural Emergency Supply Methodology help-line.
And he gets a private.
"ESMAESM help-desk, Private Smedlap speaking. How can I help you sir or ma'am?"
Milk cows. Feed.
"Where is this? Vermont? Hang on . . . I'm waiting for my system . . . Oh, right. Okay. Vermont is anticipated to experience extreme climatic conditions in the upcoming winter . . . Waiting . . . Cattle will require long-term shelter for survival. Will require feed equalling x pounds of feed per head per day. Grazing will be a minimal option of no significant note to survival. Feed stores are at an all-time low. Current feed prices indicate minimal availability and are anticipated to increase over-winter. Absent large stores of on-site feed, recommendation is culling to breeding stock. Does that cover it? Yeah, that means they have to kill them all, and hopefully keep the meat and stuff, because ain't no food for them and they're not going to be able to graze. Hell, if they're outdoors most of the time they're going to freeze. I dunno if you've seen the internal forecasts but I hope you've packed your EWCS. I can e-mail you this shit if you've . . . okay . . . Platoon.Sergeant@us.army.mil. Right. On its way. Thanks for calling the . . . Okay he hung up."
As time went on, the number got passed out to civilians. At first the help desk wasn't supposed to answer questions outside the military but by the time I got there that was old history. AESM had been up and handling for nine months or so. So we often had to deal with tofu-eaters. Which was always frustrating but occasionally really funny.
I ran the help-desk. It wasn't exactly rocket science most of the time. I had about sixty guys on my shift. "Guys." Okay, I had about forty guys on my shift and twenty females. Two female lieutenants, even. It was strange. I was infantry. Having women working for me was an adjustment.
Generally, the response stuff was set up. Sometimes, though, there'd be a call that needed actual, you know, farming expertise. There was a progression for that. But we didn't get many calls on my shift and I was bored so I generally got on at Phase Two calls.
"Major Bandit Six. Hang on, waiting for the data to transfer."
(Note, my actual last name was fairly common. I don't think any of the people calling knew they were talking to "The Centurion" and I never let on.)
"Okay, I see that first line said you need to cull all but breeding stock. Frankly, I don't know if you can even keep the breeding stock. Pigs eat a lot and there's not much sw . . . Ma'am, they're there to be turned into food. You gotta kill 'em to do that. I know they're cute, but that's the answer . . . Yes, that's a lot of pigs to kill. I suggest a .22 in the back of the head . . . Hello?"
Yeah, I got some complaints. Screw 'em.
And then I'd occasionally get some guy who was really fucking trying and needed an expert to tell him what to really do. When I got those I treated them like fucking gold.
"The good news is you're in a zone where the climate's actually better for most farming under current conditions than before. This shit that's going on actually helps some regions. Okay, give me your e-mail address . . . Damn. Okay, gimme an address. I'll send you everything I can get on what should work there. I can't give you a degree in agronomy but as long as I'm sitting in this chair I'll hold your hand as much as possible. There are stores of seeds, pesticides and herbicides that you can use. We can release them . . . Don't go organic on me . . . Oh, okay. Right, here's the deal. You can still get winter wheat in the ground if you're quick. You're going to need hands to pick rocks . . . I'll explain . . ."
The problem being with livestock that had to be culled, well, we're back to everything getting backed up.
"Yes, I know the slaughterhouses are overloaded. Look, you're in Wisconsin. You're not going to warm up for months. Just slaughter them on site. Should have been done months ago. Store the carcasses anywhere you can keep them away from scavengers . . . Yes, I know it's a gruesome business. I grew up on a farm. Yes, I'm a real farmer, thank you. I've got a degree in this stuff . . . Actually, I can send you a pamphlet on the proper method of slaughtering cattle. But just remember, if you've got anything like feed for them, keep some breeding stock. That's the bull, he's the one with balls, and a few cows. You'll need x pounds of stock feed or x rolls of hay per animal per week. And with the temps they're predicting for your area, you're going to have to barn them every night . . . Yes, it is a lot of work. No, I don't know where you can get more help. There's a lot of people standing in soup lines. Go to one of those and ask . . . Sorry if you found that offensive, sir. Perhaps you could find some Mexicans. But the last time a soldier saw enough Mexicans to help was at the Alamo and we all know how that turned out . . . Hello?"
Okay, a lot of complaints.
California started getting "unseasonable" rains. That would have helped, a lot, in Imperial Valley if most of the people there had any clue what they were doing. But the real farmers were on soup lines (okay, most of them weren't) and the idiots from soup lines were trying to farm.
And the farms didn't have a lot of food on them. The ones that had actual houses (many didn't) had been stripped by the departing owners or managers. They weren't going to leave their food for the grasshoppers.
So some of the "experts" sent out to "rebuild the farming industry" decided that they were better off in soup lines.
ADM, when it got "nationalized," sent out along with its pink-slips a way for their various managers and "associated farmers" to keep in touch. Basically, it was a "forwarding address" database. Some of them didn't do it. But farmers are planners. And if they had any chance of getting back onto the farms, they were going to take it. It took a while and Con-Agra just basically went tits up. But in 2021 when the new administration went into reverse on all this, ADM was waiting. Which is why it really dominates the industry now.
But that's then.
A disaster? It was more of a nightmare. And at the call center we were the acoustic engineers getting every last nuance of the sound of the train wreck.
I was still there as spring came around. And the nightmare really got in motion.
But I'm getting ahead of myself again.
I think I only contributed one useful item the whole damned time I was stuck in the call center and that was by accident.
I was just coming off shift. I looked and felt like shit. I knew I was going to get a few more complaints added to the stack. It had been one of those nights.
I have no clue why the general in charge of ESM decided to stop by the field grade officer's can. But there he was, taking a whiz, when I flipped out my pecker in the next urinal and had to, as usual, back waaay up.
(Wife Edit: Be nice!)
I knew who he was. I didn't say anything. He did.
"You're Bandit Six."
"Yes, sir."
"What the hell are you doing in here? Get lost in the Puzzle Palace?"
"I work for you, sir."
"You do?"
"ESMAESM call center night shift supervisor."
"How in the hell . . . ? Lieutenant" To his aide. "You know who Bandit Six is, right?"
"Yes, sir!"
"Sorry, Bandit. I had no clue you worked in my shop. But you were a farmer, right?"
"Yes, sir." (Zipping up.)
"Any suggestions?"
"Gotta get the livestock slaughtered, sir. That's all you can do this time of year. Should have been done months ago. And plan for next but we can't do that. All we can do is react."
"Slaughterhouses are full, so is cold storage. I had a brief on that yesterday . . ."
"Sir, we're looking at the coldest winter on record. Zones one through three, maybe four, you can slaughter them and hang them from trees and they'll keep all winter. Hell, we'll have eaten it all out by spring."
"Most of the farmers that are part of the . . ."
"Are idiots. Yes, sir. I run the call center, sir. And even then, the ranchers don't have the hands and the ones that are . . . transportees don't have the experience. Or in most cases the guts or will or willingness to do the work. But we, the Army, are going to need that food, sir. And we, the Army, do have hands. Sir. And guts. And willingness to work hard for survival. Sir."
"Interesting point. Lieutenant, block out some time for Bandit Six to stop by. I used to be a tanker before I got stuck on this crap detail. I'd like to talk to you about Khuwaitla."
"Yes, sir."
I went back to my quarters and forgot about the incident.
However, a week later the order went out to start "Emergency Slaughter Teams."
It wasn't just soldiers. Groups would go to the soup lines and pick up any people who a) looked fit enough and b) were willing to "do some hard work for better food." There was no pay. The pay was fresh meat, which was rare for most people in those days.
Some of the "farmers" didn't want to slaughter their pets. Most, however, had seen their feed almost totally depleted. In "Zones One through Three," the northern border down to North Carolina, dipping down to southern Oklahoma and then back up to northern California, snow was already on the ground to stay. Pigs, especially, were out of food. Pigs will eat anything. So will people. There wasn't any food for the people.
Well, there was. Rye bread from farmers who had seen that the summer of 2019 was going to be screwed and soup made up of anything that was available. Spices were a rare commodity.
Meat quickly became a common commodity for a while. There was quite a bit in those soups during the winter of early 2020. Might have kept the death rate down a touch.
Lost a lot of livestock unnecessarily. By the time the ESTs were really getting in gear most of the livestock, including breeding stock, had died of malnutrition or exposure. But we got some of the food. That was something. Not that it helped in the long-run but few things do.
By February all the livestock was either slaughtered down to breeding groups or dead. People were dying, too. Lots of people. Despite my "heroic efforts" fuel for power and heat was at a premium. There was a, in my opinion, good government program to make sure people could get what they needed. Ration cards and such. But there was never enough. And people died in blizzards when their meager stocks of food and fuel ran out. And cities lost power and people froze.
Everything froze. The sugar cane in south Florida froze. Old people in retirement in Phoenix and Miami froze.
And people died on soup lines because they were already malnourished (one small chunk of rye bread and a cup of soup is not enough to keep most humans going forever) and it was bloody cold and nobody had the right clothing and China wasn't making Gortex parkas anymore.
People got frostbite and hypothermia. They dropped like flies.
And it wasn't even the really bad winter.
Farmers are planners. They sit on their tractors and in their dens and peer into the future though cloudy crystal balls, trying to discern what wheat and soy is going to be worth a year in advance. They look at the long-range weather reports. They watch the flight of the wild geese.
I'd been trained to do that since I was a baby as a form of osmosis picked up from the few words my dad would say at the dinner table. The hands would be talking a bit and my mom would be chattering and one of the hands would say something and my dad would grunt.
"Soy isn't going to be worth the price of sand next year."
And when I got older I'd try to figure out why he knew that. And he was usually right.
There's going to be a glut in the soy market next year. Why?
Long-term weather looked right for soy. China was projected to do a big buy. Monsanto had just come out with a new seed strain that was going to increase yields, on average, by two percent. (Which, right there, was enough to cause a glut, believe it or not.)
Big corporations were shifting towards soy. Managers were talking about it over coffee in the corner greasy spoon, around the counter in the feed store. Bio-diesel from soy. Soy was the word. "Soy's going to be big next year."
And it was. Bumper crop. Perfect weather, great seeds . . .
China wasn't buying as much as predicted. Bio-diesel wasn't really taking off. Overall sales were about the same or down.
Supply and demand. High supply, low to normal demand. It was worth the price of sand.
This, by the way, is what "commodity markets" are all about. Dad didn't buy his seed in cash. He bought it, everyone bought it, on "futures." That is, credit. But the seed had to be paid for by something. So commodity markets gambled on what was going to be big in next year's crop. Or even this year's crop. People put money into the market, the market created the "margin" for the seed and pesticides and everything else. And at the end of the year you found out if you'd made money or not.
Hell, you could "day trade" on the commodity market. Going "long" on wheat, selling "short" on sow-belly (bacon). But it was always, truly, about going long. It was reading the crystal ball. By December all the money was counted and all the bills were paid or you'd lost the bet. You'd gotten the wrong answer from the crystal ball.
My dad was the fucking prophet Elijah, every single year. Which was why we stayed in business. Hell, I always wondered why he didn't just give up farming and trade in commodities. He would have made a killing.
I wasn't a prophet but you only had to be reasonably keyed in to see where we were heading. You only had to have the sort of head that could put five or ten variables, not complicated ones, together, plug in the known constants and get an answer.
The "model" in my head said that we were looking at a famine in 2020 and 2021. Could be marginal, looked to be major. But there simply wasn't going to be enough food for all our remaining mouths. And the winter was going to be another killer.
And the internal ESM models said the same about both production and weather.
Then I'd look at what the USDA and the Met office was saying and shake my head. That, by the way, was one of the variables. The fact that the people who should have been making accurate predictions were making predictions based purely on politics and fantasy.
Commodity markets were back up by spring of 2020. USDA was saying one thing. Independent research firms were saying the exact opposite. (Army data was secret but leaked.) Trading was all over the board. Long on wheat? Short on wheat? Hell, was there going to be any wheat?
Generally, the trading was very "stagnant." Which meant less money available for supplies. But just about anyone who got into the commodities market in 2020 got their balls handed to them.
It was supposed to be pre-planting. Met office was saying temps were going to be coming up, fast. USDA was predicting soil temperatures that were on with 2018 or earlier. Like they were totally ignoring the fact that we were entering an ice age.
But it was so clear, by then, that all but the most "government uber alles" tofu-heads were tuning them out. They'd constantly predicted better temperature regimes. Because of "global warming." Which everyone was starting to realize was so much bunk. They'd stood in food lines in below zero, Farenheit, temperatures. They knew it wasn't getting warmer. Not that year, by God.
And the Bitch was starting to campaign for office. She still had supporters. Some. The core of the news media, for sure. The "limousine liberals" who had managed to sail through the Plague and the Chill because, of course they got immunized and of course they got paid and had access to all their usual foods. But even that was starting to crumble.
Her opponents were beating her with a stick every time they got a second of airtime. Polls showed her numbers to be in the low twenties. And going down.
So then she started . . . reacting.