If Food Isn't Hidden During Famine, You Lose It

I believe indoor or underground and/or concealed permaculture is the only safe bet

I’ve felt this way for thirty years. It is likely a direct result of reading obsessively about the Ukrainian Famine and other world famines in history. I have a formidable library of books I have collected over the years, I could probably devote an entire bookshelf to nothing but books concerning famine or governments that created famines. If you want the summary, there is a really good free movie on Tubi at the moment called MR. JONES about the Holodomor and the suppression of the genocide that took place in Russia which still goes on to this day. If you are not familiar with the story of this famine, this film is a good introduction.

The Holocaust we hear about every ten minutes the past 75 years. The Holodomor was largely denied and concealed by the world press up until the last decade when they began to silently concede all of it. As Stalin said, “just a statistic.”

For this reason, right up until the time we left Queensland in 2012 I was enthusiastically engaged in experimentation with various automation setups to grow plants in hydroponics settings that would only require people to plant and then harvest. I wanted to put the brains into the automation to free up people to work on other things besides tending plants all day. I wanted to develop a method that was so procedural and so well monitored by my software that it would be difficult to make a mistake. It was at the same time I was designing my markdown plugin to be coupled to the CLIPS expert system to actually guide growers through all required maintenance and production with screen prompts and wizards. The system would tell you what you needed to do today and then you would look at the web browser and you’d have the sequential list of steps needed to get to the next page. I am still aiming for that target for deployment of this facility in VAULT-SYS and who knows, maybe this new little atomic version of VAULT-SYS I am calling CD-OS at the moment.

CLIPS, the expert system I have been working with for 20 years trying to make it as half as useful as the AI systems they are demonstrating this year. I will talk about this revolution in “advice from machines” in a future essay. CLIPS may still have a place but I’d love to get my hands on one of those brains stuffed onto a cheap chip for a couple of dollars. No, seriously. If not connected to the internet they would be a huge assist in the system I have in mind.

Incredibly, it looks like demand has caused this notion of the self contained portable garden to become commercially available at very reasonable prices. In the 12 years since 2010 similar kits to the ones I built by hand are now found at Walmarts and most Home furnishing stores as well as online.

The use of PVC is extremely attractive because the materials are cheap to buy in quantity, easily cut and molded, easily connected and easily modified as need presents itself. The pipes are tough, durable and good for a long time. I always flushed mine out with bleach and then let them off-gas to make sure any residue inside would not get into the plants.

You can build or buy a rack like this one with pump and timer for under $100 now.

PVC has a lot to commend it. It has one particular attraction that most people don’t mention but nevertheless are considering when they purchase it. It can be moved easily and quickly erected anywhere, including indoors or underground without a major hassle at all. It can handle a wide array of configurations including vertical growing to make the maximum use of the space it operates in.

I know the hard work that people put into their homesteading gardens. Epic labors to grow food that may involve hours of backbreaking labor for every phase of permaculture. I understand the investment people may have in their gardens and their homes as a place where they grow, harvest and process food.

I got to tell you the truth. If your food is in the open, you’re going to end up eating the crickets and mealworms the New World Order is putting on the menu, sooner or later.

During a famine, it is 100% certain that if people can see your food - including from the air overhead - they are going to come and take it. Starving people will fight and kill and even die in a minute for food they see growing outside, it’s a no-brainer for them.

You may say … we are prepared to defend our gardens and our orchards. With whatever level of violence is needed.

This couple took a stand and it worked against people who weren’t hungry enough to take the risk or suffer the costs. This would be different during a famine. Unarmed people would charge at them with complete abandon, maybe hundreds of them at a time. I always laugh when idiots ask “why would you need an assault-style rifle to defend yourself?” I hope they find out the answer to that question one of these days. Stupidity is all about the lack of imagination for alternatives.

The question is … are you sure you want to? Fighting for stuff you always end up with casualties. You could run out of ammunition killing idiots you should have avoided altogether by taking pains to make sure nobody knew you had that food. Sooner or later, if enough of them arrive that is going to get very inconvenient for you. They may be willing to kill you to get it but are you certain it is worth the lives of your loved ones to defend it? Far better to make it all invisible. If I could fly a drone over your retreat/freehold and see nothing but a house and wilderness around it, I don’t know if it is worth the calories and effort I need to devote to going there and finding out if they have anything to eat. If I can see an orchard or a vast fenced garden, that’s telling me my investment of time and diligence could secure me a meal. It’s always about costs versus gains ratio. That’s why carjackers and rapists seem to decline immediately after concealed carry laws pass the legislature.

The attraction of food grown openly becomes irresistable in a famine. If the Golden Horde we talked about previously shows up on your highway, they are going to pay you a visit sooner or later if your agriculture or aquaculture is obvious from a cursory glance at your property. You have to practice hydroponics in secret and put all your permaculture in a place that is concealed from public surveillance. This could be a toolshed at a minimum or deep underground in a fully equipped permaculture lab depending on your budget. There might be people who want to grow support gardens for their preps to supplement their storage food and that can be done in a closet with proper care to construction. With the appearance in the last ten years of super low voltage LED growlights in a multiple of spectrum frequencies, there’s nothing you get outside you can’t do better inside with a little electricity. You can buy these LED lights cheap in rolls and make the actual fixtures yourself very inexpensively.

You can run these lights horizontally or vertically to fit both types of growing approaches and the electricity required can be very minimal and run intermittently on demand so as to keep demands as efficient as is possible.

I believe that the single strongest application for the SCADA architecture in my software is found in the automation of hydroponics setups. The ideal is to check on your garden from a web browser that could be anywhere on your property and to actually to be able to take steps to remedy problems without getting up from your chair or having to go underground or visit the remote shack where it is located.

Maintenance like :

1. Turning on nutrient pump because the dewpoint (measured with a wide fan cheap and available laser sensor) shows the plants are in optimum shape to absorb the growing solution.

2. Injecting a couple drops of hydrogen peroxide into the solution storage tank because a photo sensor shows it is getting cloudy enough to be a biological hazard to the plants due to bacterial growth.

3. Checking the PH of the soil and bouncing colored light off the leaves to permit image recognition to identify plant diseases without a physical inspection. (Easier than you might think nowadays, sometimes you can do it in Javascript!)

4. Activating fans, pumps, tanks and even supplementary solutions to add fish tank nutrients, imbibe CO2 or release oxygen at optimum moments to maximize yields.

5. Turning lights on in various spectrums for the differing colored light requirements of certain kinds of crops, i.e. potatoes versus carrots.

6. Physical surveillance of the hydroponics beds to detect any intrusion, including by rats or even insects you may not know about. Motion detection can mark the second and show you the instant a centipede came into the frame or a moth was flapping around in there.

This kind of monitoring coupled to automation of most production can turn your hydroponics lab into a place that takes up 50% of your day to keep the plants alive or less than 10% of your time in a week just to go in and harvest and replant. I have plans to even eliminate that and replace it with a Farmbot style design but I have not yet gotten around to doing the R&D. Luckily the Farmbot system is open source and we may find they have done 9/10ths of the discovery in advance for us on how to get robots to even do harvest and seed work. I may just copy their design and then graft it as another modular microservice into VAULT-SYS.

One of the great strengths of concealed hydroponics gardening is that it degrades quite well no matter how complex it is when running at maximum efficiency. For example, if your electricity fails you can always just pump the solution up into the holding tank by hand or even move it with a pail. You can skip all these fancy sensors and do all the same work with your own observations and attendance. Each level of complexity you can maintain for hydroponics is more time added back to your day you can do other things which may be pressing and immediate priorities. Others can be taught to maintain the permaculture lab entirely through labor if your entire computer system fails. It is feasible (I’ve done it for a couple days) to handcrank a generator or use backup batteries to deliver the grow lights for several hours a day in a maintenance mode until you fix your other problems.

… but the best thing about all of it is that this type of food production can be placed out of sight and out of mind. Strangers can’t lust after your food and lives when they don’t even know what is there and you are making yourself a much smaller target for a much bigger sample of looters and thieves if they don’t know you have something worth stealing. It’s just another way that God is obviously right about the meek inheriting the earth. Those who live by the sword die by the sword and if you only pull yours out because its the last option, you can conserve your resources and your lives by using every other stratagem to become that gray background noise that nobody can really see, smell or hear in the environment.

I will go into these subjects in much greater technical depth on my other site devoted to the details at VAULT-CO 3.0 in the near future. This discussion was purely to convey an idea about the importance of keeping your food production a secret in the nightmarish world we may be entering soon.

P.S. Another good one on Tubi is BLACK 47 on the Irish potato famine. Steel yourself, this stuff can be depressing but very informative on what you can expect. All these famines were government engineered, every one of them. If you ever find yourself feeling sorry for the English because they are about to live under Sharia law, watch BLACK 47 and you can find out just what kind of a**holes our nation threw off our backs in 1776. We should have made a law early on forbidding any British from staying permanently in America for any reason, they are never anything but a terrible influence and the very best of them isn’t fit to crawl on his hands and knees and plant a kiss in the crack of an American’s a**.

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Keep your faith in the Lord strong and learn scripture. It’s the best insurance you can take out for hard times.

• Regards,Tex