How did people survive without Petroleum?

Benton Lewis wrote:how the Amish farmed when they did not have tractors and all, let me know.

The Amish still don't use tractors or electricity.  I don't know about a good book that talks about their lifestyle but Amish people are mostly really friendly and have no problem talking to you about how they do things if you have any in your area.  I don't know if all the Amish people have 80 acres, but it's possible.  They do have a very strong sense of community and have community barn-raisings and such.

My hunch is that it would take the entire population in an area to be devoted to growing and preserving food;

Depending on where in the world they were, between 60 to 95% were involved in producing food, shelter, and clothing (don't forget clothing - that's huge and closely tied in with food production).  

It's really difficult to talk about generics since each location and culture did it differently.  Then there's time.  England in the 10th Century had a vastly different approach than England in the 14th which changed to more than double output and half labour (so basically quadruple output) needs in the 15th.

My favourite source for information is cookbooks from the time I'm studying.  That and agricultural manuals.  The Book of the Farm by Stevens goes into great detail for all things farming in Victorian England (pre petroleum).  Stevens is writing on the cusp of the steam age - but most of the methods are with hand tools or livestock like oxen working the field.  

  But the lone family doing it after one day getting tired of modern life and heading towards the woods seems more myth for the vast majority.  

I've seen examples of this happening but very few of them have resilience.  One has to generalize and one needs a lot of equipment (which takes space) and the equipment to maintain these.    This is probably why community was so important in the past.  

Benton Lewis wrote:No gaps now and I understand it perfectly thanks to this extremely informative post.  I would give this revelation another apple if I could!  

I have a book on my shelf called Farming For Self Sufficiency by John Seymour.  When I finished reading it the first time, I was disappointed.  It was all about food production, and I expected there to be more.  But as I thought about it, I realized that's really all there is to it.  Given a place to live, and given the ability and will to work (and learn), surviving (and thriving) mostly just comes down to food acquisition.  

This food acquisition can (and does) come about in multiple ways: horticulture (garden scale), agriculture (field scale), foraging, animal husbandry, hunting, fishing, trapping, trading.  

But this was no lean, meager existence suggested.  Seymour was a proponent of not just surviving, but living well, including the importance of things like community and conviviality.

So where, honestly, is the gap in your understanding?  You say you don't understand how people lived without petroleum, but what exactly is it you don't understand?  There have been multiple examples given, for both past and present.  What specifically is the Permies community failing to communicate?  (These are not rhetorical questions.  I'm trying to honestly understand what isn't adding up.)

It might also be worth noting that the earth produces food.  It's just what it does.  Plants grow.  Some of these can be eaten by humans.  Some can only be eaten by animals, which can then be eaten by humans.  On the whole, this is no great feat; it's just how things work.  Famines are the exception.  Abundance, or at least sufficiency, is the rule.  It's not as though humans populate an inhospitable planet in which they must fight for every calorie.  No, the earth produces food.

Maybe the answer I'm looking for would be too comprehensive, but I asked to see the responses I'd get.  When I was very young, like elementary school, if asked this question, I may have answered something like hunting, fishing, eating wild plants, and growing gardens after I was told what petroleum is (i'm just interested in the food production aspect).  It was said that I should focus on a specific group of people and learn how they did it because everyone used different methods and that is a valid point.  

Supply chain management focuses on the flow of materials from point of origin (starting at raw material level) to point on consumption.  I would like to know the complete supply chain of each food and element used in food production by a people to survive long term.

I've never seen a comprehensive answer to this question.  I just remember general answers that say what a people ate without describing how they got those things to eat, what detailed farming methods they employed, and how the food met their dietary needs in detail.

If it is said they used a mule to plow the fields then I'd like to know how the mule was fed.  Was a mule fed off the surplus of one field they were used to plow?

The question can be answered with a very general response or be very comprehensive and technical, depending on the knowledge/desire of who answers.  Just thought I'd ask and see.

Benton Lewis wrote:
If it is said they used a mule to plow the fields then I'd like to know how the mule was fed.  Was a mule fed off the surplus of one field they were used to plow?

In a scenario like that, the mule would likely be tethered on land just beyond the cultivated area to graze.  Around here, they would be brought closer to home at night for safekeeping and the tether moved daily.  They might also be taken to the olive grove and tied to a different tree each day to clear around each one - function stacking!  

To get specific answers, you really need more specific questions.  People aren't going to write an encyclopedia for you.  

Burra Maluca wrote:

Benton Lewis wrote:
If it is said they used a mule to plow the fields then I'd like to know how the mule was fed.  Was a mule fed off the surplus of one field they were used to plow?

In a scenario like that, the mule would likely be tethered on land just beyond the cultivated area to graze.  Around here, they would be brought closer to home at night for safekeeping and the tether moved daily.  They might also be taken to the olive grove and tied to a different tree each day to clear around each one - function stacking!  

To get specific answers, you really need more specific questions.  People aren't going to write an encyclopedia for you.  

If you know of such an encylopedia let me know!  I don't expect an encyclopedia post.

The mule being tethered to the non-cultivated area is an example of sustainable human farming being dependent, not on human agriculture, but on wild areas.  I can see replacing wild buffalo in the prairie with cows and living off eating cows as the staple but its not the excellent human farming practices there that did it, it would be relying on the wild areas to feed your cows.  

Permaculture seems to be about humans growing all the food they need to thrive, without relying on non-renewable resources, and relying on plants humans planted in an area.  

I'm not sure any peoples lived with just human agriculture alone before petroleum, without significant reliance on the wild. I live in the southeastern united states...no praries.  From what i read, knowledge about what they ate and their way of life has been lost, as they were seen as savages and people did not want to learn from them. Who knows what the wild food population was like before

Your explanation of how the mule was fed was specific and helpful, thanks!  I can see it working if the mule is fed elsewhere than just the area it was used to farm.  My comment about human agriculture being heavily reliant on non-farmed food sources before petroleum was not meant to diminish your answer.

This five page thread might have something of interest to you  https://permies.com/t/29025/Hierarchical-Paleo-Permaculture-Hunter-Gatherer

I used to follow it...I liked the groups line of thinking.  

The last reply isn't so long ago...maybe you could get some answers there?

If you know of such an encylopedia let me know!

I've mentioned a few in this thread already and tips on how to find more.

another starting place. They mention which specific books they used in their research.  They also demonstrate how much more can be gained from first hand experience than from books alone.

Benton Lewis wrote: The mule being tethered to the non-cultivated area is an example of sustainable human farming being dependent, not on human agriculture, but on wild areas.

Among other things, the birth of agriculture in its myriad forms would likely have come about to complement, in some attempt at greater predictability, food acquisition from the wilds.  I have not seen a specific Permie definition of homesteading, but just from the wiki entry we get "Homesteading is a lifestyle of self-sufficiency. It is characterized by subsistence agriculture, home preservation of foodstuffs, and it may or may not also involve the small scale production of textiles, clothing, and craftwork for household use or sale", which does not address the sources of sustenance as either wild or cultivated.  There may be "space station" scenarios in the future where all inputs are synthesized, but at what point is the human consumer "not wild"?  Even concentrated, localized, Permie-style cultivation approaches will rely on inviting the wild microbes into your soil and septic measures.  I guess in the end, I can't imagine any earth-bound scenario that does not involve the flow, to a greater or lesser exent, of the wild into the cultivated and vice versa.  In addition to the good practical references already offered, a great philosophical discussion on the issue can be found in the late Paul Shepard's works...."Nature and Madness", "Thinking Animals", etc.

Benton Lewis wrote:I've never seen a comprehensive answer to this question.  I just remember general answers that say what a people ate without describing how they got those things to eat, what detailed farming methods they employed, and how the food met their dietary needs in detail.

If you're looking for specific locally applicable information, I would again suggest Google Books.  Maybe identify a historical group that was native to your area, and use that as your primary search term.  Even then, though, there will be plenty of overlap, so that a group that may have been geographically distant might still inform your present situation.    I downloaded a book titled Iroquois Uses of Corn, after hearing a fascinating presentation on the benefits of their no-till system.  It's still useful and informative, despite my distance from New York.

Whatever you find, you're probably going to have to mentally fill in some gaps.  Use your common sense.  If you learn, say, that a given crop was widely planted and used, but no specifics are given, you can probably safely assume that the ground was in some way fertilized, seeds were planted at the appropriate time, and the crop was harvested when ripe.  This pattern just can't be diverged from that far.  You might not glean the exact way in which this was all practiced, but you can probably get awful darn close with a little mental exercise.

If you are, rather, just wanting general information on how a whole host of people groups did and do survive without petroleum, then I would suggest that might be a research endeavor best done by oneself.  There's a lot of ground to cover, and with the level of detail you're seeking, it's asking a lot of the folks here, when that information fills books and books already.

But on a practical note, assuming you're coming more from the former rather than the latter approach, the good news is that that information is not necessary to get started.  Just start.  Identify what you want to grow and raise, and grow and raise it.  Some stuff will work, some won't.  You'll need to make changes--some small, some large--as you go.  Nobody jumps into a perfect system because they did all their homework first.  And how boring would that be, anyway?

The mule being tethered to the non-cultivated area

In some parts of Europe, this would usually be a fallow field and the manure from the mule or ox would revitalize the soil.  See The Book of the Farm, I mentioned earlier for specifics on what pre-industrial draft animals required in their diet.  Before that, they would have been run on common land - there are many records of taxation from the middle ages that discuss this.  There are also many references from what is now called Spain that talk about the specifics of how farming was done in the middle ages.  Another excellent resource is your local SCA.  They do in-depth research and publish practical guides on every aspect of medieval living (from how to grow, spin, weave and sew your own undergarments to different callorie rich ways of fermenting liquid (beer and mead))

In Asia, there were fewer draft animals, most of the work done by human labour.  These cultures had a much larger urban population to support so a smaller number of people were working the land, providing clothing, shelter and food needs.  See the book Just Enough that I mentioned before.  The fiction of Mo Yan, specifically Life and Death are Wearing me Out has detailed, first-hand accounts taken from Mo Yan's own experiences of pre-petrol farming in China.

In other parts of the world, they had managed wilderness.  But grazing draft animals there was risky.  Placing the livestock in a fallow field stacks functions - feeds livestock and rejuvenate the soil.  Maybe that's the key that's missing.  That thing permaculture calls 'stacking functions'.  My ancestors selected tasks that gave the most value for the least amount of work.  Any work done was never just one job.  A fence kept animals both in and out.  But that's only two functions.  Where my family came from, they had hedgerows.  A hedgerow kept animals in and/or out.  It provided wind breaks.  It provided fuel for cooking.  It provided fruit and berries (so fewer fruit trees were needed which gave more space to high-calorie crops like wheat and barley - the barley made beer which provided over half the calorie and nutritional requirements for the physical labourer, the mash left over from the beer was fed to the livestock).  It provided wood for tools and basketry material.  It reduced erosion.  It helped hold moisture in the soil.  It provided shade for farm labourers.  It helped define boundaries which made less strife among neighbours.  It provided a home for pollinators and a source of sugars (tree saps and honey).  All this for about 10 hours work every 3 to 7 years.  A fence requires about 4 hours maintenance a month.  A hedgerow makes far more sense to me than a fence.

In North America, few people used livestock.  In the place where I live, it was wilderness and managed wilderness.  There are several good ethnographies including the accounts of Captain Cook and others who journeyed with him.  But the best source of information I found was a local natural historian who studied these books then went and tried the different techniques they wrote about.  He had first-hand knowledge and even though he was a white man, he was often called on by the local First Nations to teach their children their traditional skills.  

Seek out your local ancient.  There are still people alive who farmed before petrol. I'm sure they would love to tell you how they did it.  

Seek out frontier books.  The Hudson Bay Co. produced several manuals for hunters, trappers, and homesteaders on how to survive - very specific manuals which covered how many pounds of wheat they need per active male adult doing such and such tasks each day.  How much for a woman doing the same tasks, how much for children of different ages.  What tasks each member of the house hold did.  What food needs they had.  What tasks they would do throughout the year.  A lot like Mrs. Beeton's book I mentioned before, only with more focus on roughing it.  

Go forth and try it. This is the best way possible to learn just what is possible where you live.  Books can only tell you what worked in specific conditions in specific locations in specific cultural.  That's what people like Carol Deppe have done.  She read about First Nation methods of growing and preserving foods and tried it.  She discovered what worked in her location and what didn't.  here's a thread about her squash.  She read books on how people ate corn in the past, and then she went and experimented until she discovered a recipe that worked for her which she talks about here.  I read her books and trying her methods, I discovered ways that grow food that require far less effort than I thought possible.  

I underlined some of the references that might help.  If this doesn't help find specific examples, maybe the question isn't specific enough?  Like was mentioned before.  It might be easier to pick one historical example and start a thread about how they farmed and thrived in the past.

Another example: Napoleon Chagnon wrote an ethnography on the Yanomami tribe in South America.  This book was written before they were introduced to modern (petroleum) methods of farming and covers specifics on farming, gathering, hunting, trading, and logging.  Instead of using livestock to revitalize the soil they would log an area, burn the brush, till that soil and grow crops there for 3 to 5 years.  When the soil was 'exhausted', they would do the same in a new patch.  The forest would reclaim the old field and it would be ready to log again in about 20 years.  

There are thousands of ethnographies out there that go into details like this.  If your local library doesn't have one on the culture you're interested in, they can get it in by interlibrary loan.  

In Farmers of 40 Centuries King describes huge numbers of people engaged in collecting waste and material for composting. I get the impression this is the main activity of many.

Benton Lewis wrote:Maybe the answer I'm looking for would be too comprehensive, but I asked to see the responses I'd get.  When I was very young, like elementary school, if asked this question, I may have answered something like hunting, fishing, eating wild plants, and growing gardens after I was told what petroleum is (i'm just interested in the food production aspect).  It was said that I should focus on a specific group of people and learn how they did it because everyone used different methods and that is a valid point.  

Supply chain management focuses on the flow of materials from point of origin (starting at raw material level) to point on consumption.  I would like to know the complete supply chain of each food and element used in food production by a people to survive long term.

I've never seen a comprehensive answer to this question.  I just remember general answers that say what a people ate without describing how they got those things to eat, what detailed farming methods they employed, and how the food met their dietary needs in detail.

If it is said they used a mule to plow the fields then I'd like to know how the mule was fed.  Was a mule fed off the surplus of one field they were used to plow?

The question can be answered with a very general response or be very comprehensive and technical, depending on the knowledge/desire of who answers.  Just thought I'd ask and see.

Edited to help fix stupid auto correct issues.


There can be no exact answer to your question in this light.  The only constant in nature is change, and people must adapt.  There is no rigid yearly regiment or quota that must be kept precisely, because that would be impossible.

I would look at your own life; start small and work towards a bigger scale of vision.

What do you eat in a day?  Month?  Year?  Many of us seeking to sustain ourselves develope an intuitive understanding of what we eat and how much we need.  When you’re talking about growing and foraging and  hunting your own food that Story is the same.  You can’t bank on getting exactly 5 deer 32 rabbits 25 pounds of mushrooms 60 pounds of berries, etc. to fill a precise list.  What you hunt and forage may vary drastically each year.  Some years will be abundant, others lean.  Farming is the same.  Your cow may milk many gallons per day for a year, your sheep may breed back twice and give you triplets each time, your chickens might hatch 15 chicks each and raise most  of them to adulthood, your garden may flourish and boom with surplus.  Or your cow could die of mastitis, your ewes could die in birth, your chickens may get ravaged by a coyote, and your garden could suffer drought, gophers, and deer Til you’re left with nothing.

This is where the wisdom of preserving your food and rationing your stores comes in.  And to what the needs of a person, family, or community may be on a precise scale will vary wildly between even neighbors and families, let alone different cultures.  

I would recommend that the first steps to understanding the daily, monthly, and yearly needs of yourself, your animals, your community, and you way of life would be hands on experience.  How much does it take to feed that mule?  Own a mule for a year and find out.  You will learn quickly to ration its food wisely and think of creative ways of producing your own food if you don’t have the money to spend on it.  As is with any livestock or pet.  

Put it in perspective: my two large dogs and 3 cats require a half a ton of fresh meat every year.  That’s a lot of meat!  A goat can eat half a ton of hay in one year.  A chicken can eat several pounds of grain each month.  We also consume huge amounts of food.

But to a resourceful mind there is always ample surplus in nature and endless opportunities at our fingertips.  

Let’s not forget other needs such as medicines and herbs, water, wood for heat and structure, tools and the means to repair them, linens and clothing, and all the little things in every day life that we need to continue on.  An understanding of all of these needs is built with experience, and the knowledge of those needs in a precise understanding is gathered and held together by communities who’ve spent years walking the walk.  The best you can hope for is snippets and glimpses into their lives, at what is truly needed for an individual or community to flourish in a natural, traditional way by asking those around you.  Because the reality of it is too large.  It cannot be summed up in a paragraph or study.  It must be exercised and experienced.

Deb Rebel has given very thorough answers here.

As she and others point out, the discovery of petroleum, a fossil fuel, merely replaced the use of animal fat . It also put a lot of people out of work as there was a huge industry just around the production of Beef Tallow, not only for lighting but primarily for Lubrication.

In other words, as Grease. This was the material that allowed the industrial revolution, at the early stages, to function. It is also usually forgotten about today. Machinery needs grease.

Even in a post petroleum age we will need some sort of lubricant to keep everything running smoothly, even if it is powered by solar or wind or whatever, and its hard to imagine the internal combustion engine dissappearing anytime soon either as it is simply too useful.

Now, it may run on hempseedoil or some other vegetable oil. That would be a good thing.

Animal and fish fat/oil and vegetable oil as an essential part of human diet was never replaced by petroleum though !  THank god for that !!

What a loaded question. What we consider "people" were around for much longer than the 125'ish years since petroleum products. Specifically, modern society's complete dependence on them. Electricity is basically the same situation. Skills have been lost, knowledge has been lost, people have become soft & lazy. In a very short time. Many are entirely dependent on someone else for almost everything. Completely out of tune with nature & their basic animal instincts. We've all seen the panic at the stores every time a strong storm is expected & the chaos if the electricity goes down. For the most part the permies crowd (you & me) is at least aware of the situation & trying to do something about it. Humanity could be back in the stone age almost instantaneously so I'm doing what I can to be ready. Your mileage may vary.

A more traditional answer ... Seminole Indians & Seminole pumpkins. Not especially high calorie but worth looking into for large amounts of self seeding low maintenance nutrition. (I'm on a Seminole pumpkin binge this year) It's a Sasquatch thing.

If I had to manually handle my drinking water I wouldn't be inclined to poop in it for instance.  My well is about as convenient as municipal water, except when it goes down; providing water on tap moved by electricity, but if I had to carry pails up hill like pre petroleum; then my septic would be obsolete to me.  That would be a lot of work per flush more so if the pails were made out of white oak instead of plastic.  ugh I need to crack my back just thinking about it.  So around these parts people used outhouses, another thing some people did was process their excrement resources prior to the modern waste disposal systems plague.  But now with our microbiology and pathogen understanding it seems right to me to consider Joseph Jenkins, Humanure processes.  Maybe adding black soldier fly eggs after the heat spike passes, then redworms after the BSFL population collapse.  That would provide some organic chemistry to the pile that I don't even begin to understand.  But a year or so later the humus should be a sanitary restorative resource instead of a toxic waste.

Petroleum has only been in widespread use for a little over 150 years.

For specific examples of how people lived, read any history book covering any time up until the American Civil War.

I, too, often wonder how people survived pre-petroleum and, obviously, since we are here today, they did quite well!

I am reading a book now, Native Harvests: American Indians Wild Foods and Recipes by E. Barrie Kavasch, and I have learned a lot about how Native Americans survived nutritionally. I believe that the nutrition of the Native Americans was far superior to what ours is today.

The diet consisted of (depending on the locale) wild foods (greens, nuts, seeds, fruits), tubers and starches, wild game, fish, insects, fungi, ferns, etc. I think we need to remember that the population at that time was far less than what it is now and that the land was pristine with virgin growth and pure waters- nothing like we have today. I can't even imagine what a virgin forest teeming with wild plants and animals would look like.

As far as the Amish- they hire a car and driver to take them to Walmart. Not impressed at all with that.

Here is a recipe from the Native Harvest book- I included the caloric value of each ingredient

Caramelized Arrowhead Tubers
    25 egg-sized arrowhead tubers (78 calories per cup- I think there would be a maybe 12 cups, if the tubers are egg-sized?)
    1/2 cup maple syrup (410 calories)
    8 Tbsp sunflower seed butter (800 calories)

It looks like meeting their caloric needs would not have been an issue!

Fun thread.

Thanks.

Sheila

"As far as the Amish- they hire a car and driver to take them to Walmart. Not impressed at all with that."

Things like that are my suspicion.

I think pre petroleum people had to rely heavily on wild game, especially aquatic wildlife in river, creek, lake, ocean etc environments and wild foods. The almost extinct in America American chestnut was also a major wild source of calories as was acorns for some tribes. I've seen acres and acres of what appeared to be wild growing cattails.

Also, they had agricultural staples like corn, beans and squash and before that staples like the eastern agricultural complex. They probably farmed formerly wild underground, calorie heavy crops like duck potatoes, spurge nettle and Prarie turnip.

I've read some tribes around the world in places like Africa, Australia, and Okinawa even today have diets extremely high in cassava and sweet potatoes to sustain them.

Benton Lewis wrote:"As far as the Amish- they hire a car and driver to take them to Walmart. Not impressed at all with that."

Things like that are my suspicion.

I think pre petroleum people had to rely heavily on wild game, especially aquatic wildlife in river, creek, lake, ocean etc environments and wild foods. The almost extinct in America American chestnut was also a major wild source of calories as was acorns for some tribes. I've seen acres and acres of what appeared to be wild growing cattails.

Also, they had agricultural staples like corn, beans and squash and before that staples like the eastern agricultural complex. They probably farmed formerly wild underground, calorie heavy crops like duck potatoes, spurge nettle and Prarie turnip.

I've read some tribes around the world in places like Africa, Australia, and Okinawa even today have diets extremely high in cassava and sweet potatoes to sustain them.

The Amish comment is true- I know it for a fact. They also hire a car/driver to take them across state to farm auctions so they can purchase the old farm equipment. I guess it is a compromise they must make as horse and buggy would be a hazard on the interstate. And, not to dis the Amish, but they are over-romanticized. The Amish recipes they have shared contain plenty of Campbell's canned cream soups.

I agree with you on your thoughts as to the pre-petroleum diets. And the fact that high starch foods are prevalent in the diets of the tribes of yesteryear and today. Definitely needed for the high caloric value.

Not all tribes were nomadic, either.  Sure there were the hunter-gatherers but there were also the farmers. I find it all very fascinating. Nature did provide all they needed as far as sustenance and medicinals.

And then we crossed the ocean....

Sheila Mleziva wrote:I think we need to remember that the population at that time was far less than what it is now and that the land was pristine with virgin growth and pure waters-

I can't even imagine what a virgin forest teeming with wild plants and animals would look like.

That's because they don't exist. Virgin Forest [as the term is formally defined] is old growth forest. Extremely fungal soils with a nearly closed canopy and very little mammalian food produced overall. [There is a mast yield of course, but by that age those trees often produce far less relative to the space they occupy in the canopy. In human terms it's sort of like their breeding like a 40 year old rather than a 20 year old.

The forests the native americans relied on for food were managed and kept at a younger state. Fire was a big tool in that toolbelt.

To address the primary topic of how did people survive without petrolium? They survived on the results of three types of caloric expenditure [rated from least energy and land efficient to most] Animal Labor, Human Labor and Human Thought.

When it comes to progress, Petrolium has largely stolen that Human Thought input, consuming innovation towards bigger 'better' technology to optimize the use of petrolium rather than optimizing Human or Animal Labor.

Various sources suggest approximately 1/3rd of a grain production farm was utilized as pasture to feed the work horses/mules/donkeys. At the average wheat yields of 750 pounds per acre in the US in 1899, it takes less than an acre in grain staples to supply a person's calories. Lets call it 6 acres of grain staples for a family of 7. Enough pasture for that horsepower to plow that [the appropriate animal for that scale remains to be seen] would be two acres. Brings us up to 8 acres per family before accounting for vegetable production for vitamins, minerals flavor and variety [1 acre would more than suffice], forest for heat and mast[lets call it five acres in light of inefficient stoves but depending on the region this could be far lower], with understory edibles like blueberries and mushrooms and ramps and such] comes out to two acres per person for this family of 7.

Alternatively, take the animal labor and plow out of the equation. With Do Nothing No Till Farming [it's not half as lazy as it sounds, basically just never do something just because 'that's how it's done', any action is done after careful observation to determine the benefits and costs of doing so] in Japan Fukuoka was pulling 5,200 pounds per acre of Rice *and* Barley. If we assume his conditions are far better and cut those yields in half, we get 2600 pounds per acre of a winter and summer grain. Let's even cut that a bit further and round down to 4,000 pounds total yield. Suddenly those 6 acres of grain can be cut down to 1.5 or we can keep the 6 acres of grain and raise poultry for eggs and cull meat.

Pastoral systems can produce fantastic abundance without relying on game as well. 'Typical stocking densities of on productive grass can be six to ten sheep per acre' with daily rotation grazing efficiency can be doubled, so lets take the average [8] and double that for 16. How many lambs does a given family need? More primitive sheep that are more durable yield approximately 30+ pounds of meat each, and selecting ewes for twinning is not difficult. I would recommend 6 ewes per acre of lush pasture [scale back for inferior pasture accordingly.] Since we don't have refrigeration, less meat per harvest means less meat we have to go to the hassle of preserving- I would recommend staggering the introduction of ewes into the flock with the ram accordingly. With a 6 ewe flock that would be every other month, with a 12 ewe flock that would be once per month etc. Bear in mind twins don't need to be slaughtered at the same time, postponing a few weeks only means they get a bit bigger. Bear in mind with this system dogs are a necessity and will need to be fed from the harvest as well.

One last option that I don't have any historical evidence of [because of the infrastructure challenge of rotating these frequently enough][ is Pig Plows rather than equine plows. They reproduce themselves a whole lot faster and do the work without human intervention. This method requires frequent rotation and intelligent crop selection to enable the effective planting of a very small field after every move and works best if the village has a farrower producing piglets. You can do this yourself but it does increase your overhead.

Another factor is ecological destruction. The passenger pigeons are gone. Salmon have left the oceans, they no longer feed the forest with their spawning. Vast spans of wild Camus bulbs have been covered with asphalt. Global warming is killing coral reefs. We’ve cut down thousands of square miles of forest, burnt the ground, poisoned the water, just to eat fast food.
Maybe the question is “Can people survive with petroleum?”. I sit on an edge between desert and industrial agriculture and I have not seen one single butterfly all year long! Plenty of cabbage moths. Fields of milk weed, no monarch butterflies.