Post-Roundup World

Donny hit Send just as the WiFi shut down as the sun dropped and the farm's solar panels stopped working.  The Ωmail service some former Googlers had built with the wreckage of Gmail after Google folded wasn't free, but it was the best way to keep in touch with his wife back in the city.  He, Fred, and 4 other guys had come here in Fred's Prius because Fred had learned there was a farmer with WiFi in the dorms who hired city workers, albeit not for the same pay as the more experienced latino workers.  The immigrant latinos weren't coming up nearly as much since the economic collapse in the U.S.  They had been able to carry enough gas in the Prius to get to the farm, but weren't as sure about finding gas on the way home over the deteriorating roads at the end of the season.  Donny locked up his iPad in his locker and got into bed.  He thought for a few minutes about  the uselessness of his Ph.D. in Economics, but the hard work tilling, planting, and pulling weeds was better than the sporadic dole in the city.  The farmer paid his wages directly into PayPal, which had managed to stay in business and take over some of the functions that the failed banks once performed.   The handful of remaining banks only troubled themselves for what passed for wealthy in America's shrinking economy.  The farmer numbered amongst those wealthy few.  He had bought up several of his failed neighbors and had enough cash to pay for human workers, since machines were now too expensive to run.  Donny thought wistfully about his wife and kids, and of the oil-rich world of his youth, when life was easy and people weren't starving back in the city, but exhaustion quickly put him to sleep.  


Not exactly great fiction, but I thought it would be fun to illustrate a possible scenario.  This micro-story was prompted by the article I read yesterday in the New York Times about Roundup-resistant weeds.  Roundup is amazing.  When we've let the weeds get away from us during winter rainy season, we've ended up filling 54 trash bags with weeds.   We had to pass them out to the trash haulers a few at a time so they didn't flip out.  This winter I applied Roundup judiciously while the weeds were small.  They died a few days later.  Only my wife's chemical-free backyard was spared, and she ended up with several bags of weeds.  In the article they comment that Roundup, plus the Roundup resistant crop seeds have allowed a form of no-till agriculture that cuts costs and preserves topsoil.  The alternative is a witch's brew of other herbicides and/or more labor.  See what the Tiny Farm has to deal with...

Roundup is one of the wonders of chemistry that makes high-output mechanized agriculture possible.   Petroleum and petrochemicals allow a farmer to operate his or her farm with machines rather than people and produce amazing yields.   In the micro-story, I allude to credit collapse, desperate times, migrant labor, and remnant elements of modern technology.   I think soon I need to post some more optimistic fact-based pieces on how to grow food where I live.  I've mentioned mesquite.  More on date palms soon.