Planning for the Zombie Apocalypse

Hey, don't blame me. Would you read a blog with a title like "Agricultural Options for Easton?" I have every confidence that our excellent public safety departments would be able to defend our borders from the coming Zombie Apocalypse especially if they had assistance from those folks who have been stockpiling Stinger missiles in their backyard as a show of support for the 2nd Amendment. The big question is would Easton be able to feed itself if it was shut off from the rest of the world?

As Chairman of the Agricultural Commission, I was looking for some goals for promoting agriculture in town and came up with the idea of feeding everyone in town sustainably. Now if you can't live without bananas, avocados, and oranges, you may want to move to further south, but the rather surprising answer I discovered is yes Easton could probably grow enough food to feed 23,000 people. Let's assume that there will be signs of the approaching zombie problem (the election of Rick Santorum for example) that would allow us time to stockpile seeds, animals, and farm equipment.  I'm also assuming we wouldn't want to change from our truly bizarro American diet overnight. That means you'd need to grow 83 pounds of tomatoes, 87 pounds of potatoes, and 24 pounds each of sweet corn and melons per person. Everyone would need 32 pounds of cheese as well. That's two million pounds of potatoes per year!

Easton isn't exactly Iowa so my calculations used crop yields from the Massachusetts Department of Agriculture. I also assumed, based on the few zombie movies I've seen, that we'd like to keep all our woodland for hiding places just in case the living dead break through. I then calculated crop needs for apples, melons, peaches, pears, strawberries, bell peppers, broccoli, cabbage, carrots, cauliflower, cucumbers, green beans, lettuce, onions, peas, potatoes, summer squash, sweet corn, and tomatoes. These are the crops I had both consumption and yield data for. Obviously, there are other useful crops that we could grow here like turnips, parsnips, and rutabagas.  Given average crop yields for the state we'd need only 750 acres to grow all the crops mentioned above. That would fit into the current open fields of the town especially if we include those big backyards that draw the ire of the smart growth urbanizers. How can you call it smart growth if you aren't thinking about food security disasters like attacks from the living dead?

Two things are missing from these calculations: grain and meat. As I learned from watching King Corn, modern corn meal breeds of corn produce giant yields so I think we could at least bake corn bread. Wheat never grew well here so most old time farmers made bread from "Rye and Injun" meaning rye and corn meal. We'd also probably want to add some barley and oats. I'll have to figure out the space needs for this one of these days.

A lot of protein needs could be taken care of by ducks and chickens who can be useful eating insects and weeds in the field and require very little space. Cows would be more of a problem. They take up a lot of space and aren't as efficient turning food into protein as poultry. Still dairy products would seem to be needed. Maybe we should turn to goats, sheep and pigs. No, I'm not suggesting milking pigs, but they are good at turning food scraps into meat. I'll have to work out the details for animals someday. In a pinch you could always eat brains; my zombie friends tell me they taste delicious:-)

What's the point of all this? While I don't expect Easton to feed itself anytime soon, I think we can definitely have MUCH more locally grown produce that is fresher and more nutritious. Using local produce we could also cobble together a healthier, less processed diet. What about the cost? More on that tomorrow.