“Preparing for a Pandemic: Stage 3: Grow Food if You Can [COVID-19, hort, US, Patreon]”

[Kenny]

Link post

This is not the Stage 3 I thought I was going to be writing. That has been re-designated Stage 4, and this is getting abruptly inserted.

Over the last 48 hours, I’ve become aware of what I just posted about, in “Pay Attention”. In addition to the things I posted, I’ve heard and seen a variety of little things and not so little things – this evening I was finally briefed by a friend who does business in China and has friends in Wuhan – which boil down to four points:

• Food supply chains in other countries have already been disrupted at every point along the line – production, distribution, and vending – by the coronavirus;

• We are beginning to see evidence of that happening in the US;

• We have every reason to believe the US will do even worse with managing its supply chains than most other countries for a whole host of obvious reasons, from not be able to intervene as effectively as China did (and China had some weeks without fresh veggies in Wuhan!) to treating its largely undocumented population of migrant farm workers terribly, from having inadequate PPE for people working in the supply chain to probably having a more severe outbreak with a larger percentage of workers incapacitated.

• There has already started a run on garden supplies in the US.

I think that if you can manage it, it would be a good idea if you grew food. Particularly fresh vegetables.

...

This blogger, siderea, has been (at least) as roughly prescient as anyone else about the COVID-19 pandemic and this topic – an impending drastic disruption to our food supplies – hasn’t received much attention here (AFAIK).