Lori Alexander: Everybody should farm

[jenny_islander]

People/families have never been self sufficient. If you somehow manage to learn all the skills needed to create a shelter, ward off pests and other wild animals, plant and harvest a garden, hunt meat, do any repairs necessary, build a well, keep the well operating, make your own clothes out of plant matter and animal hides, do your own dental work, do your own surgeries, tan your own leather, cobble your own shoes, build your own fishing equipment, build your own farm equipment, test your own water for safety, well, then you get mad props from me, because I don't think there is anyone who can literally live off the land without the help of another human being or technology anymore.

--snip--

Even "ancient wisdom style" wilderness survival books--Tom Brown and so on--presume that you're out there with a steel knife, which presumably you didn't make yourself. Tom Brown actually outlines a complete list of survival activities that, he says, will take you from shivering under a tree to sleeping with a full belly in a dry shelter with a fire smoldering outside--but you have to have a knife.

The only small groups that have ever been able to go all their lives without trading for something vital live/d right on top of deposits of tool-quality stone. And they breathed in a lot of smoke from crude firepits burning whatever they could scrounge, and they died with their teeth worn to stumps, because they chewed hides with them all the time to soften the hides for making clothing. And they were old and bent at forty.

[jenny_islander]

I thought God liked herders, not farmers. That's why he's our shepherd instead of our gardener. We can't do both - rancher vs. farmer is literally one of the oldest conflicts in the book! (No, really. Cain was a farmer, Abel a shepherd, God preferred Abel's sacrifice, sibling rivalry came to a head, you can't trust those farmers who put up fences everywhere.)

Though if you want an easy life with less work, I hear hunter gatherers do pretty well. Can't support a large civilization that way, though, and I imagine it limits your ability to have lots of stuff.

If you live on the migration route of something numerous and meaty, you can build relatively large communities with plenty of places for storing and displaying wealth. But yeah, hunter gatherers who have to follow the game have like a duffel bag's worth of stuff each. Including communal supplies and tools.