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Comment by LargoLasskhyfv | Hacker News Reader

Why do you exclude farming? Even if the tractors and other machines would still work, where would the harvest go under such circumstances? By which means? Think about how industrialized all that shit is meanwhile, with 'precision agronomy' by means of GPS, and so on? And as you said yourself: Transformers. Cooling for perishable stuff without electricity? Wanna rely on some Amish with horsedrawn carts?

Edit: Will the stocks of fertilizer last long enough, before some normalcy sets in again?

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Many farmers still have really old diesel tractors around. These things run fully mechanical, sans the starter motor maybe. If there is one thing farmers are good at, it's in-field improvised repairs.

Refrigeration is mostly an issue with meat and milk, but eh, humans have managed to do fine for millennia without it.

Fertilizer however, oh boy, that will be a nightmare. We can get by now that we know about stuff like nitrogen fixers or the beneficial effects of livestock like chicken, but it requires a serious effort to rethink mindsets.

You know that most of the chickens we have won't make it for long, outside?¹ Because they are all highly 'optimized' breeds? Even coming with a handbook for that breed, several hundred pages long. Defining exactly what to feed when in which amounts and intervals, but also temperature and lighting. Where again does one get that stuff, when everything is chaos? Could more normal, robust ones be bred and distributed fast enough to compensate? In the required amounts?

¹As folks from PETA and the likes have discovered when freeing them, several times in multiple places. Beginning since at least two decades ago, meanwhile.

I doubt farmers have enough spare pre-electronics equipment sitting around to run the entire farm at the same scale. I'm sure they could improvise a way to continue farming, but output would be substantially impacted.

Humanity managed to do fine for millennia by existing in a state of frequent malnutrition and a not insignificant number of deaths from starvation. And it was never in a world with the population density we have today.

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