What Happens When Nobody Knows How to Grow Food?

[RobertPummer]

Most of us know how to buy food.


Far fewer of us know how to grow it.


That difference doesn't matter much while trucks are moving, stores are stocked, electricity is running, and somebody somewhere is doing the farming.


But what happens when those systems stop working?


In The Good Earth Saga, I started playing with that question on a much larger scale. Earth itself has been pulled out of its familiar place in the solar system. Technology can solve some enormous problems, but it can't make ordinary human knowledge unnecessary.


Eventually somebody still has to plant a seed.


Somebody has to know when to plant it, how to save it, how to protect the crop, preserve the harvest, feed animals, repair tools, and teach the next generation what they've learned.


That led me to a question I hadn't expected:


Have we become more knowledgeable, or have we simply become more dependent on other people knowing things for us?


I'm curious how science-fiction readers see it.


If modern supply systems disappeared tomorrow, what practical skill would become valuable first?


The complete Good Earth Saga is free to read at the Planetary Roundtable:


https://planetaryroundtable.online/library.html

 

[Cicero]

Jonh Christopher did a novel called The Death of Grass 1956 in which a disease wiped out wheat on global , Civilization very quickly collapsed in a Mad Max like fashion.

 

[Hobbit]

Jonh Christopher did a novel called The Death of Grass 1956 in which a disease wiped out wheat on global , Civilization very quickly collapsed in a Mad Max like fashion.

And reviewed here, back in 2009!