Bill Hearne got home to find his wife hunched over a tablet, face pale and drawn. He sat down beside her. “What’s wrong, Alice?”
“The new USDA Farm Report just came in, and I don’t know which is worse, the statistical data or the verbal reports.” Alice tilted the tablet to let him see the columns of numbers, although he didn’t have enough context to really appreciate them.
Still, he made a show of skimming over them before admitting his own ignorance. “I’m not really all that current on agricultural matters, sweetheart. As busy as my own work keeps me these days…” He shook his head. “Although I thought this plague only affects humans.”
“Bill, you and I were both raised on farms. We know just what it takes to bring a crop in, to keep livestock.”
Now there was a truth. He’d been raised on a dairy farm north of Madison, while Alice had grown up on a wheat farm not far from Duluth. But while both of them had loved the wide-open country of their childhood, neither had been over-fond of the back-breaking work of farming, the white-knuckle vagaries of weather, and had sought careers that took them elsewhere: himself into the Air Force and then NASA, Alice into the life sciences and agronomy.
“Now consider what happens when a lot of the labor force starts falling sick. Crops don’t get planted or harvested, and worse, livestock isn’t getting taken care of. Sure, it’s a lot more automated than it was when we were kids growing up, going out every morning before breakfast to do our chores and still getting to school on time. But it still takes someone with a loader to fill up those automatic feeders, and if everyone on the farm is laid out flat with illness, what happens when those feeders run empty?”
Alice wasn’t a total stranger to livestock, even before she became Shepardsport’s Chief of Agriculture and unofficial county agent to all the outlying settlements with Zubrin hobby farms. Although her dad and uncle had raised wheat for sale, they’d always had a pig or two and a coop of chickens for the table. But it was a far cry from five hundred head of Holsteins waiting for their twice-daily milkings and concentrates feedings.
“That’s not good. I remember some winters we’d get snowed in so bad the milk truck couldn’t get out to us .We’d have to dump milk so we could keep milking. Otherwise the cows’d go dry on us.”
“Which means there are going to be whole herds of cattle all going dry at once. And that’s assuming they have access to pasture, like on your dad’s farm. A lot of the big dairy farms these days keep their cows inside and provide them with hay all the time. Even if they’re running robotic loaders, it’s only a matter of time before those things get wedged from one thing or another. If nobody’s around to reboot them, what happens then?”
She paused to let it sink in. “And then there’s the hog farms. I’ve got a report here from one of the big ones in Iowa. Ten thousand head of hogs, all in confinement buildings. Or there were when this started. By the time someone got out there, more than half the herd was dead of starvation. They’re not even sure how many died, because the stronger ones ate the weaker ones.”
Bill could believe it. He’d heard some horror stories when he was growing up, of neighbors savaged by an aggressive or hungry hog. And he’d hunted razorbacks with Braden Maitland, back in Texas before the Expulsions. “They’ll probably have to wipe that whole herd out. There’s no way it’ll be safe to try to fatten the survivors back up and try to take them to a slaughterhouse.”
“They might not have any choice. They may not have anything to feed them. Heck, from some of the things I’m reading, we may be looking at serious food shortages in the grocery stores.” She looked straight at him. “Not just like back in the Energy Wars, when you couldn’t always get fresh fruits from Chile in the winter. I’m talking the shelves being barren, without even the basics. And there’s not going to be a damned thing we can do about it up here. Sure, we’ve solved the problems we had right after the Expulsions, when our population doubled, and doubled again. But even with a surplus, it’s not going to be nearly enough to make up for all the food that’s been lost dirtside.”