Instead of taking section reports at a general meeting, rather like a corporate board meeting, Reggie Waite had decided to meat with each of his section heads privately. It meant fewer schedules to co-ordinate, and he could be more flexible about the time he allowed for each report. With things in such an odd state, he’d found that a lot of times one department had little or nothing to report while another had a lengthy report.
Right now he was talking with Alice Murchison from Agriculture. She’d reported on the ongoing repairs to the irrigation systems that had been compromised by defective tubing, and given her projections on the next cycle of harvests.
However, he also knew that she had some strong connections with the agricultural reporting system back on Earth, as well as more personal connections to the land. No doubt she did not see them as relevant to her work up here, so she’d not included them in her report. So he asked her directly what she knew.
Yes, the question caught her more than a little by surprise. It took her a fumbling moment to pull her thoughts together and relate what she had been reading from various agricultural reporting services she subscribed to. She openly admitted that the information had to be incomplete, for the simple reason that a lot of county offices and local grain elevators were shuttered as a result of the pandemic.
“In fact, I’d be just as ready to trust the anecdotal evidence I’m getting from our family dirtside. Bill and I both grew up on farms, and members of our families still own and operate them. Nephews and nieces for the most part, since our siblings have gotten to that age where they’ve pretty much retired from the day-to-day operations. But from what I’m hearing, they’ve all been able to maintain production as long as they can keep their equipment in good repair, but there’s a lot of question about getting the food to market. According to Bill’s brother, they’ve had to dump milk as often as they’ve been able to get the milk truck out there to pick it up. Apparently there’s been a quiet sort of exchange with the neighbors, but strictly speaking, they could lose their Grade A certification if anyone official were to find out.”
“Understood.” Reggie considered some of the stopgaps they’d used in the first weeks and months after the Expulsions began, when they had to find some way to absorb all the new people and keep them breathing. “What about your family?”
“We were always grain farmers. Winter wheat, mostly, with a side of short-season soybeans to maintain soil nitrogen levels. So it’s not quite the same issue as a dairy farm has, but my niece and her husband have apparently been having trouble getting fuel deliveries. There’s some real question of what’s going to happen if they can’t get the crops harvested for want of diesel fuel to run the combines and the tractors to pull the grain wagons. Thankfully we never got quite to the point where we switched to custom harvesting, because I’ve heard a lot of farmers are discovering they can’t line up anybody, and they just don’t have the equipment to do it themselves. We could be looking at a situation where there’s ample food in the fields, but it rots for want of the wherewithal to harvest it.”
“Like something out of the old Soviet Union.” Reggie recalled some of the things he’d heard, of the problems that lingered even a decade or more after the end of central planning, simply because access to resources remained so uneven. “And we’re going to have a ringside seat to the consequences, and not a damned thing we can do about it up here at the top of the gravity well.”