Tag: Jennifer Redmond

Jenn Redmond had spent most of the morning going through inventories in preparation for her touch-base meeting with Alice Murchison. At least now she knew all the things she needed to ask the head of Agriculture, but she had very mixed feelings.

This time she was going down to Alice’s office for the meeting, which made sense. They both needed to actually see what the other was doing.

However, when she arrived, she discovered that Alice was already in a meeting with someone else. From the sound of it, something had gone seriously wrong with the drip irrigation system in one of the greenhouses, and they were having to hand-water some five hundred square meters worth of tiered vegetable plantings. Just to make it complicated, it would be in one of the high-carbon-dioxide intensive vegetable production greenhouses, which restricted who they could press into service. No one without oxygen-delivery certification could wear the self-contained breathing apparatus that was necessary to work in that atmosphere, which meant she was having to pay highly-skilled technical personnel to haul buckets of water.

But if those plants go into permanent wilt and die, people are going to be going hungry. Even as that thought came to her, Jenn recalled her experience in victory gardening back during the Energy Wars. In fact, depending on exactly what they are, even if they do come back, the yields are going to take enough of a hit that meals could get a lot smaller.

Apparently whoever was talking with Alice was on the technical side of things, because he said he’d take a look at it just as soon as he could retrieve his breathing rig from Engineering. Alice thanked him, and then the door slid open and a tall, muscular young man stepped out.

“Hello, Miz Jennifer.” Juss Forsythe was a clone of Ed White, and Ken’s all-around troubleshooter and fix-it man. “I hope I didn’t cause you any trouble.”

“No, not at all.” The words came out awkwardly, in a rush. “You obviously are dealing with a critical matter, and a routine meeting can wait.”

“Thanks. I’d better be going now.” With that, Juss hurried away to complete his errand.

At that point Alice gestured for her to come in and take a seat. “Sorry to keep you waiting, but we have a problem.”

As Alice explained the problem, Jenn listened attentively, although she was already aware of the situation. “Do you think you can save those plantings?”

“We hope so. That’s why we’ve been working so hard to hand-water them while Juss works on the irrigation system. That kid’s sharp, and it really helps that he’s finally old enough to get his oxygen-delivery certification so he can work in those greenhouses.”

“That’s good to hear. Right now, we have enough food that we can keep everyone fed a diet that meets NASA nutritional standards for the next three months. It’s going to be monotonous and not necessarily very filling, but nobody’s going to starve..”

“Which is good to hear. There are some things I can do to help make things better, but there are some foods that simply require too narrow of growing conditions for us to be able to produce them in a lunar greenhouse farm, or at least produce them in the quantities we need to feed the entire community.”

Jenn had a fairly good idea of what those were. She’d talked with her husband about whether the chemistry people down at Engineering might be able to synthesize some of the flavors of certain spices that had to be brought up from Earth. But even those would take time to work out, particularly if there wasn’t that much to work on.

We may just have to focus on keeping everyone fed, even if it isn’t the tastiest food.

As Chief of Agriculture, Alice Murchison was well aware of the ultimate destination of the products of her department. However, she seldom “went backstage” to the industrial-grade kitchens that fed not only Shepardsport, but many of the smaller research outposts that didn’t have their own food production and preparation facilities.

However, today she needed to talk with the Chief of Food and Nutrition, and given the sensitive nature of what they needed to discuss, it was really best to talk face-to-face.

So Alice walked down the long corridor filled with the scents of food being cooked. Some for today’s meals in the dining commons or to be taken by deliverybot to people eating at their jobs or classes, but others to be dehydrated and vacuum-packed for shipment elsewhere. This place was a lot larger than it had been when she had first come up here and taken charge of the settlement’s greenhouse farms. But that had been right after the Kitty Hawk Massacre, when the settlement was undergoing a period of explosive growth as a result of the Expulsions. More than once she had come here to discuss priorities in expanding food production and been handed a chicken to strip or beans to snap while they talked.

Today Jennifer Redmond was alone in her office, looking over recipes on the monitor of her workstation while making notes on a tablet. Alice tapped at the doorframe, and Jen looked up. “Come in, sit down.” She pulled a folding chair out from a nook behind her desk.

Normally they might spend a little time in small talk, but today things were sufficiently urgent that they launched straight into the matter at hand without worrying about social niceties. “As if trying to keep a dirtside pandemic from getting up here to the Moon, Bill just told me that it looks like the Sun may be screwing up our spacelift capacity for as long as a month.”

“I heard.” Jen made a sidelong glance at her computer. “Ken’s been keeping me up to date on the situation. He’s been so busy down at Engineering with this situation that we hardly ever see each other, but we keep in touch, mostly texts but some e-mail. According to what he’s passed to me, Astronomy thinks that the folks dirtside may be overstating the case for an extended period of solar storms, but there is still a heightened possibility of additional CME’s, and until they actually happen, there’s no way to be sure which way they’ll be going.”

“Which means we’ll want to be prepared for the worst case. Both the loss of certain supplies from Earth that we can’t produce locally, and the possibility that sufficiently severe solar storms could affect local production.” Alice retrieved her tablet. “The greenhouse farms were built with sufficient shielding to stand an average-strength solar storm, but it’s still possible that being hit with an X-class CME could result in radiation levels that will negatively affect plant growth. Of course different plants have different levels of sensitivity to radiation, and domesticated plants tend to be more sensitive than their wild relatives, for the simple reason that we’ve compromised hardiness in search for more desirable characteristics for our tables.”

Jen gave her that smile that wasn’t quite bless your heart, but came close. “Oh, yes. I have raised a garden in my time, and I know all too well the relative hardiness of weeds and the plants you actually want.” She laughed. “At least we don’t have to worry about that up here. And as long as you’ve got a decent stockpile of seed against emergencies, we should be able to replant and get back to business soon enough. Unlike on Earth, where losing a crop at a key moment can mean losing the entire season’s production.”

She returned her attention to her computer, pulling up what looked like a database. “According to our records, right now we have sufficient supplies to provide minimum adequate nutrition for everyone in the settlement for two months. Of course that would mean some pretty bland and repetitive meals, and no treats. Everyone would get a little thinner, and I’d need to be careful to have enough variety that we don’t end up with appetite fatigue, but we’re not looking at a famine unless we completely lost all production for at least three months.”

Alice realized that she really hadn’t been keeping that close a watch on what was happening to food when it left her department. But then she had plenty on her plate already,, so it was easier to consider her job done when the harvest was delivered to Food and Nutrition’s processing and storage facilities.

At least they did have the advantage of an institutional culture that planned for anti-fragility. Just as mechanical systems were built with triple redundancies to make sure a single-point failure couldn’t become a catastrophe, supply systems were arranged with capacity for stockpiles, rather than being run just-in-time. From the beginning of long-term settlement of the Moon and in-situ resource utilization, everyone had known that a large community could not afford to be one problem away from running out of something vital. Of course it helped that they ran everything as closed to closed-cycle as possible, although there were always losses.

“OK, now let’s get down to the nitty-gritty of specific steps we’ll need to take to make sure that as much as possible of our food production capacity is protected. We’ll want to prioritize breeding stock and reserve seed supplies, but we need to plan for a variety of scenarios, best-case and worst-case.”