... half our productivity without any serious crimping on our capability to support 500,000 or so, because of the massive amounts of food that we are feeding to cows and chickens and pigs. Eating more of that food ourselves and eating meat only once every day or two rather than three or four times a day would turn the trick.

The worry is rather if we scale down to half our productivity and then scale down to half or a quarter of our productivity again as the midwestern heartland shifts to dryland farming and the dryland farming terrain turns to desert.


I've been accused of being a Marxist, yet while Harpo's my favourite, it's Groucho I'm always quoting. Odd, that.