https://dalek.zone/videos/watch/47e894ab-97b9-48bf-81fb-e7349dd992bc A reader who bought the book sent me a question I've been chewing on: if local food systems fail, doesn't the national or global supply chain act as a safety net? It's a good question, and the answer is yes — with one large caveat. A global food system genuinely does mitigate the risk of local production failing. My argument isn't that we should abandon it. It's that it should be the backup plan, not the only plan. Right now, in the developed world, industrial agriculture isn't the backup — it's the only option most people have, because almost nobody grows any of their own food. People will take on debt before they'll grow fifteen tomato plants. So I walk through the system I actually envision. Start with the farms around the cities, growing the grains and the bulk of the seasonal vegetables. Then retro suburbia — people growing a real amount of their own food, trading fruit from a tree on an elderly neighbor's property for tomatoes or grain. They can't grow year-round calories because space is the limit, so they're buying from those peri-urban farms and converting it — sauerkraut, kimchi, grinding corn into meal, wheat berries into flour. Then the urban core, growing what suits low-energy settings like mushrooms indoors, and planting every available space to food-bearing perennials: nuts, grapes, fruit trees, rhubarb, perennial spinach. And if all of that fails, yes — you still have the industrial system behind it. The other half of this video is the water work, which is where the same idea shows up physically. I couldn't till because of the rain, so I've been digging terraces instead — Fanya Juu terraces, where you dig out and throw the soil uphill to make a berm. I need a couple of ponds and I need to decide where to send all this water. Everything I showed you is water leaving the property, not being stored on it, which is a necessity — without that drain, everything downhill floods. But storing water on a hillside and depending on systems off your property turn out to be the same question. For us the luxury items are chickpeas (too humid here, they rot before you get them out), olive oil, bananas, and milk — we don't have a milk cow, so cheese and yogurt are luxuries too. That's not a problem. It just tells you what's actually worth trading for. What I want is to be able to answer the question of what replaces those things before I have to. No schedule, no sponsor, no AI on these. I'd rather you watch on Spectra than YouTube, because it doesn't gather your data and sell it. I post here too, mostly because Spectra is down from time to time. Full guides at loopfarmstead.com Chapters 0:00 Intro 0:11 Unable to till, so I started digging terraces 1:24 This is called a Fanya Juu terrace 1:44 The future root cellar goes here 2:58 How much water came overnight 3:40 This is water leaving the property, not stored 4:27 A reader's question about the supply chain 5:20 Yes, a global system does mitigate risk 5:40 It should be the backup, not the only option 6:28 Start with the farms around the cities 7:02 Retro suburbia, and what they can trade 8:34 The urban core contributes too 10:22 Chickpeas are a luxury item here 12:07 Diets used to be bioregional 12:50 Our diet should be based on the place we live 15:31 Iodine, and what we genuinely cannot grow 17:49 Live now as if in an energy descent future 18:09 Cheese and yogurt are luxury items for us 20:29 Global agriculture should be our backup plan 20:53 Outro Thu, 01 Oct 2026 08:12:37 GMT https://validator.w3.org/feed/docs/rss2.html PeerTube - https://dalek.zone https://dalek.zone/lazy-static/avatars/958461d1-6a1e-41b1-962e-d8f79c4e0f1b.png https://dalek.zone/videos/watch/47e894ab-97b9-48bf-81fb-e7349dd992bc All rights reserved, unless otherwise specified in the terms specified at https://dalek.zone/about and potential licenses granted by each content's rightholder.