Chapter 8: Settling the Dries By Building Heavy Agriculture, or How We Outcompete the Capitalists

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As I noted earlier, an aspect of the dialectic in history is its penchant for combination and recombination to spawn irony. In the Cold War, the socialist states were far behind their Western counterparts in heavy industry, and often their Five-Year Plans would emphasize the development of heavy industry at all cost, often de-emphasizing or even blatantly robbing agriculture in the process. How fitting and dialectically ironic it will be, then, for the Marxist-Lincolnist collectives of this generation to be devoted to boosting agricultural production and ecological preservation first and foremost. Our Five-Year Plans will have carbon budgets where once there were steel production quotas.

How can we boost agricultural production while sequestering more carbon? By transitioning from monocultures to polycultures like the food forests they grow in Cuba, we can dramatically increase yields per acre at the "cost" of slightly higher labor inputs. In other words, if your food gives someone else a job, you get to grow more of it on less land. Some of the farmland thus saved can be used for housing climate refugees, the extra work can help employ the unemployed immediately, and the rest of the excess land can be turned over to growing the densest possible local forest cover to improve conservation of local resources and the absorption of carbon.

It is at this point that I should stop being coy here, and admit that I am already working on this myself. I did research, and found that Elko County, Nevada, had the cheapest and least-regulated land in America. It's also, not coincidentally, the most conservative part of Nevada. (The lack of bougie regulations to fine and pester the working class is another way conservatives and socialists secretly work to one another's interests.) I bankrolled this expedition by selling off some of the books I was given in college by retiring professors, and bought a small plot of land in a ghost town. A comrade bought the next plot of land south. And using conservative homesteading praxis, hard work, and found resources, I'm turning this cheap land into an agricultural collective.

You can achieve an American-enough standard of living building yourself a tinyhouse underneath mounded earth. Seal it in with a layer of plastic and the scavenged wood you build it out of will not rot. The mounded earth keeps it 55 degrees Fahrenheit summer or winter, saving the costs of heating or cooling. A simple solar electric system costing less than an average month's rent can power fans and electric devices. A separate room insulated with mounded earth, where snow gets piled during wintertime, can store water for crops in this desert as well as keep food cold without the need for the vast electrical and capital expenditure of refrigeration.

I'm currently in the process of building myself a house on those principles. It will be 8 feet by 14 feet, and half of it will be a sunroom for growing the most delicate crops indoors. Coffee, citrus, cannabis (what!? it's legal here), olives and the like will all be grown in here. The rest of my crops will be grown in a greenhouse taking up the entire back half of the property (the legal description might as well read "what if a standard town lot, but sagebrush and nothing?"), and the space in between will be used to grow redwoods. An ancient redwood forest once grew in Nevada five million years ago, before the uplifting of the Sierra Nevadas divided the Humboldt River from the Sacramento. The needs of the climate emergency suggest it had better start growing again, and my backyard is as good a place as any to start.

Nevada is a great place for comrades to homestead because greenhouse food forestry is not only immune to the water scarcity that limits all other agriculture here, but can actively foster the rest by saving water. Food forestry done under a greenhouse recycles 95% of the water used for the crops, because they transpirate the water into the air, just for it to be caught on the greenhouse walls, re-condense, and fall like rain over and over in that microclimate. The only water loss is water rejoining the water table, and harvesting crops with water in them. The latter is less than 1% of water loss, and the former can be negated entirely by placing plastic tarps underneath the greenhouse as well as above it, hermetically sealing it off from the water table. Then, the greenhouse essentially needs to be watered once, and then it's good for almost ever - even in the middle of a desert. The land is currently priced as if it were useless for anything but running cattle. We should take advantage of this capitalist utopianism before they come to their senses.

Of course, any greenhouse is not being rained on by the scarce rain in the desert. If a greenhouse takes up half of your property, then effectively you've doubled the amount of rainwater falling on the half that isn't greenhouse, because the water falling on the greenhouse tarps will be redirected. This means you can get away with growing a couple crops outside that can't cut it in a desert, so long as there are walls on the property sturdy enough to keep out the cattle and more importantly, the fierce wind. One of these crops could and should be redwoods.

The Nevada desert is desert not because the rain doesn't fall, but because it doesn't stay put. The water table is relatively high for a desert, but the vagaries of state water law make it difficult to dig wells. However, there is no law against building retaining pools to hold onto the water that falls, and no law against planting trees with roots deep enough to drink that water table, like redwoods. The redwoods, in turn, will decrease water evaporation by 25% anywhere their shadows touch, as well as transpirating the water they drink back into the air, where it will fall like rain somewhere else in the valley it's planted, and its tall branches will scrape the water out of clouds whose rain doesn't always quite touch the ground before evaporating. And in winter, the redwoods and the snow they hold will insulate everything below them, creating a more temperate climate all around.

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