What is the most stable food production method?

TotallyHuman@lemmy.ca to Asklemmy@lemmy.ml – 89 points –

Crops can blight, animals can get diseases. I don't know much about hydroponics but I know that bacteria are a concern. What food source is the most reliable, the least likely to produce less food than expected?

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This reads like a Rimworld post.

I don't think there's a Rimworld community on Lemmy and I'm not going on Reddit anymore so I'll just throw this comment into the void and hope some fans are out there. 👋

Also in Rimworld terms the answer is corn (if monoculture) and send everyone to harvest at the first sign of blight.

But in both Rimworld and real life, a monoculture strategy isn't sustainable. Diversifying via multiple food sources reduces your risk of disaster leading to starvation.

Rimworld is awesome. But I guess I was thinking in terms of "all crops" being one type of food source. In Rimworld, you can't get multi-year droughts that make growing anything almost impossible. In real life, you can.

I was going to say hydroponic rice. It grows so quick and if anything happens it's back up in 7 days.

The problem with corn is that it takes so long to grow that you get a wealth spike when harvesting it and if anything happens to the harvest you can be at risk of starvation.

The trick is to always keep roughly a year worth of corn stored, and only sell off the excess.

After the initial 'getting the base running' I usually pay merchants that accept it in corn, up to the amount where they end up giving me all their silver on top of what I wanted to buy.

!Rimworld@lemmy.world

@Rimworld@lemmy.world

Yeah idk how to link it. Here: https://lemmy.world/c/rimworld

My first thought when seeing the title was also Rimworld. Glad to know others are fans of the corn monopoly.

and send everyone to harvest at the first sign of blight

That sounds like a good strategy until blight happens in the middle of a massive invasion.

I still do mostly corn, but with smaller fields with gaps in between. Makes it easier to take fields out of use if I don't need them and they'd just be wasting work time, and I can ignore blight without losing too much if something else is going on.