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?
Diversity is the most stable plan. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket. Get food from multiple sources.
Likely Algae. Good luck intentionally getting less
Intercropping, preservation of biodiversity, rotation of crops… There is no magic bean, but in the long run basic conservation combined with advancement of plant genetics is the only realistic path forward, in my professional opinion
I think the answer is potatoes. Other root vegetables might be equally reliable.
Not what I heard from an Irishman…
But jokes in poor taste aside, yeah. I’d have to agree. A lot of grains can also do really well, but potatoes are hearty, have a lot of what you need to live, and require no attraction work to make into food after you dig them out of the ground. Onions would also be high on the list, but aren’t as viable for keeping you alive as long when eating them, nutritionally.
Kinda hard to have a stable food system when an imperial power is stealing most of your food in a rather genocidal fashion!
Jerusalem artichokes > potatoes
Yams FTW.
Irish Potato Famine would like a word
The problem with the potatoes in Ireland at the time is that they were basically a monoculture and all had the same susceptibility to the same diseases.
If you grow them as they’re traditionally grown in Central and South America, you have hundreds (or thousands!) of varieties of potatoes planted in different climate zones by utilizing mountains. You have basically no risk of a total crop failure as long as it rains or you can irrigate them.
One possibility is breadfruit. We, realistically, can’t depend on one though. Even the most robust staple food will still have some sort of vulnerability so it will always be of benefits to have several.
Probably not the answer you’re looking for: Afaik if you store grain properly it can last over 30 years. So as long as you’re growing too much to keep your silos full and save, and you store enough, it should be incredibly reliable.
To answer your question. When Agriculture was first “discovered” by humans ~20,000 years ago, the most stable production method was diversification. You should have a variety of crops with overlapping growing seasons and overlapping macro nutrients. For even more security, introduce animal husbandry that can graze on your fallow land and if you have enough land make sure to have multiple distinct herds that never interact with each other except for breeding every few years.
Additionally ensure your food production isn’t dependent on a single harvest season, nor a single climate. Have fruits/legumes/etc other lower yield crops that can be substituted in case your primary grains are hit with blight, or some other environmental factor.
Now let’s introduce some technology. Create several fast growing monocultures that allows you to get multiple harvests in a season that can be used for animal feed, storage and supplementing any deficiencies in the primary human food supply.
tl;dr. Make sure you have multiple methods of food production that are all viable at different times of the year. Ensure that the failure of any one or two of them isn’t a problem for overall yearly production, and ensure that they are independent on each other.
10,000 BCE unless something dramatic happened this year.
Seize people’s grass lawns and tear out 2/3 of roadways and convert the land into community gardens and ponds, grow food where the people are. Probably some form of population control.
Pie in the sky though. We’ll probably just start eating bugs by the container ship load and then go extinct instead
Probably soon it will be some form of single cell protein like methanogen. Being able to grow with less sunlight is pretty valuable.
Everything the body needs
Cannibalism.
Until the prions get you.
Cells in agar in an incubator. Anything above that scale is bound to have losses and fails. How much depend on how controlled your environment is.
Photosynthesis
Foraging if done in a low density area. Natural food sources grow in an extremely diverse way and any blight or parasite will only ever effect a portion of edibles around you.
