Originally posted by Folcwine01:
An idea... If your worried about food availability, take advantage of the easiest food storage solution. Get non-modified seeds, potatoes, etc. Stuff that will blend in ok. Go plant in in some fields in your AO. Not like the local park. In the woods if they will take shade, in meadows, where you go to FTX. Make sure its good hardy plants, not stuff that will smother.
Potatoes are great for this concept, a 10 or 50 lb bag can make a lot of gut fuel. They go in lots of soils, they are short, dark and will spread if you don't dig them up. All you need is a spade and knowing the area they are in and you'll have atleast something to put on the plate, raw or not.
Smart, I never thought of that on a matter of scale but the concept is valid. I had a bag of onions here start to sprout faster than I was eating them, so I took the extras out to an old garden spot in the back yard and just planted them. You could do the same with potatoes for sure.
One thing about sustenence farming is that it tends to be labor intensive. Modern farms generally have low population density and high infrastructure dependence due to economic reasons and limitations of available on-site labor. The workforce for labor intensive farming tends to be mobile and transient to some degree, but often falls into a pattern of working a circuit of farms through the seasons.
Inserting a group into that flow, or simply having some equipment and knowhow to quickly convert a rural property into a village commune type farm is one manner in which a fighting group can be integrated to some degree with a support group. This however, would also mean small, highly mobile and perhaps fairly elite fighting units which enjoy a concentration of support resources while the support structure (the mobile but economically sustainable families) support the activities of a fairly open security group, and then a very secretive fighting group.
A concentration of forces would be the various fighting groups converging on an operations area within proximity of a hotspot, and at that, supplies get pre-staged and sent in. I could see a fighting group being deployed to a hotspot with enough money to say, rent some low end worker housing or property, do local recon, then a few support groups move in with a concert or trade show, but stay a while, setting up support resources for the fighting group, or specialized support groups setting up resources for fighting and security groups. Some of the groups would be food production, storage and service specialists.
One type of specialist is the foraging specialist. That person is an expert at obtaining supplies and food. Not just in hunting, but barter and trade. Someone with economic savvy and the ability to obtain game and farm sourced meat. Back when I was wheeling and dealing guns, it was not particularly hard to find some backwoods teenagers who would trade or sell fresh salmon or elk at very generous rates if they were provided small amounts of cash, ammo and the occasional $89 Moisin or SKS. Their parents encouraged the self sufficiency.
If you are a guerrilla without local support, and the locals are not even willing to do business with you without price gouging then you are in a hostile area and have no business fighting for anyone's rights or freedom there unless your common enemy is so repulsive that you feel ultimately honor bound to do it. It is one thing to be a well paid professional engaging in conflicts supposedly on behalf of the general public, entirely another when you are a volunteer being forced to support yourself in a hostile environment.