It's pretty clear to most on the LATOC Forum that the Cornucopian paradigm is failing. Those of us determined to avoid being subject to the shrinking, yet intensifying Welfare/Police State realize that we're going to have to adopt a simpler, perhaps more primitive way of life that does not depend upon GovCo infrastructure.
Some envision a return to the Dark Ages... Perhaps even the Stone Ages. And that might be inevitable if the collapse were to happen overnight and without warning. But this is not the case. We've been warned, and things are unraveling over time. So we should be able to take steps to do better.
Living without petroleum-enabled, Cornucopian resources isn't really uncharted territory. In fact, it was the norm right up until a handful of generations ago. After millennia of experience, our grandparents
(add as many "greats" as is appropriate for your generation) had worked out a pretty decent way of life by the dawn of the 20th Century.
We've learned some new things since their time. And that will surely come in-handy, as we will have to get-by without the 19th Century infrastructure they had backing them up. But they also had an expression about being
"too clever by half", which described people who were likely to fail with new and complex solutions to problems that could easily be solved with tried-and-true approaches. Many people today, including some on the LATOC Forum, tend to be too clever by half when they could benefit from the wisdom of our elders instead.
Transportation and Farm Traction. When it comes to independent transportation, the too clever by half ideas include electric cars and scooters, hybrid electric cars, solar-powered cars, and "devout" walking. For farm traction, a lot of folks love to propose oxen or more unorthodox animal power, some kind of electric or biofuel tractor, or relying strictly on hand tools.
The problem with the electric, solar, hybrid, biofuel, and other modern machinery is that what is available now is scarcely more infrastructure-independent than its petroleum powered equivalents, and tends to be cost-prohibitive. Waiting around for these techno-fixes to evolve and become affordable doesn't get you an inch closer to being LATOC-ready
today. Oxen, yaks, buffalo, reindeer, llamas, and other critters have indeed been used successfully as beasts of burden. But there's good reason you didn't see many of them in-use in America by the late 19th Century. And good luck finding well-broke working teams of any of these, or anyone who knows how to produce them. As for relying entirely on your own two feet for transportation, and human labor for farm work, that's just voluntarily regressing to the Neolithic when we could easily do so much better.
At the end of the 19th Century, there was a fabulous revolution in human transportation. The practical bicycle! Before it was relegated to use by children and recreational enthusiasts by the advent of the automobile, the bike was a means of serious, everyday mobility for many Americans. In some parts of the world it remained a primary mode of transport right through the 20th Century... The things still work just fine today, and you can go buy a serviceable, new one that will last for decades of sensible use for an affordable price at a store near you tomorrow! A small closet full of spare parts and tools could keep you wheeling for the rest of your days.
For heavier transportation and farm traction, there are horses or mules. Faster and more versatile than other beasts, the development of the
collar and hames type harness, which allowed them to work up to their full potential, had an enormous impact on the history of Western Civilization. Like the bicycle, equines were mostly relegated to sport and recreational use by the rise of the automobile. But there are still millions of horses to be found all over America.
Unfortunately, the vast majority of these modern equines are used for riding only. While riding has its uses, you can get a lot more practical work out of horses in harness. But it may take some effort to find fully-trained harness teams and competent horsemen who can show you how to hitch and drive.
Opportunities to learn basic horsemanship are pretty easy to come by. There are many stables that offer riding lessons which will at least show you how to handle and move around horses safely. Competent instruction in hitching and driving is harder to find. A good place to start may be your local Thresher's Reunion or draft horse auction. (
Rural Heritage keeps a calendar of draft auctions and events at
http://www.ruralheritage.com/calendar/index.htm) Another handy resource is the
Small Farmer's Journal. 
Seen at our Thresher's Reunion.
(Click for video.) Keep in-mind that you don't have to start out with giant draft horses and a full outfit. You can get a lot of work out of common horses and ponies.
I did a series of articles on getting started with driving on the cheap a while back which you may find handy.Vegetable Farming. I've personally sworn off ever reading the LATOC Forum's
Food Production and Gardening Section due to the fact that the bulk of the concepts posted are too clever by half. Hydroponics, "no-till", square foot, lasagna, mulch/ ground cover, straw bale, exotic crops, "permaculture", etc., etc... It's not that these approaches and techniques don't work. It's that most of them either require Cornucopian inputs, can't be effectively scaled-up to meaningful production, have serious drawbacks, or were accomplished by previous generations without so much fuss.
Farmers have been identified with plowing for millennia for good reason. Tilling and cultivating the ground works. Food crops are only as good as the soil they're grown in. You don't get healthy minerals from straw bales or shredded newspapers. And you can't keep the weeds from taking over a garden big enough to actually feed anybody by hand.
(Most people grossly underestimate the volume of vegetables it actually takes to support a low meat/dairy diet, and claims about "feeding the family" from a little backyard plot conveniently ignore the calorie-intense flour, corn, sugar, and whatnot they bring-in from elsewhere.) "No-till" is actually the way modern industrial farming is done, relying on chemical fertilizer/herbicide/pesticide programs designed to grow big, pretty vegetables (which tend to be deficient in nutrients and taste compared to those grown in healthy soil).
Gardening is a good way to learn how to grow things. But the doomer gardener should always be thinking in terms of how they could make their garden grow without Cornucopian inputs, and how they could scale-up to produce a meaningful amount of food.
Pre-Cornucopian farming was not just acres and acres of row crops. It was an integrated system of woodlands, orchards, pastures, and more that provided labor, fertilizer, fuels, and most of what was needed to support the operation. If all you've got is a veggie patch, you're not going to make it unless you are part of a community can provide the many things you lack.
Our grandparents had most of this worked-out. The aforementioned animal traction to till the soil and pull cultivators through the rows to keep the weeds in check, as well as to provide fertilizer and work it into the dirt.
Plain old outhouses had the "humanure" thing going-on without the expense of modern composting toilet systems. If you're just trying to feed yourself, some of the less glamorous staples like potatoes, corn, beans, and tomatoes should be a focus. Unless you can sell the surplus, a lot of the other veggies were limited to grandma's kitchen garden because, even if you could grow enough of them to be a significant part of the household diet, they wouldn't keep long enough to be more than a seasonal treat without energy-intensive storage.
Livestock. Meat, dairy, and egg production is another realm in which some people seem intent upon "thinking outside the box" before they even look into the box to find the perfectly good solutions within. Sometimes it's vegans with their quasi-religious dedication to the false notion that an animal-source free diet is sustainable and LATOC-efficient.
(I've been on a vegetable-intensive diet for a few months now, and that means bringing in a ridiculous amount of very perishable stuff that could not possibly be supplied by any garden. So I know better!) More often it's a fascination with unorthodox, exotic, rare, or re-purposed stock. Animals which are hard to find and expensive. That your local vets and other care professionals are likely to be unfamiliar with. That may not do quite so well in a domestic farming situation as you imagine.
Plain old dairy cows, especially the Jersey, produce healthy, high-butter milk as well now as they did a century ago. If Bossie is too much for you, a common nanny goat or two will fill the bill (although the milk is a little trickier to handle). Ordinary chickens are hard to equal as a practical source of eggs and occasional meat. And the hog was recycling all sorts of stuff into useful pork and lard for homesteads long before recycling became "a thing".
Chickens are probably the best place to start for someone with no livestock experience. They're cheap, and a hen-house, coop and tractor aren't that difficult to build. Looking after them isn't exactly rocket science. That's why pretty much every country house had chickens all over the place back in the day. There are plenty of folks around who can show you how to humanely kill, pluck, and butcher the excess birds.
You can even find demos on the Internet.
Hogs are also pretty simple to deal-with and can withstand inexperienced management with few ill effects. Especially if you start out with feeder pigs. You just put 'em in a pen with some shade, keep 'em supplied with water, and provide them with a slop of whatever you have too much of. Produce, eggs, dairy, acorns, etc. They're omnivores with digestive tracts almost as tough as humans. It's best not to interact with them too much because they are the most dangerous animals on the farm, and because... Well... You're going to be cutting them up for bacon, so you don't need to get attached. Before embarking on raising hogs or other large meat animals, you might want to go on some deer hunting trips and learn from experienced hunters how to dress a carcass. Or get someone with that kind of experience to come help you dispatch and butcher your first hogs.
Dairy animals require more knowledge and skill for proper upkeep, as they have longer productive life-spans and need to be handled on a daily basis. But cows and goats were commonplace on homesteads of yore, and caring for them is not as daunting as you might think. A bit of grass. (Dairy cows and goats are pretty adept at grazing tethered, so you don't even need good fences everywhere.) A shed where they get in out of the weather. Common feed supplements. There are lots of good
books on home dairy production. And
Internet resources.Home Heating. There are several trendy alternative home heating approaches among doomers. Geothermal loops, masonry/soapstone stoves, pellet stoves, solar radiator systems, and others. All of which tend to be pricey, both in terms of purchase and installation. Some also have little-publicized drawbacks. Rooftop solar collectors ineffective when covered in snow, when you need them most. Circulation systems dependent upon grid power. Stoves that take a long time to start putting out heat, then keep heating your home through the day when it's already plenty warm enough.
Two of the most common approaches to home heating back before the grid were in basic design (what we now call "passive solar") and good old cast-iron wood stoves. The former was just a matter of letting the sun do its thing. The latter was far more efficient, and easier to install, than a stone or brick fireplace, and could turn a relatively small pile of wood into a very controllable amount of heat which could be started and stopped in fairly short order as needed.
Natural passive solar can be achieved to a substantial degree simply by surrounding one's home with deciduous trees rather than evergreens. Yes, they look rough during the winter, but they let the sun's warming rays through to your roof, walls, and windows. You can even get double service out of the seasonal shade by planting fruit trees. Just opening your curtains and blinds during bright day for a bit of greenhouse effect (especially if you have double-layers of glass), then closing them to hold in the heat at night can do wonders in temperate regions.
People really do make a mountain out of a mole-hill when it comes to wood stoves. But you can get perfectly serviceable stoves dirt cheap if you look around, and everything you need to install them is at Home Depot or Lowes. It's just a cast-iron box full of fire with air-intake vents in the front and a exhaust pipe coming out the top. You put heat proof floor tiles under it (and where embers may fall out when you're tending the thing), situate the stove and pipes where they won't be too close to anything flammable like unshielded walls. A simple damper in the pipe from the stove. Heat-proof accommodation for where the pipe passes through the wall. A strong-supported smokestack that extends well above your roof, and is capped and screened to keep rain and birds out. Heck, just try to find an old country store or someplace where they've been using a wood stove successfully since before we started letting bureaucrats and lawyers design everything and see how they did it. It really isn't brain surgery.
Water. One essential aspect of living in which we sadly cannot emulate our pre-Cornucopian forefathers is the acquisition of safe water. They relied heavily upon surface sources. Creeks, ponds, rain catchment, springs, and shallow wells. Sprawling development, factories, mining/drilling, and industrial agriculture have rendered such sources unreliable and polluted. So we're forced to depend more upon deep wells.
Retrieving water from deep below the ground is a challenge that some propose to meet with some pretty clever approaches. Windmills and direct PV solar DC submerged pumps filling above-ground tanks for gravity-pressure running water are great alternatives to grid-dependent pumping... At least in theory. But both are quite expensive to install and can be difficult to maintain.
Early in the Cornucopian era, our grandparents figured out what has become the standard for rural, deep-well water supplies. A high voltage, AC, submerged pump feeding into a fairly small pressure tank, then out to the taps. Because such current feeds well over long wires, the electric conduit need not be over-sized. This type of pump can bring up water at high volume and pressure, so there is no need for a large storage tank, and the water can be left safely underground until it is needed. The pressure tank can push water out through the pipes whenever taps are opened, with the pump only running intermittently to charge the tank pressure back up when it drops below a set PSI. Thus the pump typically runs only a few dozen minutes per day... This kind of deep well pump set-up is compact. (Usually about the size of a dog house.) It's relatively inexpensive. And it's pretty-much "install and forget", as the components can last decades with little or no maintenance. If such systems didn't rely upon the grid for power, they'd be doomerrific.
Click for Solar Well Pump Conversion Thread. Unless you're building your doomstead from scratch, you'll probably find an AC submerged pump and pressure tank set-up already in-place. For a few thousand dollars, you can install alternative energy collection (a couple of solar panels and maybe a small wind turbine), a controller, a few deep-cycle batteries, and an inverter to create a free-standing power station to run the established well pump system off-grid. It'd be wise to have some spare parts (especially for the inverter), and to learn how to recondition the batteries. But the whole thing will cost substantially less than a DC-direct pump system (which requires several times the solar panels and/or wind turbine wattage), needs no water tower, or major construction (as is needed to support a deep well windmill pump). And the parts that will need maintenance aren't going to be way up on a tower, or have to be fished-up from hundreds of feet down.
Critical Existence Fail. There's a lot to be said for unorthodox approaches and innovation. If doomers had the time and money to invest, we could no-doubt apply many of the breakthroughs and developments of recent years and create doomsteads and LATOC communities that would enable a post-crash way of life substantially easier and more modern than one based on pre-Cornucopian technologies.
But most of us don't have tons of money laying-around. And none of us have a lot of time left to work with. The difference between my plow horse and many other doomers' home biofuel production and farm equipment is that
I actually have the plow horse, while their system exists only as a plan, waiting for the resources to build it to materialize... A cow or goat in the yard will produce a lot more milk than the yak or exotic breed animal you were
planning to get before the crash hit home and you lost your chance... When fuel distribution fails, the bicycle in your closet will be a whole lot more useful than the high-tech, solar-charged, lithium-ion car you didn't quite save up the money to buy.
Not pictured: The vast fleet of good bicycles you could have bought for the same price. At some point, the wheels are going to come completely off the economy. 9-11, Katrina, and the Gulf of Mexico demonstrated that we can't count on a lot of warning, and never know just where or how the crippling blow will strike. But when it does, only
what you have actually done to prepare will count. Your doomer drawing board will be useful only for fuel... And even that only if you actually have a wood stove rather than a mere plan to get a soapstone stove somewhere down the line.
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