FARMLAND IS NOT A LIFEBOAT

"The world’s most powerful investors have been advised to buy farmland, stock up on gold and prepare for a “dirty war” by Marc Faber, the notoriously bearish market pundit, who predicted the 1987 stock market crash.

The bleak warning of social and financial meltdown, delivered today in Tokyo at a gathering of 700 pension and sovereign wealth fund managers...

...“The next war will be a dirty war,” he told fund managers: "What are you going to do when your mobile phone gets shut down or the internet stops working or the city water supplies get poisoned?”
Times Online

I guess my question would be what good will farmland do you if everything goes to hell in the cities and you still live there?

I live in the country and I hate to break it to the money guys but just owning land does not make it productive. It takes a lot of hard work to get a piece of ground to produce enough to support you. And what about networks? You choose to live in the city and the people you know will live there, too. You can't expect to pick up and come out here and have instant friends. And believe me, you WILL need friends when things come apart. You may have money but it won't mean a thing if the system that supports it has disappeared. You can't eat gold, either.

People in the country will try to help if we can but if there is a dirty war we'll be busy just getting by out here and working with the people we know. Real skills will have a market. Playing games with other peoples money will not. So ask yourself before you escape to the country; what do you bring to the party? Your land will be fallow, your skills will be useless and no one will know who you are. We will never have seen you at church, at social functions or working on community projects. Your kids won't have gone to our schools and you won't even speak our language. All of the jokes that your sophisticated, urban friends and you have made about us poor hayseeds will come back to haunt you. You won't understand our culture and you may not be able to accept it.

If you truly believe that the world as we know it is about to come apart then you need to make significant changes to your life now, not after the event happens. If you knew that the Titanic was going to sink would you have boarded anyway, assuming that there would be room on a lifeboat?

Dr. Faber's advice to buy farmland does not go far enough. Buy farmland and move to it, now, while the gettin's good. Establish yourself in the community and show you can be trusted and that you have some useful skill. Learn to be one of us because all of us will have to work towards a common goal together if we are to survive what I believe is coming. We won't have the time or the resources to carry others that should support themselves. Those that don't work won't eat.

The thing is that if you can't see moving to the country when times are good because the rural life just doesn't appeal to you, what makes you think you'll last out here when the SHTF? Get your mind right, boy! (I suddenly feel like Strother Martin.) What is coming will require as much of a mental adjustment and toughness as it will a physical toughness. If you can't make that adjustment now you won't make it later.