by Nathan Surendran
“Collapse is living in the same conditions as the people who grow your coffee.” Vinay Gupta
When I talk to people who visit supposedly ‘under-developed’ countries, they come back saying two things – “They’re the poorest people I’ve every met, and they’re the happiest people I’ve ever met”. I do not say this to trivialise the material hardship, nor the societal coordination and governance challenges that are apparent in these countries, but I do believe that in inevitably returning to somewhere closer to the global average in terms of material standards of living, Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, Democratic (WEIRD) nations stand to gain as much, perhaps more, than they lose, in the medium to long term.
If, and this is not guaranteed, they can avoid starving in the meantime.
Understanding this, what follows is my attempt to put together a starting point for a practical emergency adaptation initiative for the people of Southland – and by extension anyone in a temperate, food-producing region facing a severe and extended fuel shortage – to think clearly about the gap between where we are now and where we might need to be.
This is worst-case planning. I want to be clear about that, and I want to say it once rather than hedging every paragraph. The more comprehensive thinking and plan (although still only a starting point) is in the accompanying white paper, No Fuel, Still Fed: A Regional Food and Water Security Framework for the 2026 Energy Crisis, published in support of this article – I welcome feedback and comments on the Google Doc version here.
Accompanying the whitepaper is this article which I published yesterday attempting to summarise the foundational knowledge (covered more extensively in my energy white paper) about why this situation is probably much worse than you understand: Hoping the Ship Arrives Isn’t a Strategy.
This article below is an action oriented vision for you to share with your neighbours, your councillors, your local farmers market organisers, etc. In the comments I will put links to my own letters to local councils.
The gap that matters
We are in April. We are going into winter in Aotearoa New Zealand.
Those two facts are the starting point for everything that follows. Because if diesel supply contracts severely – and the trajectory since the Strait of Hormuz closed in late February suggests it will, perhaps not immediately but soon – the most dangerous period is not some distant future. It is the next six months. Winter reduces outdoor food production. Spring planting for calorie-dense staples can’t happen until August at the earliest in Southland. Main-season potatoes don’t harvest until January. The gap between what we can produce right now and what we will need if supply chains fail is a specific, calendar-bound problem.
This is not the time to wait and see.
What we can actually grow through winter
The good news, which tends to get lost: you can grow food in Southland right now. Not calorie-dense staples, but real food – greens, herbs, roots – that provide nutrition and keep skills and networks active over the winter months. The key is cover.
A basic tunnel house – timber posts, polythene film, 6 metres by 3 metres – costs under $500 in materials and can be built in a day. Clearlight polycarbonate panels from Mitre 10 or PlaceMakers add rigidity and light transmission. Under cover, these crops are realistic from an April sowing in Southland:
Radishes: 4-6 weeks. Rocket and spinach: 6-8 weeks, cut-and-come-again so they keep feeding you. Asian greens – bok choi, gai lan – 6-8 weeks and cold-tolerant. Lettuce: 8 weeks. Spring onions: 8 weeks. Silverbeet from established plants can be harvested now and for months.
For calorie contribution, the crops that can actually be planted now and deliver before spring: broad beans, planted April-May, harvest September-October. Carrots, sown now under cover, harvest August-September. Garlic, planted now, harvests November-December. These are the crops worth prioritising in every garden that can take them.
What we cannot grow our way out of, no matter how many tunnel houses we build: the six-to-ten month gap before main-season calorie crops come in. That gap has to be bridged. Which brings us to the animals.
The standing food reserve we already have
New Zealand has 5.9 million dairy cattle, 3.8 million beef cattle, and 23.4 million sheep. Those animals, on the hoof, represent a food reserve that requires no diesel to have already been produced.
The question is how we manage that reserve. Left unmanaged, what happens in a fuel crisis is: farms can’t get tankers, can’t afford feed supplements, can’t process and move stock. Animals die on farm or get sold for almost nothing in a collapsing market. Processing works get overwhelmed and then close. Farmers are destroyed financially. Meat that could have fed people is wasted.
Managed, it looks different. The animals most appropriate for early culling are the ones that consume feed without contributing to breeding recovery: castrated male cattle (steers) at or near finishing weight, old ewes past productive life, excess rams. These are the standing food reserve. A planned, compensated destocking programme – one that pays farmers fair value, spreads the processing load across months, and clearly identifies which animals are retained for breeding and herd recovery – turns a crisis into a managed transition.
This needs a working group to organise it. It needs all interested parties at the table. It needs to start before the crisis forces the decision, not after.
Draft animals: the idea that sounds radical but isn’t
I recall presenting this to the Regional Council back in 2015 or so, and a receiving a derisory comment from a councillor along the lines of ‘I expect you think we should all go back to horse and cart’?
Before diesel, NZ farms were worked by bullocks. Castrated male cattle trained to pull implements – ploughs, cultivators, wagons. The last generation of New Zealanders who knew how to break and work bullocks is in its seventies and eighties now. Some of that knowledge is still held in the working horse and bullock community. Heritage ploughing competitions. A few farms in NZ keep the tradition alive.
If we start training bullocks now from this season’s male calves, they are working animals in 18-24 months. They run on pasture. They require no diesel input once established. And the knowledge to work them – if we move to capture and teach it in the next few months – does not have to be lost.
This is not the primary food system solution. It is additional insurance for small scale food production to feed our communities, in a world where diesel is scarce or gone.
Water: the thing people forget until they don’t have it
Safe water matters as much as food, and it is more fragile than most people realise.
Most of NZ’s water supply is electrically pumped and chemically treated. The electricity, in most regions, is primarily hydro – which provides genuine resilience. But the chemicals are imported. Chlorine compounds, coagulants, pH adjustment chemicals – these come through supply chains that are under exactly the same stress as fuel supply chains. A treatment plant that runs out of coagulant is a plant that can’t treat water safely. The fix is not complicated: councils should be auditing their chemical stocks right now and targeting 12 months of supply on hand. This is a procurement decision. It costs money but not very much, relative to the alternative, and i recognise it may already be the case.
For secondary water supply for households, the answer is rainwater, not fantastically expensive large scale engineered systems vulnerable to the same risks as our existing supplies. Most NZ houses could collect rainfall off their roofs already. Two IBC tanks (the 1,000-litre food-grade plastic cubes you see on farms everywhere) connected to a downpipe with a first-flush diverter provides 2,000 litres – 20-40 days of water for a family of four at emergency use rates. Cost: approx $400. Time to install: an afternoon. Design and installation guidance here: “To Catch the Rain”.
The first-flush diverter needs to be sized properly – roughly one litre per square metre of roof catchment, so 100-150 litres for a typical house, not the 20-litre devices sold as “rain head” diverters. A proper diverter means the first contaminated flush from the roof goes to drain, and clean water fills the tank.
For drinking, clean metal-roof rainwater in low pollution environments is generally safe without treatment. A simple filtration system increases safety considerably and can be made from a few buckets and some gravel/sand/charcoal. If in doubt: boil for one minute. Or use unscented household bleach at 2-4 drops per litre, wait 30 minutes.
For more ideas about things you can do personally (which can be facilitated / enabled by local government) Wise Response published this collaborative guide to Mutual Aid:
The money problem nobody is talking about
Food and water security in a fuel crisis are comprehensible problems. There’s a harder one underneath them: what happens to the local economy. New Zealand is already paying an extra $200 million per week in fuel costs at the time of writing. That money is money that isn’t being spent into the local economy, and is inevitably coming out of rent, mortgage payments, food budgets, and profit margins which have turned negative.
When energy supply contracts, money behaves strangely. Nicole Foss – who chose to be based in New Zealand, and specifically in the South Island, because she concluded it was one of the better places to be for what is coming – wrote about this extensively. Her article on Solution Spaces is worth your time to read. The core of it: financial crises typically arrive before supply crises. And when they arrive, the problem is not a shortage of skills or food or labour. It is a shortage of the medium through which those things can exchange.
People stop spending. Businesses close. Rates arrears for Local Government increase rapidly. Workers have skills that nobody can afford to hire because nobody has money circulating. The economy seizes, because the monetary token system used as a means of exchange stops functioning adequately through mismanagement and structural barriers.
The historical response to this – used in over 450 cities during the Great Depression – is local scrip. A council-backed complementary currency, accepted for rates payments, that keeps local exchange moving when national money tightens. The most documented example is Wörgl, Austria, 1932: a town of 3,000, 30% unemployment, municipal council votes to issue stamp scrip backed by a deposit of the town’s own funds, unemployment dropped significantly in 13 months, all planned infrastructure works completed, plus new housing, a reservoir, a bridge. It ended only when the Austrian central bank shut it down – not because it failed, but because it worked too well and threatened the national currency monopoly.
By creating scrip currency and accepting it for rates payments, councils can create a medium of exchange that allows farm produce to be paid for outside of a primary financial which will probably be a system in crisis.
A council that has thought about this before the crisis, and has a resolution and design ready to activate, is in a fundamentally different position from one that tries to improvise it under pressure.
In New Zealand, voluntary complementary currencies are legal. Council acceptance for rates requires only a council resolution. The design is not complicated. The political courage to consider it is the scarce resource.
What you can do this week
If none of what you’ve read is familiar territory, start here.
Get seed. Kings Seeds, Egmont Seeds, Yates, etc, and local garden centres and the Riverton Environment Centre. Target: kale, silverbeet, spinach, carrots, broad beans, garlic, radishes, rocket, bok choi. These are not decorative choices – they are some of the most productive, cold-tolerant, fast-maturing food crops available in Southland’s winter window.
Build or borrow a tunnel house. If you have a section, a community garden plot, or access to a school or marae garden, a basic polythene structure opens up year-round growing. Here’s some ideas from builditsolar.com, and some thoughts on improving winter performance: Reinventing the Greenhouse
Get two IBC tanks and connect them to your roof. $300-600, an afternoon, and you have a 2,000-litre buffer against any water supply disruption.
Store food. The government recommends three days. The IEA has called this the greatest global energy security challenge in history. Three months of basic dry goods – rice, oats, lentils, dried beans, canned protein – is not hoarding. It is prudence.
Talk to your neighbours. Not metaphorically. Knock on the door. Find out who has skills, who has land, who has resources, who has needs. The trust networks that make community resilience possible are built in normal times, not during emergencies. We can still call the current moment normal times, just barely…
Contact your councillors. Both Invercargill City Council and Southland District Council will receive have received this open letter this week.
In it I am asking them to act on the issues in this article and in the accompanying white paper. If you think this matters, tell them you think it matters. Do the same for your own council using this as a template!
The closing thought
Vinay Gupta’s definition of collapse is not a threat. It is a description. For most of human history, and for most people currently alive, life is lived closer to the conditions of the people who grow the coffee than to the conditions of the people who drink it. The carbon pulse – that extraordinary, anomalous, geological-scale event that we in The West lived inside without seeing it – is near its peak. It will start coming down.
How it comes down is, in part, a choice. Not a choice that any one government or institution or individual makes alone. But a set of choices made by communities, households, farmers, and councils in the months and years ahead that will collectively determine whether the coming transition is managed or chaotic, equitable or brutal, conscious or blindly reactive.
The white paper linked to this article is the starting point for a plan. It is not a plan for comfort, or for preserving what we have. It is a plan for keeping people fed, watered, and economically connected to each other through whatever comes next.
Get moving people, the clock is ticking..!
Download the companion white paper here:
Nathan Surendran is Principal Consultant at Schema Consulting Ltd and Chairperson of the Wise Response Society. His white paper “The Limits to the Energy Transition: What Physics Means for New Zealand’s Economy” is available here.
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