In the morning the team of engineers arrived as did the labourers. I spent an hour or so detailing my plan with the killbox to them, they seemed perplexed as to why I would want such a structure in the middle of my beautiful yard.
By midday the enginers improved upon my design and returned their final plan along with a list of materials and tools needed.
It's good that I acted before hand and purchased a few CAT escavators so now while the materials are being ordered, the killbox can still make progress. I appointed the senior most engineer as the project manager and left him with the duty to supervise the construction of the killbox.
Once the construction of the killbox began the system informed me that my performance in wave 9 granted me some nice buffs.
[Boon of Construction: Increases construction speed for the time period]
[Effective period: 89 days, 14:16:23]
[Boon of Agriculture 1: Increases crop and animal growth rate for the time period]
[Effective Period: 89 days, 14:16:22]
[Boon of Agriculture 2: Increases crop and meat yield for the time period]
[Effective Period: 89 days, 14:16:21]
[Boon of Population 1: Increases Fertility among citizens for the time period]
[Effective Period: 89 days, 14:16:20]
[Boon of Population 2: Increases Immigration rate for the time period]
[Effective Period: 89 days, 14:16:19]
Hmm nice.
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From our discussions about become self sustaining, both Anna and I agreed on a single thing, food is of the utmost priority.
You can't build a country without food. It's the biggest vulnerability of any nation. Starve the citizens and the country will collapse in on itself before long. So while we still can we will stockpile immense amount of food from the local markets.
We will store a few months worth of food physically in the barn and the rest we will own as futures from local farmers.
You see, a future is an agreement between two parties to buy/sell and item at a decided price at a specific time in the… well, future. Futures are mostly traded as a financial derivatives but you see they serve a secondary use as well, of 'pre-ordering' something.
As I have no intention of selling the futures for a profit, I instead sent all the local farmers deals offering twice the market price for 40% of their yearly yield.
Ofcourse you can't be too reliant on others so I'll be creating some farmland on my property that can sustain our population entirely on its own. As such, today I left out to survey some open flat land. I was told that there were some natural plains just a 2 kilometres or so out from the stables.
Apparently these plains were once connected to the grazing fields near the stable but my great-grandfather decided to separate them so he had this tree line planted.
I'll be honest, I don't really know the first thing about what to look for when searching for the ideal farmlands. … Maybe near by water sources are needed? In hindsight I should have called a professional, after Mr Plates retired he now does farming work in his ranch right? He's still staying in the guest mansion as I have yet to confront him, I should call him here.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
"Ah, Jean." The old man hobbled out of the car.
"I haven't been able to get a word in with you yet, after I concluded my research you abruptly began digging around the hole and- ah right about the hole, Miss Jean that hole is-
"Yea yea I know the hole is unnatural, deep sea microbes in its soil and what not. Listen I have another assignment for you, Mr Plates can you please inspect this field and tell me if it's suitable for farming and if not what adjustments do I make here?" I interrupted the old man.
"Huh? You are giving me another task? Wait, how did you even learn about the deep sea microbes?"
"Nevermind that, can you please survey this land."
"… Ok."
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Great, now that I delegated the task to a retired man I can focus on something else.
Water.
Yes the conversation of being self sufficient on drinking and commercial water also came up last night. We discussed a number of ways we could go about it.
We could:
- Find and use natural sources of flowing water. Wyoming has a number of different rivers, the closest to my ranch being the Yellowstone river which basically divides my ranch in half. We could place a filteration station and use the flowing water of the Yellowstone river.
But if that's the only source of water we have, it would become a major vulnerability, for example if the United States found out that we are trying to become independent they could just cut off or divert water supply of the Yellowstone river and we'll be forced to surrender within days.
- Alternatively we could import all our water needed. This is just as bad of an idea as it sounds. We need to convince atleast two other states to defect with us, in order to get any sea access or one state to defect to get land access to Canada. Even if we somehow manage to do that, giving a foreign country controll over a resource as cruicial as water is definitely a sure fire way to get exploited.
- Lastly we could find a natural reservoir of water to supply us, lakes or underground reservoirs. There are a lot of lakes in Wyoming but the land under the lake is federal land and so pumping water out of it will be iffy and cause a lot of unwanted questions, we are trying to be discrete here.
Hence why, we will be going with the last option and hopefully find a large enough reservoir to pump water from beneath my property. It's easy to be hidden and if the question arises I can make a better excuse than my I'm pumping it out of a lake.
So tommorow we will be scanning for underground water reservoirs along my property.
Now that the first and second pillars of civilisation; food and water are somewhat in progress, let's talk about the third; electricity. Electricity is essential for any modern civilisation and the way we will harness electricity is… Oil!
You see, my great grandfather build a vast sum of his wealth from pioneering the global oil market. As such he was always afraid that one day his beloved empire would slip away from his hands (pun intended). Guided by his fears, the old man bought a huge "emergency oil field" as a back-up fund, that he could use to build up his riches again if he ever lost everything he had.
And that emergency oil field is a part of my very estate, this was among the things I learnt when my father laid on his deathbed.
All records of the discovery of this oil field were meticulously deleted from history as such even the US government have no clue that the Choppafeller estate is built upon the eight biggest oil reservoir in the entire country.