The main industries in Lancaster are agriculture (mainly crops and dairying), coal mining, salvage and textiles. The last had gone into serious decline in the years before Doomsday and by 1983 most of the area's cotton mills had been closed and the machinery scrapped. Following Doomsday the few surviving mills had lain idle for a number of years as the population focused on food production, but in the late 1990s the food situation had stablized enough to allow the workforce to diversify and with an increasing demand for textiles both within the Duchy and abroad (which at that stage meant the Celtic Alliance) the surviving wool and cotton mills were brought back on line, with the latter being adapted to process locally produced wool and bast fibres (hemp, linen, nettle etc) as cotton was no