Farming in Creation

[Erinys]

That quote actually describes 4-5 total harvests: 3 of food, 1-2 of fiber crops.

[Lundgren]

The average village is able to plant three fields for food and a fourth and fifth for fiber crops and still keep two fields fallow for animal pasture.

This is not the same as sequential crops as discussed previous in the thread, but having several fields that each give one or more yields per year (well, depending on if they use crop rotation or having a field rest.

[Erinys]

So the multiple harvests are more like having one field in summer wheat, and a separate field in winter wheat?

That would make it far more reasonable. Instead of a excessive overabundance of food driving the value into the dirt, you have a hefty supply that's evenly spaced around the year so there isn't really a lean season. I don't know enough about farming to know whether this reduces the chance of a famine -- but with the weather so strongly controlled, the gods of pests probably controlled too, and the crops diversified to avoid overdependence on any one plant, I'm guessing famine is rather rare unless it's artificially caused by idiotic command-economy market manipulations.

[Lundgren]

So the multiple harvests are more like having one field in summer wheat, and a separate field in winter wheat?

Multiple harvest would be using the same field; first for the summer wheat, then after reaping sowing the winter wheat.

This one from the original post:

Most areas can harvest three crops of rice a year, while the Blessed Isle and the Scavenger Lands bring in five rice crops in the most fertile areas. This vast bounty encourages large and complicated societies, for one peasant can nourish many people with her labor.

Means that three fields of food would mean 3x5 harvests. As I found and posted earlier in the thread, there are a few small areas in India that can produce 3 harvests of rice in a single field, so that would give 3x3.

But the quote Isator Levi found don't say anything about several harvest of food per field, so it can be 3x1. With control of the gods and everything, it might mean 3x2, but it can also just mean each field is just harvested once per year. Having assistance from sorcery and gods might just mean each field gives an optimum amount as it is never to much sun or to much rain.

[Isator Levi]

@Isator Levi

It also implies another thing that keeps land unoccupied :
"the wilderness is so dangerous, lonely farms are a rarity"
And then
"Almost every acre not part of the vast swaths
left as land preserves is under heavy cultivation"
So is it dangerous or just something that needs to protected? Also it implies to me that most of the land is cultivated

I think that when it says "almost every acre is cultivated", it's referring to the densely settled flat lands, with places like mountains and highland forests being the barely settled wilderness.

Village every 3 miles(5 km) one village per 25 km^2 and assuming Blessed isle is 2000kmx2000km (4M km^2) it is 160000 villages assuming 100% land usage with 100 people per village is 16 000 000 people , with 500 per village it's 80 000 000 still low and without including city populations and less than perfect land usage

Wouldn't 80 million out of 100 million mean there's a sizable urban population while still maintaining a majority of peasants?

I just thought about it longer asumimng ratio of 1 peasant per 4 city dwellers

Why?

[Isator Levi]

Reading some more stuff branching away from Wikipedia article about the open field system.

For instance, the idea that a family would need about ten acres to rely on the land for their livelihood.

As well as the concept of the "Malthusian trap", the idea that technological advances that increase population number but not actual standard of living mean that there is stagnancy in incomes.

Depending on how that intersects with the Blessed Isle, it might allow for the idea of most people being farmers even when there is enough food to allow for population growth.

I mean, people have repeatedly talked about enough people to force industrialisation, but... the Realm doesn't have the technology or the political context for that. Why should abundant people go off to the city? Property and lifestyle there is more expensive, and there won't be any actual jobs for you.

[Synapse]

@Synapse, see the other big thread going on in here, Population in Creation. Earth Prime (the real world) has 7.3 to 7.5 billion people running around. Creation, by canonical (stupidly low imo) numbers never cleared 4 billion. Ever. Even at the height of the First Age, much less any point after, and by the AoSorrows, canonical numbers are less than a billion humans in all Creation, total. The 2 to 5 ratio greater numbers is correct, just the other way round, Earth having bigger than Creation in most cases.

EQUIVALENT AGES, Origato. Pre 10th century earth had around 120 to 300 million people, most of them in China, while Creation easily has 500 million, and might have as many as four times more.


So yeah, Creation has more time and landspace to produce more grains. It also has far more people than those societies we know that had similar farming techniques.
Do you guys really, REALLY want to spend the week arguing about how that is feasible or realistic in a world where gods walk among us, and we punch them in the dick? There's no need to worry too much about that, so instead worry about how to make fun stories out of all this!

Problem: It looks like there's too much crop output to feed people.
Solution: Less people plant. Less Efficient farming is made (meat, flowers). Lack of Food is a localized problem instead of an endemic production issue (like, you know, the modern world)

Don't worry about explaining why people have too much food. Worry that the local Wheat God wants so much more wheat to be planted the wildlife is dying. Worry about a flash flood caused by an elemental court's "heated arguing" that turned hundreds of acres of farmland into fetid swamp.

[Isator Levi]

Do you guys really, REALLY want to spend the week arguing about how that is feasible or realistic in a world where gods walk among us, and we punch them in the dick?

Does punching gods in the dick make the nutritional requirements of people change, or alter logical mathematical implications?

There's no need to worry too much about that, so instead worry about how to make fun stories out of all this!

The game provided a book about financial policies and logistics. It has areas of concern with which to make fun stories.

[Kyeudo]

Does punching gods in the dick make the nutritional requirements of people change, or alter logical mathematical implications?

It can, if you punch the right gods.

[Ludek]

Why?

I just wanted to get population of Blessed Isle to be around 250M .. with I think is canonical number (but when I think of I can't tell you where I read that number .. it could be forum wisdom) whille keeping farmer density within range suggested by text you have given given.All I could think of was increasing population of cities and then wondered what it can tell me about Blessed Isle.

[Erinys]

Reading some more stuff branching away from Wikipedia article about the open field system.

For instance, the idea that a family would need about ten acres to rely on the land for their livelihood.

As well as the concept of the "Malthusian trap", the idea that technological advances that increase population number but not actual standard of living mean that there is stagnancy in incomes.

Depending on how that intersects with the Blessed Isle, it might allow for the idea of most people being farmers even when there is enough food to allow for population growth.

I mean, people have repeatedly talked about enough people to force industrialisation, but... the Realm doesn't have the technology or the political context for that. Why should abundant people go off to the city? Property and lifestyle there is more expensive, and there won't be any actual jobs for you.

Alright, but in that case they would reduce their labor and produce less plant food. Either they'd start producing other stuff like cash crops or meat or crafts or alcohol, or (since apparently tons of jobs are just illegal in the rural villages!) have more leisure time. Leisure would probably result in something else happening (sex, theatre, legal crafting, sports, whatever) which might be production of a different sort. But they wouldn't bother to make excess food.

Which means that either the number of harvests, or the acerage under cultivation, would decrease. And again the result would not be the same as the numbers in the books.

(It's already been said by others that exporting all of it wouldn't work, and in any case the Threshold societies would look different if it did work.)

The only thing I could imagine would be a top-down command economy in which the Empress demands mountains of food be burned or left lying around to rot. I don't know if the books paint the Realm as the type of command economy that can do that, nor what the Empress (or local House leader, etc.) would gain from mountains of rotting rice. Is this supposed to be some sort of idealized expression of the Immaculate hierarchy claptrap, where peasants are proven to be incapable of anything except producing grain? Does the Order teach peasants to take pride in how much food they can afford to throw away? Does the Imperial tax agency have an actual use for the stuff?

It would be hilarious if the Empress was secretly raising behemoths in the Imperial Manse, but that's really silly and probably not the intention.

[Isator Levi]

Wouldn't the idea that you get more food out of less land mean that any given amount of land can support more people, so more and more people spread out into the countryside where they can feed themselves on minimal plots of land? This seems like the kind of logic that says that an Irish family being able to live off of the potatoes you could cultivate on tiny plots of land should have led to an emancipation of the agrarian class.

[Erinys]

And again, that doesn't fit with the low population and the statement that there are no such things as isolated farms.

[TGUEIROS]

I've been reading the thread and am wandering if the material that is being referenced explicitly states that those 30% are used on rice. From what I understood 30% is arable and/or farmed, but numbers weren't given on what percent of that is used on staple crops and what percent is used in cash crops, be they food, fiber, or other uses (essential and vegetable oils, drugs and fuels). Maybe out of those 30% only 5-10% are used for basic food crops and the rest are luxury items used for internal markets or trade. I see the Realm as being a great consumer of spices, silk, oils, drugs and myriad other items that are far less productive on the land x product ratio. Some of these items my require permanent use of the land, such as orchards and can't be cycled to produce food in the off seasons.

Maybe you just need to play with that, 30% is farmlands, ok. But its not 30% rice patties or corn fields.

[Isator Levi]

I think isolated farm means the kind of thing you had in the American frontier; a lone farmhouse, miles away from anybody else, in which you cultivate everything that you can survey. That's distinct from villages using an open field system, in which the poorest locals can still scrape by on the tiny plots right outside of their cottage, have a pig and a few goats to raise on the common pasture, and provide much needed labour for the farmers lucky enough to have rights to a few dozen acres.