Re: (TFT) Agraculture, economics and population growth.

["Quite Confused" <Confused3141@hotmail.com>]

Mr. Taylor, remember this from a few days ago?

> >>>>>May I suggest a reason for the existence of guilds?
>
> >> Excellent analysis! I love this kind of stuff...
>
> Well cool. I'll post a whole list this evening.....

Well here we are several evenings down the line and I still haven't posted a
list. There's a reason though. Farms. Out of 40+ structures farms are the
stickiler. I had done research on production rates in the Middle Ages quite
a while back but umpteen moves later I couldn't find my notes. Enter the
internet and suddenly I have more info than I know what to do with..... I'll
try to get the building list henpecked in tonight over a couple of bloody
marys but until then here are some of the high points of what I've found on
farming. Maybe someone will find it intresting if not useful.


Common Tasks for Middle-Aged workers

January & February - work indoor  repairing hunting nets, sharpening tools,
making utensils - on mild days gather firewood, prune vines, mend fences.

March - work in the fields, plow fields  and cultivate fields

April - clean ditches and pruning trees, fixing sheds, hauling timber,
repair roofs

May -  sheep cleaning and shearing.  planting and field maintenance

June - mowing hay crop and raking it into piles

July - harvest grains, bundle sheaves, weeding gardens

August - threshing and winnowing of grains, grinding of grains into flower

September - fruits picked and dried or stored, grapes picked and pressed for
juice and wine

October - gather nuts, roots, berries and mushrooms, fields plowed and empty
fields sown with winter wheat, repair, cleaning.

November - firewood gathered, split and stacked for themselves and the lord,
pigs and cows slaughtered and meat smoked,  flex and hemp processed to make
thread and rope

December - trim trees, grape vine pruned, hunting

Adapted from Nikola-Lisa, W. "Till year's good end: a calendar of Medieval
Labor/" 1997
(Great Children's book on middle ages.)

Basic daily requirements are 2410 calories, and 65 grams of protein.
[newspaper article]
0.75 g of protein/kg of body mass/day [Marvin Harris, The Sacred Cow and the
Abominable Pig]


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Carrying Capacity Hunter-Gatherer  0.1 person / km2
Dry Farming  1-2 person / km2
Irrigation  6-12 person / km2

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"Population densities of hunter-gatherers are typically one person or less
per square mile, while densities of farmers average at least ten times
higher. ... nomadic hunter-gatherers have to keep their children spaced at
four-year intervals by infanticide and other means, since a mother must
carry her toddler until it's old enough to keep up with the adults. Because
sedentary farmers don't have that problem, a woman can and does bear a child
every two years."
"One can still harvest up to seven hundred pounds of grain per acre from
wild wheat growing naturally on hillsides in the Near East. In a few weeks a
family could harvest enough to feed itself for a year." [Jared Diamond, The
Third Chimpanzee]


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"The unmodified rain forest can support perhaps one human being per square
mile." This is about 2.6 / km2. By practicing swidden agriculture, the
Sembaga support about 165 people / km2. [Roy A Rappaport, "The Flow of
Energy in an Agricultural Society"]
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"Over the course of its recorded history, Russia has averaged one bad
harvest out of every three."
"The typical yield ratio in medieval Europe as 1:3 or at best 1:4, the
minimum yields which make agriculture worth while and create conditions of
sustaining life. ... In the late Middle Ages, western yields rose to 1:5,
and then, in the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, they
improved further to 1:6 and 1:7. ... Like the rest of Europe, Russia
averaged in the Middle Ages ratios of 1:3, but unlike the west, it did not
experience any improvements in yield ratios during the centuries that
followed. In the nineteenth century, Russian yields remained substantially
the same as they had been in the fifteenth, declining in bad years to 1:2,
going up in good ones to 1:4 and even 1:5, but averaging over the centuries
1:3 ... Such a ratio generally sufficed to support life. ... The trouble
with Russian agriculture was not that it could not feed its cultivators but
that it never could produce a significant surplus. ... By the end of the
nineteenth century, when good German farms regularly obtained in excess of
one ton of cereals from an acre of land, Russian farms could barely manage
to reach six hundred pounds."

In the 1840s, August Haxthausen "compared the income produced by two
hypothetical farms of equal size, 1000 hectares of arable land and meadow
each, one located on the Rhine, near Mainz, the other on the upper Volga, in
the vicinity of Iaroslavl. A German farm of this size, in his estimation,
would require the regular attention of 8 male and 6 female peasants, 1500
man-days of seasonal hired labour and 4 teams of horses. The total operating
expenses would come to 3500 thalers. With an estimated gross income of 8500
thalers, it would return annually a net profit of 5000 thalers. In
Iaroslavl, only because the short farming season demands a heavier
concentration of labour, it would take 14 male and 10 female peasants, 2100
man-days of hired labor, and 7 teams of horses to accomplish the same work.
The resulting expenses would reduce the profit by nearly a half, down to
2600 thalers."

The sokha, the Russian scratch plow, penetrated at most 10 cm, but required
little pulling power and was ten times as fast as the plow. [Richard Pipes,
Russia Under the Old Regime]


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Irrigated taro fields in Hawaii yielded up to 24 tons per acre, the highest
crop yields in all Polynesia.
The hunter-gatherers of the Chathams had 5 people per square mile, Hawaii
had 300, and Anuta had 1100 people per square mile -- a greater density than
modern Holland. [Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel]

Under the conditions of prescientific agriculture, in a good harvest year,
six people can produce barely enough food for themselves and four others.
http://www.britannica.com/bcom/eb/article/printable/4/0,5722,108624,00.html

Each acre averaged about 10 bushels a year (rounded up) and they used a 3 or
4 cycle rotation for each field with one cycle allowing the field to lie
fallow.

Jay
"Maou Tsaou: A scholar not succeeding and giving himself over to liquor."
The Chinese Unicorn, edited from Chinese-English dictionaries, by Thomas
Rowe.
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