Re: (TFT) New file on Farming in TFT.

[Rick Smith <rick_ww@lightspeed.ca>]

Hi Peter, everyone.
  Using modern gardening techniques, people can be fed in a tiny amount 
of space with greenhouses.  I've seen numbers around 3 ares which is 0.03
hectares per person.  Or less.  (The danger with less is you have NO 
margin of error if bugs or some disease gets into your greenhouse.)  And 
that is not stacking plants on shelves.

  Nothing in these techniques seem vastly beyond ancient technology 
assuming that they have glass.  Add in a bit of magic and you could justify
just about any number you want.  

  The numbers I've seen for Mediaeval China's food production are all over.
I picked some conservative ones in my essay, but doubling them (to 6 koku / 
hectare), were among the reasonable numbers I've seen.  The problem is 
that the sources mentioned China and rice production in passing and there
was no detailed description of how typical those values were, and at what
time the techniques for rice aquaculture were introduced.  

  So I was guessing.

  For European farming, the numbers were much more clustered, and I took 
conservative values.  So you could end up with numbers a bit higher than 
mine (10%? 20%?) with no problem.  Do your number include fallow land?
That would make a big swing.

  My numbers do not work in all cases.  The Nile delta is higher than my 
numbers for the European farm land.  However, I assumed that that was 
because with the annual flood, they didn't have to leave any fields fallow.

  Of course, one thing our fantasy farmers have to deal with that real ones
don't, are griffon, apep and wyvern attacks.

  Anyway, if you have reliable sources that suggest that the population 
density should be higher please let me know.  I thought the books I was 
using were good 20 years ago when I wrote most of this, but I have no 
idea what my sources were after all this time.

  Warm regards, Rick.


On 2015-08-29, at 11:49 AM, Peter von Kleinsmid wrote:
> I'm glad you posted this, as I'm working on systems stuff including farming.
> 
> Now I'm going nuts looking for my own farming stats.
> 
> In one case I had a baseline for average medieval yield at three acres to support one person, so
> 1.21 hectares per person, which is even less optimistic, but without my notes, that might not all be farm land, just more of an overall land use estimate, including waste, wilds, fallow, unused, losses, etc.
> 
> PvK
> 
> At 07:10 PM 8/26/2015, Jeffrey Vandine wrote:
>> ...  Just glancing through the internet, for example, the absolute minimu
>> m of land to feed a person for a year is about 7500 square feet -- that's a
>> plot 75x100 feet -- and that is roughly what the Japanese achieved in the
>> medieval period through a combination of intensive agriculture, and extreme
>> good fortune in terms of soils and weather to support rice growing.Â
>> And that works out to about 0.07 hectares per individual (or an average pop
>> ulation density of 3700 per square mile).  If we assume that for TFT m
>> agical support was used, this might be possible for a wider area.  How
>> ever the FAO states that, on average, it takes about half a hectare to supp
>> ort a single person (including a diversified modern diet of meat and vegeta
>> bles, fruit and grains).  So I don't know what would be the acceptable
>> answer.
> ... 
> 
> =====
> Post to the entire list by writing to tft@brainiac.com.
> Unsubscribe by mailing to majordomo@brainiac.com with the message body
> "unsubscribe tft"


=====
Post to the entire list by writing to tft@brainiac.com.
Unsubscribe by mailing to majordomo@brainiac.com with the message body
"unsubscribe tft"