Share your research: Agriculture

[Devor]

I'd like to start a new trend in the forums by inviting you to share your research on one of the subjects which might come up for a lot of the works we're writing. I'm hoping this could be of help consolidating research for those who have trouble with the process.

To get things going, I'm going to start by asking about the activity that covered 90% of the population and 95% of world-saving heroes: Agriculture.

Agriculture includes farming, hunting, fishing and gardening.

It also includes information about water supplies, irrigation and the engineering feats which might be needed to supply water to a farm. Aqueducts, aquifers and wells would all fall under this category.

So help us all out, what have you found out about the subject?

 

[JCFarnham]

Well the first thing that comes to mind (for reasons you'll find out in a couple of worlds) is what people around where I live call the "Norfolk Four-course System" ... basically a pretentious name for crop rotation. Basically four fields, three sown with crops and one "resting". It saves the soil from becoming useless due to intense over working, but of course doesn't come without its draw backs. (there's more to it of course, like nitrogen and sulphur nurient enrichment, and the rotation of deep and shallow-rooted crops, and so on ...)

If anyone is interested in modern livestock matters in small-to-medium sized farms (specifically pigs and chickens) then my current job is just that. I call it "agricultural labourer" but ... farmer, yeah.

If I can't confidently answer a question myself I can ask someone who does know. I'm not read up on historical techniques as such, but I can safely and fairly accurately make guesses based on current knowledge and geography/history lessons back in the day haha ... or again I'll just ask. What can I say? It's a family business, I'll just go see my Dad.

What I can do however is provide anecdotes

 

[Telcontar]

This site is one I've linked before (in this very forum). The site author discusses a number of subjects as they relate to game design, but it is all useful information for writers too. One of the subjects is "Food Basis"

He discusses a few interesting topics - such as how the staple crop of a society heavily influences how it evolves (like wheat cultivation has historically gone hand in hand with raising horses and thus encouraged horsemanship, and therefore cavalry). He also mentions some space/population limits (or guidelines, as most fiction writers would consider them. One of my favorite tidbits is:

A general, historically accurate figure is that each wheat farmer produces enough food for himself, his 3 non-farming dependents (who don’t get as much food as the farmer), plus 10% surplus, taking into account the amount of grain you need in reserve for replanting...

Each farmer generally works about 7 acres of wheat, and assuming your society is using a three-field system, each farmer would require about 10 acres, including the land that is left fallow that year (generally used for grazing while the land replenishes itself). Using a rough conversion of acreage to square miles (640 to 1), each square mile of wheat will thus support 64 farmers and their families plus 6.4 non-farmers. A typical farming village in old England of about 180 people thus requires 3 square miles of arable farmland, which is in keeping with the fact that such villages typically existed about 2-3 miles apart."

I also enjoy the humorous introduction, which implies that all this information is just to help the believability of our worlds:

These pages deal with creating a believable backstory... Some people have used this section to claim that the thrust of this whole document is that [writers] should be dealing with arable land ratios and grain yields all the time, when in fact I only want this to be the case for those people who made this assumption

 

[SeverinR]

How far back did they rotate crops? I would guess BC.
It doesn't take alot of thought to realize a field needed time to replentish nutrients, and if you don't you get alot less fruit for ones labor.

 

[JCFarnham]

Crop rotation - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

In various forms it can be found in historical Roman literature. First a two-field system, then a three-field system around Charlemange's time, then the four-field version pioneered in the 16th century and popularised by a British agriculturist in the 18th.

That little tidbit and the link should help get a basic understanding of the concept, but I urge you to see if you can find more reliable sources.

 

[Devor]

How far back did they rotate crops? I would guess BC.
It doesn't take alot of thought to realize a field needed time to replentish nutrients, and if you don't you get alot less fruit for ones labor.

A big part of crop rotation is finding crops which work together. It's not just about leaving a field barren. It's about growing a crop there that works to restore the soil. Or some crops have deep roots, and some crops have shallow roots, so they drain nutrients from different layers of soil and let the rest recover. And a fallow field isn't usually barren. Usually it's growing something like clovers which both serves as feed for the animals and provides nutrients for the soil.

That's part of the whole thing about George Washington Carver and the peanuts in the U.S. Peanuts and Peas and some of the other crops he pushed are great crops to include in a rotation because they restore soil nutrients. So it goes back a long time, but a strong understanding of soil rotation is actually a pretty modern thing. Most farmers just three hundred years ago had no idea what they were doing in terms of managing soil.

 

[JCFarnham]

I would have gone into it more myself, but I didn't really know if anyone was specifically thinking about it. Thank you for exanding on what I (briefly) mentioned Devor you're a star.

 

[Devor]

I would have gone into it more myself, but I didn't really know if anyone was specifically thinking about it. Thank you for exanding on what I (briefly) mentioned Devor you're a star.

Actually, which crops does your family grow? And how long is the rotation?

 

[JCFarnham]

Rapeseed, beans and wheat. We have a four-course rotation which goes something like; Wheat, Rape, Wheat, Beans. So half is wheat at any one time. There used to be an EU scheme for subsidising set aside land, but that was scrapped. Aside from those stipulations I believe its fairly standard four-course.


The main thing to keep in mind with mixed crop arable farming is the windows where each individual crop is best for harvest. You'll need to know growth speeds and all that good stuff to know when to harvest and sow, and make sure the crops finish at the right times.

A poor year weather wise can mean things get knocked off spec, as it were, and you have to keep one crop a week or two longer than you'd like to. This seems to be happening more and more each year in line with the extremes of climate change, but it is fairly easy to deal with it by changing your times and such to compensate.

 

[Chilari]

Wow this is fascinating. And I should like to add the following: bees! Bees were quite important to smallholders in the ancient world, because you could increase your production without requiring extra land by keeping bees and selling honey and wax produced, and also bees pollinate plants. In Roman Egypt, on the imperial estates (ie owned by the Roman state), tenants paid quite low rent of beehives - no rent at all on the first five, then one sixth of production of honey, wax and royal jelly on subsequent hives - which I reckon (from my own research as part of my masters dissertation) was to encourage them to keep bees which pollinated the plants; rent on beans was also lower than that on wheat, olives or wine, and elsewhere it is noted that beans were liked by bees, so that might also be part of encouraging people to keep hives.

It should be noted that bees can be kept anywhere, not just out in the countryside, but also in the city too. Beehives have been found inside Athens dating to the period of the Peloponnesian War (late 5th century BC); and at Tel Rehov there was a relatively large apiary thought to have had over 100 hives within the city walls, dating to the tenth century BC. The British Beekeepers Association (or whatever it's called) has recently been encouraging Londoners to keep bees on the rooves of their blocks of flats or in their gardens, where they can go to nearby parks and overgrown canals to find flowers to pollinate and gather nectar from. So beekeeping is a form of agriculture that is feasible in an urban environment. Honey, wax and royal jelly in particular were valuable products in the ancient world. Honey was the only known sweetener to the ancient Mediterranean civilisations and useful in treating burns (a property which has been researched medically in the last few decades and shown to be true, unlike quite a lot of ancient medicine), and wax was used in sealing letters, making writing tablets, and producing bronze statues via the lost wax process.

I also know that while wheat was the preferred grain to be eaten in ancient Greece, it wasn't the most common. At least in the Greek climate (I'm not sure about elsewhere), it was relatively hard to grown with low yeild, compared to barley, which was easier to grow, higher yeild, but not as nice to eat. Olive trees, also grown in Greece, take some 20+ years to reach maturity and only produce olives every second year most of the time, but were considered the most reliable, stable crop to invest money in out of the main three then farmed - wheat, grapes (for wine) and olives.

 

[Devor]

That's interesting stuff, Chilari. I'm not sure many people would think of bees.

Does anybody know anything about laying out a new farming settlement? How would you go about picking the right terrain, figuring out the irrigation process, and any of the other steps involved in clearing or planting a new farm?

 

[studentofrhythm]

Devor, I don't know much about setting up new farms, but I'm sure a lot would depend on the location. Is it in a forest? You'll have to clear the land. Is it on a prairie? You'll need the right kind of plow; the steel plow was what enabled the U.S. to expand into the prairie so rapidly. I know the Mandans farmed there before, but as I understand they stuck close to the rivers.

Going along with the more general topic of the thread, this shows how a society's food crops relate to things like technology, animal use, living patters etc. For example, rice cultures tend to be high population, high density because growing rice is very labor-intensive. By contrast, plants like the Three Sisters (maize-beans-squash) or potatoes don't need as much work and can support small populations in places like deserts. I've read that this was a factor in the Mayan, Aztec and Incan civilizations having the manpower available to build their big stuff, but China built some awfully big stuff as well.

The processing of crops can make a big difference. Maize again: ancient Americans did just fine with it as their primary food because they processed it with alkali, making it more nutritious. When it was introduced to Europe, and English settlers took it into the north American forests, they had mills that could grind it more easily without the processing, and so pellagra became a problem among poorer people. In turn, maize got a bad rap: even Fernand Braudel dissed it in Civilization and Capitalism, 15th–18th Centuries.

I think it was Braudel who pointed out that farmers would often grow maize for their own use while selling their wheat. Wheat has enjoyed high prestige, and other starches like maize - or potatoes - have been markers of lower class status. In the Middle Ages, there were food laws against peasants eating expensive meat or white bread.

Another Aztec grain, amaranth, has been eaten as a nationalistic gesture post-conquest.

 

[gavintonks]

if you grow tomatoes they leach the soil you have to leave the fields as you cannot grow for more than 3 years
my biggest concern in stories is feeding people considering the amount of food you consume, about 350g a sitting so that's 1,05kg plus 8 liters of water with these big armies and cataclysms it makes it hard to believe people are running around fighting on no food
a horse requires about 16 liters a day and an active horse would need 160kg of grain and 350kg of grass/ alpfalfa or whatever a month
so imagine the support and supply chain for a large army moving around, plus it takes 8 months to produce a tomato and only 12,5 kg per bush as a really top farmer so more like 8 kg because of pests etc, you seriously need a large productive farming community to wage war

 

[gavintonks]

also look at the number of animals you would need, unless you supplemented your food with soya. a sheep would give about 35kg which would mean about 100 portions at 350g or in broth etc up to say 150portions so your keeping one fighting fir soldier with put McDonald along the way is a huge exercise in itself.
I read somewhere one ancient army took the supply chain 3 days to leave the city walls, so setting up camp would probably supply the army for 3 to 5 days advance before they moved on again
even on horse back you would not sustain heavy exercise without allowing the animals time to graze, they need bulk for their digestive systems