# Is it plausible for a society to be so adept at war, they forget how to farm?



## Roughdragon (Aug 29, 2017)

I'm asking this because as I was worldbuilding, I thought it might be a clever idea to have a seemingly unstoppable military-focused society fall due to their lack of agriculture. Basically, they had become so used to taking supplies from others that they had no idea how to farm. After they had taken over their entire island, they had nothing left to take, and widespread famine eventually lead to their downfall. Now, in a realistic scenario, would this be plausible? The society has basically mastered the art of war, but the concept of farms or even fishing is alien to them.


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## Orc Knight (Aug 29, 2017)

I'm sure you can build it and make it work. The only problem is, if you look into fiction or real life, any society that had those raiding sorts also either pulled in slaves or had a class/caste specifically for farming. Take the Ironborn, Martins vikings on drugs. Even they know they can not get by without people working for food. Food, farming and agriculture are important for armies, as much as the smiths are. And if they are essentially raiding, they have to go back to a home base, unless they're more mobile. The old saying of 'An Army runs on it's stomach' is quite true. And soldiers who don't get paid and fed tend to get...nasty.

It is still up to you, obviously, to try it to that extreme. And if you can make it work, go for it.


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## FifthView (Aug 29, 2017)

For tens of thousands of years, humans didn't farm.


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## Vaporo (Aug 29, 2017)

Try reading up on ancient Sparta. If I remember correctly, all Spartans were soldiers with almost no exceptions. The got food by essentially enslaving the surroundings lands.


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## pmmg (Aug 29, 2017)

Don't Orcs kind of function this way?


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## Orc Knight (Aug 29, 2017)

I'd put it to any Horde based enemy for that, though I suppose orc's and goblins would be your standard fantasy set. But any sort of Reavers, Raiders and Viking sorts also run the all warrior groups. Anything that's spawned with magic (or is a walking terrorizing fungus) may well not have to do with the whole farming thing, true.


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## Devor (Aug 29, 2017)

Without relying on slaves to do the agriculture, I'm a little skeptical about getting this to work for larger than, say, a few hundred armed, travelling horsemen.  Societies are large, and the land that a society would cover can be vast.  Dragging food that you stole from a war in the north to your fellow countrymen in the south just isn't going to be viable.  And when you defeat the people in the north?  You need to find a new target even farther away, and the land you have to cover just got bigger.

As others have said, you can rely on slaves to feed everybody just fine.  But I don't know if that's the same thing you had envisioned or not.  It's not quite the same as forgetting agriculture for warfare.  You can rely on slaves for centuries without ever going to war again.


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## Steerpike (Aug 29, 2017)

FifthView said:


> For tens of thousands of years, humans didn't farm.



Yes, but isn't that also why they didn't have large cities/societies?


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## Steerpike (Aug 29, 2017)

As above, my first question would be why don't they get some of the conquered people who were previously farming (or whose ancestors were) and make them farm?


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## FifthView (Aug 29, 2017)

Steerpike said:


> Yes, but isn't that also why they didn't have large cities/societies?



Yes, I think so.

But the OP didn't mention large cities or the size of the society.

There have long been nomadic societies that didn't farm—I think? I don't think the Mongols farmed much, if at all. They had herds and slaughtered animals, used lots of milk, hunted, but no agriculture. I'll admit I'm not incredibly well versed on the history of such societies, but I think they could grow rather large.

_[Edit: I was thinking of the planting of crops when I wrote "agriculture," but apparently the term also refers to domesticating animals for food, so maybe it wasn't the best term to use in describing the Mongols.]_


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## valiant12 (Aug 29, 2017)

> Now, in a realistic scenario, would this be plausible?



No.



> After they had taken over their entire island, they had nothing left to take, and widespread famine eventually lead to their downfall.



I assume that they didn't kill all the people they conquered. Their slaves/subjugated people will produce all the necessary food.


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## valiant12 (Aug 29, 2017)

> But any sort of Reavers, Raiders and Viking sorts also run the all warrior groups.



Real vikings farmed. They also fished,hunted, traded, etc.


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## Orc Knight (Aug 29, 2017)

Aye, you want really delve specifics with them, the Viking part was just the raiding forces. Go a-viking upon the sea's. I realize they operated on other parts of society, as no society can really live without the backings of it in some way. Most times if we're talking the Fantasy equivalents, be it games and others media were they operate as the Horde, that's all you get. Being put up as the antagonists and all. And I was putting the Fantasy face on it.


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## Devor (Aug 29, 2017)

The mongols still had farms.  It's true that they used horses as livestock on the go, and that's something that helps in making their constant warfare more viable.  But even horses needed to be fed - grazing takes a lot of time and isn't going to feed an army, so they had to carry huge quantities of hay with them.  They had several horses per person, and as their supplies began to shrink they'd eat the horses that were carrying them.  But they couldn't go on indefinitely that way.  They still had cities and farmland feeding them.

The other group people have mentioned, the Vikings, were unquestionably farmers. The cold Scandinavian winters actually keeps their soil extremely fertile.  One of the theories trying to explain the viking pillaging?  They tended their farms all summer, and when the winter snow came they went off pillaging, then returned home for the harvest. But they also settled in colonies that farmed and traded and befriended their neighbors - Normandy, in France, for instance, was a Viking colony that eventually went native.

For the OP, though, boats and a coastline might help make it more believable.  For example, think of a society that had two parts, the horseman army and a host of boats that stored the supplies they can't carry and raised more through fishing.  The horsemen could pillage the countryside, keeping their supplies through the boats, and if they take a city they've got the coastline and the land covered together.


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## Tom (Aug 29, 2017)

The Vikings raided _because_ of farming, believe it or not. Their soil was poor and rocky, and because of the mountains and dense forests there wasn't enough farmland to go around as the population increased. They began raiding to amass wealth that could be traded for food, and to capture arable land that could be settled. 

Human society as we know it today began because of farming. If not for the agricultural revolution, our species wouldn't have gotten far. Any society that forgets how to farm is a society that's as good as extinct.

EDIT: Ninja'd by Devor who said essentially the same thing. Dammit.


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## DMThaane (Aug 29, 2017)

You can't really have a human conqueror 'forget' how to farm because even if they don't do it themselves they'll just force the people they conquer to farm, even turning conquered territories into 'breadbaskets'. You _can_ have a conqueror grow so large and urbanised that it can't sustain its population without heavily importing food and then have it lose its major food producer, either to war, rebellion, or natural causes such as droughts or blights. This probably wouldn't destroy the society but it could bring down or diminish the empire.

Fantasy races a different. With explosive birthrates and fast maturation you can have a goblinesque species explode outward, consume everything, then collapse inward. This wouldn't so much be forgetting how to farm so much never knowing how to farm but it's a more practical twist on the idea.


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## Russ (Aug 29, 2017)

FifthView said:


> For tens of thousands of years, humans didn't farm.



But there is an anthropological thing going on here that you are missing.

Before humans farmed, they hunted and gathered. Hunting/gathering is a time intensive process (not that farming isn't but it is much easier for farmers to produce a significant surplus etc than hunter gatherers).  That left not much time for art, science, etc including the art of war.

So if you were living by hunting and gathering you would not have the time on hand to master the art of war.   

Thus the pre-agricultural human model would not make a good one for this ultra war making society.


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## Russ (Aug 29, 2017)

Roughdragon said:


> I'm asking this because as I was worldbuilding, I thought it might be a clever idea to have a seemingly unstoppable military-focused society fall due to their lack of agriculture. Basically, they had become so used to taking supplies from others that they had no idea how to farm. After they had taken over their entire island, they had nothing left to take, and widespread famine eventually lead to their downfall. Now, in a realistic scenario, would this be plausible? The society has basically mastered the art of war, but the concept of farms or even fishing is alien to them.



It depends on what you mean by "war" and what you mean by "society."  (yup a lawyer's answer).

So, as mentioned above, Spartan citizens did not concern themselves with farming.  Instead they relied upon slaves who did the farming for them (and they were always uptight about slave revolts which did happened because the ratio slaves to spartans was always high).  So if you define the slaves out of society you can do it.  But if you build your society that way you are unlikely to forget how to tell the slaves to farm for you, or forget how to beat them into submission.  

Now, I  served when I was young  and have studied military science my whole life.  Feeding the troops and having adequate provisions is an essential part of military strategy.  No competent commander would ever lose sight of the need to feed his troops both in the short and long term.  There is an old saying that an "army travels on its stomach" (and the extension is "but its ass sticks up the highest" but I digress).  So feeding your people and  your army is a fundamental part of making war or the art of war.  You may not be writing great music or painting great art, but you are feeding those soldiers and are good at it if you are winning.

So on a large scale it seems unrealistic.

Having said that, I think it is a cool idea for what is commonly called a morality tale.  In this kind of work the realism takes a back seat to delivering a moral message, which your story idea has the potential to do.  So I might encourage you to write this more in the form or a fairy tale or a morality tale without much or any focus on the "realism" of the premise.  Morality tales, although they don't sell as well as they used to, have formed a central part of literature for centuries and are well work penning.

PS- there used to be this idea that the people in Easter Island managed their resources so badly that this happened to them, but the latest research I think casts some doubt on this.  However you might want to look at the older ideas about the extinction of Easter Island for inspiration.


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## Demesnedenoir (Aug 29, 2017)

I could see there being a "legend" of such a culture, a cautionary tale. A great warrior culture collapses, the real reason lost to time, and the story develops. But in reality? Not so much. Yup, I can see the farmer's kid who wants to join the army rolling their eyes at this story to keep them on the farm, LOL.

Magical-wierdness... they were bred into uber roid-rage barely human warriors who wiped out everything that moved until they split into their own units to kill each other fighting over increasingly scarce resources. Heh heh.


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## Michael K. Eidson (Aug 29, 2017)

If the conquered people would rather die than be enslaved, then maybe you could have the story ending you want.


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## Ban (Aug 29, 2017)

As others have said the best option is to make these people not human. It would be difficult for readers to accept that an entire human society could be short-sighted enough to kill off all the people who know how to farm. Human raiders would either enslave or vassalize  farmers. An orc or goblin or other ficitonal being on the other hand could be capable of this.

The other option is to have the raiders be part of some sort of cult. There are many real-world examples of cult members doing very strange and self-harmful things. Perhaps the raiders believed that their deity/deities would come down to earth and give them free lasagna for the rest of their lives if they killed off all the farmers.


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## Devor (Aug 29, 2017)

Michael K. Eidson said:


> If the conquered people would rather die than be enslaved, then maybe you could have the story ending you want.



I came back to post something along these lines.

There are places where empires rise and fall very quickly - wide open plains. The huns and mongols and others conquered along a stretch.  There's another in Africa, a strip of plains right around the middle of the big north part of the continent.

If you're building your empire from one side of the continent to the other, you're setting up logistics over these conquered territories, and stretching your army far from home.  Imagine you're far from home, short on supplies, maybe you just lost a big fight, and as you're going back to these conquered cities for support, they've organized a revolt and closed their gates against you.

You have an army. You've just lost your supply lines. A siege takes time.  You've already ransacked the countryside the first time you conquered them.  You're not in good shape, here.


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## FifthView (Aug 29, 2017)

Russ said:


> But there is an anthropological thing going on here that you are missing.
> 
> Before humans farmed, they hunted and gathered. Hunting/gathering is a time intensive process (not that farming isn't but it is much easier for farmers to produce a significant surplus etc than hunter gatherers).  That left not much time for art, science, etc including the art of war.
> 
> ...



The idea that hunter-gatherer societies had little free time might be a myth, although I'm certainly no anthropologist, and from this article, there is some disagreement between those who are: Hunter-gatherers have more leisure time.

In any case, in designing a fantasy society, there could be division of labor, with active hunters and gatherers supporting war parties–and in the OP's description of this fictional environment, the raiding and conquering warriors are being used as a type of hunting and gathering force! It's just that they are gathering from conquered peoples.

And, hunter-gatherer societies actually participated in warring with other hunter-gatherer societies, in our world.

I could almost imagine a _young_ expansionist society (in a fantasy world), starting isolated as a hunter-gatherer society and then discovering the abundance of resources when discovering other societies, and expanding too fast, depleting resources and/or the environment, and then collapsing fast. Perhaps the lure of wealth that just sits in towns and cities could draw its own people away from the habits of hunting and gathering natural resources, over time.

The OP didn't specify the size of that society, and I'm not sure how ultra--or, sophisticated--the war making he intended.


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## psychotick (Aug 29, 2017)

Hi,

Since people have mentioned Sparta it will serve as a useful example of what could happen. Sparta had a two tier population - Spartans and slaves. Spartans fought, slaves worked the fields etc. And what happened to them was that they had a vastly larger slave population than Spartan. Though they were the pre-eminent warriors of their day, they accrued losses with all their battles, and because Spartans could only come from other Spartans - ie blood - that ratio between slaves and Spartans grew ever worse for them. 

Their long slow collapse began after their greatest victory - Athens when they had lost so many people that they could not recover from it. After that they could not control their slave population. There were Helot uprisings, their armies became divided in roles between war and controlling their slaves, and ultimately they became vulnerable to a rivals and started losing battles.

In terms of the OP though, they did not forget how to farm. They simply lost control of those who did the farming for them. And they weren't completely destroyed by it. But they slowly lost power over the following centuries.

Cheers, Greg.


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## Roughdragon (Aug 29, 2017)

Steerpike said:


> As above, my first question would be why don't they get some of the conquered people who were previously farming (or whose ancestors were) and make them farm?



I did forget to mention this, but the society-- let's call them Vangardians-- are obsessively xenophobic. The denizens of their island include high fantasy societies such as orcs and elves, and the Vangardians believe that using the perceived lesser races for anything in their society-- even slavery-- is an insult to their honor and culture, and would taint their civilization. 

In terms of farming in general, the idea never even occurred to them, even when they saw the gardens and farms of the elves and orcs.


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## Roughdragon (Aug 30, 2017)

FifthView said:


> The idea that hunter-gatherer societies had little free time might be a myth, although I'm certainly no anthropologist, and from this article, there is some disagreement between those who are: Hunter-gatherers have more leisure time.
> 
> In any case, in designing a fantasy society, there could be division of labor, with active hunters and gatherers supporting war parties—and in the OP's description of this fictional environment, the raiding and conquering warriors are being used as a type of hunting and gathering force! It's just that they are gathering from conquered peoples.
> 
> ...



The island the Vangardians had completely taken over is about the size of Rhode Island. Also, their style of war is inspired by Hoplite strategies. Basically, they got into a large formation and steamrolled their way through the less advanced societies on their island.


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## Roughdragon (Aug 30, 2017)

Demesnedenoir said:


> I could see there being a "legend" of such a culture, a cautionary tale. A great warrior culture collapses, the real reason lost to time, and the story develops. But in reality? Not so much. Yup, I can see the farmer's kid who wants to join the army rolling their eyes at this story to keep them on the farm, LOL.
> 
> Magical-wierdness... they were bred into uber roid-rage barely human warriors who wiped out everything that moved until they split into their own units to kill each other fighting over increasingly scarce resources. Heh heh.



That is what I'm trying to do with this society. Essentially, when I get around to writing a story, one of the characters will be a descendant of one of these warriors, and would be driven to discover the history of his people.


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## Russ (Aug 30, 2017)

IF you try to make this war effectively makes this society forget how to farm etc story plausible, I think you have a significant TSTL problem to conquer.

Would enjoy reading it when you finish it though.


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## ShadeZ (Sep 6, 2017)

Even if they forgot how to farm they would likely still hunt and forage if food ran low or something like that .


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