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

[Roughdragon]

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.

 

[Orc Knight]

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.

 

[FifthView]

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

 

[Vaporo]

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.

 

[pmmg]

Don't Orcs kind of function this way?

 

[Orc Knight]

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.

 

[Devor]

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.

 

[Steerpike]

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

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

 

[Steerpike]

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?

 

[FifthView]

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.]

 

[valiant12]

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.

 

[valiant12]

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

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

 

[Orc Knight]

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.

 

[Devor]

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.

 

[Tom]

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.

 

[DMThaane]

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.

 

[Russ]

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.

 

[Russ]

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.

 

[Demesnedenoir]

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.

 

[Michael K. Eidson]

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