As promised, here is the next installment in the series. You might think that agriculture is not important in a fantasy role playing game, but there you would be wrong. Population densities and city sizes, warfare and social forms are all closely connected with agriculture.
To take the first point, the number of people that a given area of land will support depends upon how much of it is actually farmed, and upon the amount of food that the farmland yields. For instance, an area with a low population would probably have a low proportion of land under cultivation. Allowing for pastoral lands, the area in question can still contain a lot of wilderness, with all the possibilities that the wilderness holds in FRP games.
But populations are usually not static, and as the people grow in number, more food must be found for them. Either the land already under cultivation can be farmed more intensively (e.g. using more fertilizer, growing two crops a year instead of one, developing cereal varieties with higher yields), or more land can be brought under cultivation (i.e. clearing the wilderness).
The second course is more likely to be undertaken in the short term. This means that the wilderness will be encroached upon by colonists who have migrated some distance (perhaps one mile, perhaps one hundred) from their ancestral farms. Considering the nature of the wilderness in most FRP campaigns, this will be a highly dangerous undertaking. Here is a made-to-order place for adventurers. A ranger might protect the colonists out of a sense of duty; others might be more likely to work for hire. The first method also holds possibilities for characters. Treasure from foreign lands takes on a new meaning. If the PCs are from a backward area, better strains of cereals (either fast ripening or higher yield varieties), or knowledge of better farming practices might be found priceless on their return.
City sizes are closely linked with the amount of land that is needed to support a certain population (much more land was required in Europe than in China). With a basic knowledge of agricultural yields, a GM can calculate how much food certain cities would need to import over what distances (remembering that water transport of bulk grain is much cheaper than overland transport). They can also see the possibilities this has for monopolies and prices, siege warfare and so forth. (A good calorie counter can be used to work out how many kilograms of cereal ,grain and vegetables the average person needs to eat each day.)
The link between agriculture and warfare is first in the amount of surplus food available to feed the army, and second to determine when the army can march and fight. This will also depend upon whether the army is made up of conscripted peasants (who must be allowed to go home for the harvest, or they will desert anyway), or professional soldiers who are free to fight the year round. At certain times in Chinese history, the army (consisting of career soldiers) was kept busy in the off-season (as it were) by cultivating military farms, which also alleviated the supply problems.
Social forms are also linked with agriculture, but the causal connection is not clear. Do agricultural patterns exist because of the social forms, or do the social forms exist because of the agricultural patterns? The discredited theory of hydraulic despotism claimed that the despotic nature of Asian civilizations stemmed directly from their agricultural patterns. The large irrigation works of Asian agriculture needed coordinated efforts to build them, and despotism was the only way to achieve this coordination.
That ends this brief explanation of why at least a basic knowledge of agriculture is important to both GMs and players alike. The following article compares Chinese patterns of agriculture with those of traditional (mediaeval) Europe and should be useful even to people who are not interested in Asia itself.
China has always supported a higher density of population than Europe, and the Chinese people generally have had one of the best diets in the world. (The economically depressed China of the nineteenth century in which subsistence agriculture was the norm was not typical of the rest of Chinese history.) Chinese cultivation was able to support a higher density of population due to higher cereal yields than in traditional European agriculture, and to the minor role of animal husbandry. The several reasons for these higher yields will be considered in turn in describing the patterns of Chinese agriculture.
There are two major environmental zones in China, and so there are two main patterns of cultivation. The dry northern plains support a dry field (generally wheat and millet) agriculture, and the sub-tropical regions south of the Yangtze River are dominated by irrigated wet rice cultivation (although these wet fields can be drained and planted with dry land crops).
There are generally quite dramatic differences between the climate of Europe and that of China, and this had its impact on the development of agricultural practices. For example, the North Chinese farmer had to cope with short periods of very heavy rain, rather than the constant drizzle of European weather. If the Summer rains were too heavy, flooding would result; or there could be drought if they failed. As a consequence, there was an early emphasis on flood control in the North China plain.
One of the fundamental differences between Chinese and European agriculture is the importance of livestock. In traditional Europe, animal husbandry and grain production have always been integrated. Grazing lands formed a large proportion of farmland, and animals were pastured on fallow fields. This was one of the few ways of maintaining soil fertility in traditional Europe. Animal manure was usually in short supply because fodder crops were rare, and few livestock could survive the lean winter months. (Excess animals would be killed and their meat salted for the winter.) The result was that fields had to be left fallow one year in every two or three.
European livestock were kept as draught animals (ploughs were heavy, poorly constructed and turned the soil inefficiently and slowly, needing teams of from four to twelve oxen or horses to draw them), and also for wool, leather, meat and dairy products. (Meat for the rich, and milk and cheese for the poor.)
In China, on the other hand, animal husbandry has not been at all important in historical times. Animals were kept, but fewer than in Europe, and they were grazed on waste land (such as hill sides or river banks). Buffalo, oxen and mules were used for ploughing, but only one or two animals (two oxen or mules in the north, one buffalo in the south) were needed because the Chinese plough was much lighter than the European one. As well, transport in the south was generally by boat or carrying pole (the land in the south is quite mountainous) so there were fewer roads, and thus a lesser need for animals for transport. Carts and road transport were generally used in the north.
The animals that were kept by the Chinese were pigs and poultry, which can live on household scraps and waste. They not only provided meat (pork and poultry were the most common meats in the traditional diet) but pigs were also great producers of manure.
Because land or grain was not needed for feeding livestock, this in itself meant that a given area of land could support more people in China than Europe. But as will be shown, there were other reasons as well.
Cereals made up a larger proportion of the diet in China than in traditional Europe. The Chinese diet was predominantly cereal grain (wheat or millet in the north, and rice in the south), with cooking oil, green vegetables, pickles, sometimes meat or fish (the waterways and lakes of South China teem with fish), and spiced with soy sauce, ginger, chilli or vinegar. Dairy products are simply not a part of the Chinese diet.
Chinese cultivation managed a much higher yield than did European cultivation because of the sowing techniques used by the Chinese; the types of grains cultivated; farming practice which was generally more labour-intensive than in Europe; and field fertility.
The seed drill first appeared in China sometime during the Han Dynasty. By comparison, in the West, seed was always sown by hand (usually broadcast) up to the eighteenth century. (The seed drill was completely unknown until the sixteenth century.) Chinese methods were more elaborate. The Chinese themselves distinguished three methods of sowing: broadcasting, sowing in rows, and sowing individual seed.
Broadcasting of field crops seems to have been regarded as rather an inferior practice in North China, where sowing in rows by drill was preferred as it saved seed and economized on soil moisture. If a crop was sown broadcast, it was usually because the seed was too small to be sown properly by drill. In South China, most dry land crops were broadcast. But rice was sown broadcast in North and South China.
Individual planting was used for crops that were unsuited for drill sowing, for example, ginger and other roots and tubers. Transplanting of rice seedlings can be seen as an elaboration of this method. Transplanted rice gives substantially higher yields than rice sown broadcast, but it is a comparatively complex procedure, and is much more labour-intensive.
This refers to the tending of crops after germination. In China this was generally more labour-intensive than in the West, and was one of the reasons for a higher yield. For example, hand weeding of rice can increase yields by up to 45%.
A general principle in China was that one should use less seed on poor soil than on fertile land. This reflects the care that went into tending the crops. (For where weeds are not controlled, the practice is to sow more seed on poor land to ensure that at least a few plants survive.) Here it should be noted that a by-product of broadcast sowing is that the grain that germinates springs up so haphazardly that thorough weeding is almost impossible.
Millet and rice produce many more grains on each plant than either wheat or barley. So the nature of millet and rice is to have a higher yield to seed ratio. Pre-modern Europe had ratios no higher than 3:1 or 4:1 for wheat. This meant than as much as one-half or one-third of the crop would have to be kept for seed grain (this is partly a result of the use of broadcast sowing which is very wasteful of seed). In China, on the other hand, wheat yield to seed ratios were about 10:1 by the twelfth century. (This is a normal figure for traditional cultivation techniques in Asia today.) Compare this with the figures for the late twentieth century: wheat varies between 20:1 and 6:1.
Rice, by comparison, today averages 50:1 and millet (setaria italica) yields are of the order of 100:1. Some varieties of rice can give 100:1. Yields that were attained in China historically were easily as high as 20:1 or 30:1 for rice, and could even have approached modem figures. Certainly, millet yields very early on were said to have been as high as 100:1.
The higher yields in Chinese cultivation meant that only a small proportion of the crop was needed for seed gain, allowing a greater part of the crop to be reserved for human consumption.
As mentioned above, European farmers used mainly animal manure, supplemented to some extent by vegetable waste, marl (a kind of rich soil), and (in coastal areas) seaweed and sand.
In China, animals had a smaller role in the agricultural economy so (while animal manure was never wasted) they provided only a very small proportion of the total amount of fertilizer used. In general, the Chinese used a wider range of materials, including human manure. Green manures - crops grown solely for the purpose of improving the soil for a following crop (mainly legumes with nitrogen fixing properties) - were also used, although the use of these cultivated manures seem to have begun later in China than in the West. Other fertilizers that were used were: hemp waste, oil cake or cake left over from making bean curd (industrial by-products that had to be purchased by the farmer), lime, mollusc shells (used for their lime content), river mud, animal bones and hoofs, chicken feathers and so on. The Chinese understood that the addition of organic manures improved the soil structure and increased water retention as well as nourishing the crops.
Allowing for fallowing of fields in traditional Europe, two or three hectares of land were needed to feed each person. In the most fertile parts of mediaeval Europe (e.g. Flanders, Eastern England) c. 1300, farm holdings of under three hectares (7.5 acres) were too small to support a family.
Chinese farms were much smaller, this smaller size made possible by high productivity. Two hectares could support a family of eight (two adults, two old people, and four children) in the north. Holdings in rice growing areas could be as little as one acre for a family.
Field size makes a contribution to land productivity. In Europe, field holdings were long strips sometimes just a few feet wide, and this also contributed to inefficient farming and low yield. Actually, fields in the North China plain superficially resembled this pattern. Fields were rectangular and laid out in large regular blocks or strips which were several hundred metres wide. Partible inheritance over the centuries reduced many of these plots to strips only a few feet across. But the Chinese strips within a single block of land were not managed by common consent, nor were they ever used as communal pasture land.
Double cropping also ensured a greater yield from a given area of land. Land in the north could yield three crops in two years, and in the south two crops in a year. In some parts of the south, farms could produce three crops of rice, or two crops of rice and one commercial crop in a single year. Vegetables were also intensively cropped in this way. Multiple cropping is largely a product of a more favourable climate in China than in Europe, but also results from the development of early ripening varieties of rice, and from agricultural practices such as transplanting, and from the absence of the need to let land lie fallow.
It should be apparent by now that the traditional patterns of European agriculture could be said to be quite backward in comparison with those of China. Certainly the level of technology was lower, and so was the extent of knowledge of farming practices. These combined to ensure that Europe could not support as high a density of population as could China.
This information has been adapted from Francesca Bray, Biology and Biological Technology. Part H: Agriculture, volume 6 of the Science and Civilization in China series. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984.
Fallow fields ... In crowded areas of China, on the other hand, letting land lie fallow to restore its fertility was regarded as a last resort as early as the Han Dynasty, whereas in Europe it was still an essential part of crop rotation until the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries.
Vinegar ... In the Sung Dynasty, vinegar and soy sauce were considered to be two of the necessities of life essential for even the humblest peasant family.
The seed drill ... A machine that allows seed to be sown in straight rows. It basically consists of a seed bin, and some mechanism, perhaps a sieve, which regulates the fall of seed to the ground. Thus, the seed can be sown thickly or thinly as the farmer wishes. Most Chinese seed drills sowed not only seed, but also applied manure (although this was a later development).
Transplanting ... In transplanting, the rice seed, usually pre-germinated, is sown in seed-beds of various types, and then transplanted into the main field after anything from 2 to 8 weeks depending on the variety of rice. The seedlings should normally be transplanted at their period of maximum rate of growth, by which time they will have reached a height of 15-18cm. The sturdiest seedlings are pulled up from the seed-bed by hand and tied into small bundles which are transported immediately to the main field as they must be transplanted the same day. The roots of the seedlings are usually washed and the top few inches of the leaves trimmed to reduce evaporation and damage in handling. They are then transplanted into the main field.
Pre-modern Europe ... The low yields of traditional Europe are explained by poor farming practice, and also the possession of few good strains of seed.
Animal manure ... Silkworm droppings were a particularly potent fertilizer. Sericulture-the cultivation of silkworms and production of silk cloth-were an integral part of farming practice and economy.
Other fertilizers ... In seventeenth century Kwangtung, frogs killed in brine were used as a fertilizer.
Holdings in rice growing areas ... Some figures from China in the 1930s: In one particular village, the average farm size was 1.29 acres. The average production of rice was 40 bushels (or about 1220 kg) per acre, or 51.6 bushels per average farm. The average family size was 4.1, with an average food consumption of 20 bushels (this food consumption representing the food consumption of 2.9 adult males). Land rents were normally half of the total crop, i.e. 25.8 bushels.
Regarding traditional millet yields, the Ch'in statesmen Li K'ui reckoned an average yield for setaria millet of 700kg/hectare (about 280 kg per acre).
Early twentieth century wheat yields in China ranged from 400kg/hectare (about 160kg/acre) to 1100kg/hectare (about 450kg/acre), with an average yield of 1090/hectare in 1934-6. This compares with modern yields which are as high as 4500kg/hectare (about 1820kg/acre) in some parts of the world.
Fields in the North China plain ... In South China, irrigated fields are irregular in shape because they follow the contours of the land. They are also small, because then water flow and depth and temperature can be controlled more accurately. The optimal size of a wet rice field is about 1/6 acre. To a large extent the shape and size of a wet rice field is determined by natural conditions. Wet rice fields are rarely physically divided on inheritance. One field may be left to two or more heirs, in which case the division will be marked with stones or trees, but the field will continue to be cultivated as if it were one field.
Multiple cropping ... Irrigated fields are required for multiple cropping. This generally limits it to deltaic plains or valley floors because of' the necessity for perfect levelling of the field surface. Terraces are a rather recent development in China proper. Terracing itself is a world wide phenomenon. Note for example the well-known rice ten-aces of Bali and South China, those of Peru where the Incas grew irrigated maize, the Mediterranean, the Middle East, Japan, and many parts of Africa. In China today there are dry terraces in the north, and irrigated terraces in the south. Terracing may have begun as early as the Han empire, but were definitely in use by Sung times. (This is relatively late in terms of Chinese development.)