- Location
- The great frozen north
[X] Plan Years of Agriculture, Learning, And Goods
Attempting to Fulfil The Plan: ISOT Edition
- Thread starter garphield
- Start date
- Alt. History
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- Tags
- plan quest
- Location
- Raleigh, NC
[X]A Partially Achievable Plan
I trust Blackstar, they run a quest like this one.
I trust Blackstar, they run a quest like this one.
- Location
- Most likely California
[X] Plan Years of Agriculture, Learning, And Goods
[X] Plan Years of Agriculture, Learning, And Goods
The 20-30 bushels per acre figure is pretty flat going all the way back to at least the early 1800's, and even in the 1700's yields averaged like 15-20 bushels per acre. 3 years is a really short time and peasants hate changing what works, like the Peloponneseans are only just now starting to popularize eating this newfangled potato thing. More esoteric knowledge than "eat the potatoes goddamn it please I promise they're good" is going to take even longer to percolate down, and that's in our core territory with a sympathetic population and existing educational infrastructure. The Atticans are going to catch on even slower, I suspect it's going to be a 3 year struggle just to get them on a basic crop rotation system, much less anything more complex.
Even if we magicked up machinery and chemicals far in advance of anything actually on the docket, I still think per-acre yields would have a lot of trouble rising because our agricultural system relies on peasants voluntarily adopting new production methods on their private plots. We don't actually have any big state farms that we can just order to switch to more efficient/industrial methods and have it happen overnight, we have to convince notoriously conservative peasants to risk starving their family on the word of some outsider wizard from another universe who's army was "foraging" off you not even a year ago. Uptake of new technology is going to be painfully slow, certainly far too slow to cause a 40% or 55% spike in 3 growing seasons.
It's going to take at least the first 2 successful growing seasons just for the village risk-taker to convince his neighbors that maybe the new agricultural package isn't a huge gamble, and even then he's only going to get the relatively risk-inclined cousins in on it. It's probably going to take 5+ years of the newfangled stuff reliably producing better yields to get the more conservative farmers in the village to admit that maybe there's something to it and it's not just a fluke, and we'll probably never get 100% uptake until the state starts sending Chekists door to door to make sure you use the right kind of plow.
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[X] Plan Years of Agriculture, Learning, And Goods
Nervos Belli
Don't think this means you've won!
- Location
- Murica
Well if the peasants refuse to improve their methods, the ghost of Stalin has a few suggestions...
- Pronouns
- He/She/They
[X]A Partially Achievable Plan
Beyogi
and a fairy
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Honestly seems counterproductive. Capitalism has perfectly fine methods to make arch conservative farmers change their methods... or stop being farmers and only having themselves to blame.
Just raise the quota/reduce prices and they'll either comply or fail. And you don't even have to discredit yourself by tormenting those who kinda deserve it.
[X] Plan Years of Agriculture, Learning, And Goods
A suggestion, let us not terrorize our farmers in the name of efficiency when they make up a fairly large chunk of the population and our legitimacy relies on the population being supportive of the regime.
A suggestion, let us not terrorize our farmers in the name of efficiency when they make up a fairly large chunk of the population and our legitimacy relies on the population being supportive of the regime.
- Location
- France
- Pronouns
- She/They
There is no real miracle of agriculture we can pull out, not in three years, especially since per acre yields are static and we cannot multiply populations in agriculture, in fact, most of our industrial program explicitly relies on us looting the agricultural sector for workers. The below image basically shows the start of mechanization and the improvements made in the US since the Civil War.
Historical Corn Grain Yields in the U.S. (Purdue University)
The Corny News Network was created by RL (Bob) Nielsen, Extension Agronomist at Purdue University. The articles written for the CNN pertain primarily to corn production & management issues important for Indiana corn growers and their consultants.www.agry.purdue.edu
To even accomplish the 25% goal that means we need to increase effective labor power by more than twenty-five percent and arguably far more if we want to continue the looting of the agricultural sector for industrial aims. This disparity is only deepened since we need to both bring new lands under cultivation/develop virgin lands and we are likely already farming the best lands we have, leaving mid and lower-grade soils left for utilization. Even if we stole literally no one from the farms, that would be a transition on the order of thirty percent in relative agricultural efficiency per person. Made even worse in that there is no source of nitrogen for soils outside of cover crops, limiting per-acre operations to the amount of nitrogen we can pump into the soil via inefficient crop rotations.
> Corn
Well there's your mistake.
I don't even think corn was a focus of US agriculture through the first half of that graph. Its production is mostly an artifact of subsidy structures. It's also a fairly demanding crop on soils and water, even if it's also a productive one because of that. And of course even ignoring the arbitrary choice of crop the starting point of that graph is not ours.
This timeline really gives zero actual data about transition from barely out of subsidence agriculture on a complete crop package. Let alone data on rebuilding the liberated territories' agriculture and supporting infrastructure after the war, which is where I expect a lot of the gains will be.
That said, I don't really mind the 25% target, I just think it's doable and we could also do the modernization if we aren't entirely giving up on that goal. And we shouldn't because regardless of plan targets, we're going to need those improvements to keep our growing cities fed.
I'm still voting for your plan because the others have a bunch of unrealistic goals and I agree on the military dice economy argument.
[X]A Partially Achievable Plan
You mean the ways he destroyed soviet agriculture?
If we really want to appeal to peasants to adopt newer methods, we can set the tax burden based on production targets so they enjoy the benefits if they exceed expectations.
Capitalist accumulation is just as brutal as stalinist consolidation of agriculture, just spread over a longer period of time. Thankfully it's not really an option here because successful peasants can't buy the land of failing peasants. We still have the pressure to produce thanks to the tax burden but the consequences for failure and the fate of the land of those who fail are much less dire. Peasants are also not paying for the improvement out of their own pockets so we aren't creating the debt spirals that plague smallholders and allowed for agroindustrial capital to become the dominant player of the farm economy.
In short I think our incentive and rural organization structure is already pretty good and better than either extremes.
Though if we're clearing new land or consolidating land of farmers that left for city work I'm not opposed to trialing production integrated in our planning more directly.
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Unironically why would we do that? The whole point of people establishing the PRM was to bypass capitalism. (This is from the opening post). As our character is a Maoist I imagine what we will be doing to improve productivity/get more peasants will look something like this (Hopefully without the Lysenkoism)
- Location
- The United States
- Pronouns
- She/Her
The arguably larger issue with our agriculture and the targets around it is that we are constantly and consistently looting it for personel to pull into industrial applications. Assuming we are aggressive and focused on meeting our other targets with expansions in mining and industry it's entirely possible we get a decrease in ag production. Trade with Egypt will let us keep hammering on industry, but given what we need to do to hit the other targets. Every factory we build and every mine we man is a drain on the rural work force that we have to rush to make more efficient. The incoming generations are still not as large as they would be with the reductions of childhood mortality enabled by our choices, those are likely only now being born to like two years old. There isn't a surge of manpower coming and we are going to be pushing for industry and mining hard. To an extent I think if we go for even attempting the low ag target we will fail every other target as it would require us not pulling workers out of the agricultural sector.
- Location
- The United States
- Pronouns
- She/Her
How are we expecting to masses of down timers that own only their land to move? Most of the people we'd be looking to have moved cannot read and lack information access. We are one of the few states that even has newspapers. An Egyptian peasent likly doesn't know we even exist, much less wanting to move to us. Most states also likly view their peasents as important economically and aren't exactly going to enable them moving, leaving the task of somehow convincing illiterate peasents to move to us. And these are peasents one of the most risk averse demographics brought on by being subsistence farmers, we need far more than rumors to get a meaningful amount.
Our way forward is mostly through mechanizing agriculture. Chemicalization needs more time to cook, and we have a decent amount of empty land both in our borders and in the unorganized lands to our north in modern day Albania. Reduce the manpower needed for farms and the second and third sons will either join the army, head to the city, or if we have the empty plots organized and recorded go start their own farm.
Don't get me wrong, it'd barely be faster than just up and raising new generations, but mass migrations are a reality of this historical period. Mostly fleeing horrible disasters, sure, but that's something we can work with. It's an extra labor income we could obtain.
The information environment will only improve, and through that we might be able to create not a propaganda campaign or an organized trail but a perception - "A better life awaits in the Popular Republic". Lots of the states around us absolutely suck even for a stable person, and stability is at a premium with Jesus' war crime brother running around. Small things can produce large culture.
There's no real border control in this age, so I'm not too concerned about the role of the other states. If we consider something more organized, we might be able to set favorable policies for ships bringing interested people our way.
- Location
- The United States
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Yes, but we are expecting to have this growth in import populations in 3 years, not decades. Further in terms of mechanization there is no technology we can quickly introduce to solve the problem nor significant improvement in methods given that Arizona likly already implemented the low hanging fruit via their agronomist. Things become overwhelmingly a pure production problem and we cannot solve decades of progress in three years. Maybe in a decade, but we do not have a decade. We are also, more importantly looting it for personel consistently especially as we get mining going.
The mass migrations you are talking about spanned centuries and they were caused by climate change (like the Late Antique Little Ice Age) or a change in landscape. If either of those two events happen near enough to us that migrating populations will find their way to us, then it is happening near enough to affect us. In the case of pre-modern mass migration events, I'm not sure we would have the resources to absorve the migrants.