Questions tagged [agriculture]
For questions related to the production of certain types of food: plants, nuts and everything else that is edible and cultivated.
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Societies After A Sudden 'Ice Age'
About 300 years ago, my world underwent massive climate change. It suddenly shifted from something we'd consider normal/livable to a climate similar to that of the last glacial maximum. (Side note: I ...
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Why would a highly advanced society still engage in extensive agriculture?
What are some plausible reasons why an advanced, futuristic society would still have a sizable agricultural/rural component, and a significant rural population? This hypothetical civilization is ...
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Solutions for an Aquatic Race to Harvest the Sugar Under Sea Grass Meadows
So it turns out that there’s billions of Coca Colas’ worth of sugar released into the rhizosphere beneath sea grasses.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/05/220502120422.htm
I have a race of ...
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Would a windmill shaped like a waterwheel work?
The culture I'm working on lives in a constant state of snow storms and tundra. In the snow lives a bioluminescent type of algae that thrives on the cold and only glows when its temperature goes above ...
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What earth crops could be grown on a high gravity (1.5-3g) planet?
I feel like there must be a lot of factors here from the actual structural rigidity of the plants, to how well capillary action functions in higher gravity, to how well cellular mechanisms such as ...
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What would be the easiest way for a fictional civilization to feed carnivorous mounted animals?
Many fictional worlds have their civilizations (usually the bad guys) ride some sort of carnivorous animal, usually something like a wolf or a creodont. Think something like the Wargs from Lord of the ...
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Conditions required for a society to develop aquaculture?
While researching Kwak'wala, because I think the languages of the Pacific Northwest have this amazing aesthetic I want to mimic in some languages in my world, I came across the fact that the Kwakwak'...
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What are the best food crops for sapient rats?
In the near-future, a hitherto-undiscovered island becomes a training and research facility for an unnamed nation’s military. One field of research taking place on this island is in the development of ...
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Aeroponic farming in a gas giant
In the setting of my projects there is a gas giant (with a mass of about 3 jupiters) that migrated within the habitable zone, as such it's outer atmosphere would feature plenty of water wapor and have ...
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What is the most efficient crop for converting kilowatts of UV light into calories people can eat?
If a group of people live in a closed loop environment, with all energy coming from a reactor. What crops would you grow if you only care about keeping people fed for the absolute minimum amount of ...
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What could humans forage 75 million years ago in Laramidia (Western North America) and could the stuff I've found actually be plausible?
So first things first, I'm trying to put together a grounded cretaceous Western setting for a personal world building project. I'm aware of just how... Limited humans would be when it comes to diet ...
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Growing space on an early planetary colony
So, humans in the distant future have launched a sleeper ship to a new solar system. Having shed its light-sails in orbit, the vessel has crash landed on it’s intended World; a barren mars-like planet....
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What would the climate be like on highly volcanic planet?
I'm writing about a planet that is harsh but livable. This planet is covered with mountains and active volcanoes. Far more volcanoes than what exists on Earth. It is more like Venus but is much ...
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Greenery on a planet without large oceans
I want to create a planet that is mostly covered in land mass, with large amounts of forest, grassland, and farmland, but does NOT have large oceans. I envision the planet to have lots of lakes of ...
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Food chain based in geothermal heat?
Underground dwarven (and other) civilizations are a staple of fantasy worlds. The obvious question (what do these people eat?) is rarely answered.
As an explanation, I considered a food chain based in ...
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Would a post-apocalyptic village full of only children be sustainable? [closed]
In Fallout 3, there is an infamous settlement the player has to go through called Little Lamplight. Little Lamplight is a cave town that exclusively consists of children and tweens under the age of 16....
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How would one create a living pantry to use in an emergency?
A group of ~100 people working together have built a large forest secluded from the rest of society. The forest is ~70 km by ~70 km square. It has no seasons and can not be found or accessed by any ...
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Would a purely agricultural world exporting its production be sustainable when it comes to water?
To simplify the question as much as possible, let's assume an Earth-like planet, part of a galaxy-spanning civilization. 30% is above water level, the rest is ocean of salt-water.
This world is an ...
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In a world without grasses, which vegetarian foods would be best suited for long-term storage?
In my fantasy world I am going for a Mesozoic-inspired biome, so I want there to be no grasses. This means no wheat, rice, corn, and the like. I imagine that the staple crops will be tubers, legumes, ...
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The absolute limits of photosynthesis [closed]
I have found that some crops, like sugarcane, have a photosynthetic efficiency of 12%. Using extensive genetic modification and eliminating all natural barriers, like light wavelength, chloroplast ...
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Hypothetically, can early humans have an alliance with giant ants? Maybe even assist humans in the agricultural revolution?
Any ant-keeping geeks out there? I know what it's like to keep ants and they are quite fascinating, I was wondering if there were giant ants (their gigantism is due to high O2 levels) could they be ...
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How can crops survive in a desert where it's over 110 degrees... in the Winter?
Some folks I write about live in a series of mutually-supporting, mostly self-sustaining agricultural stations/colonies on the edge of a desert, and are attempting to turn said desert greener.
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Evaporation Pans by Filling Lake Makgadikgdi with water from the Zambezi [closed]
I have Macro question, and have enquired and discussed this topic with numerous people. My background is more in Economics and Finance, but I have a small little plot in the Waterberg Limpopo (Pecan ...
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At what point does a human civilization on a dead planet require petroleum?
I’ve gone and designed an entire earth-like planet where life had never evolved. Oil can be reached if needed—the purpose of this question is to find how far they can go and avoid it. (Oil is ...
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Could animal husbandry in space ever hold economic value?
Could animal husbandry ever have any economic value as a space-based industry? We are already on the cusp of lab-based meat that is grown as an alternative industry, but would the practice of actually ...
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How much would this alien parasite increase crop yields?
It is a bizarre prokaryotic flowering plant parasite which has graphene reinforced cell walls and is so distinct from all other organisms to warrant placement in its own domain of life (indeed it only ...
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Maximizing crop yields
Ladies and gentleman, today we were summoned by the Agro-nerd council with one unique mission: we must take a single acre of land and feed the largest amount of people possible. But this isn't your ...
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Life on a planet with little axial tilt
As we know Earth has axial tilt and a nearly circular orbit. What if there was a habitable planet with almost no axial tilt? Obviously there wouldn't be seasons induced by tilt, instead the seasons ...
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How many calories can a cubic meter produce?
In my Generic Dystopian Setting™, space inside the nuclear shelters is at a premium, and so people have had to come up with creative means of growing food inside them. This often includes thinking ...
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Irrigation in ancient societies [duplicate]
In what kinds of environments would the irrigation of crops require authoritarian governments ? This would be about ancient pre industrial societies.
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How much could honey-production be scaled up
Worldwide 1,850,868 tonnes of honey is produced per year
There are eight species of bee that produce honey, it's not just apis mellifera.
Supposing honey became a main food source for humans, and ...
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How plausible would apple-sized raspberries be?
In one of my settings, the people have domesticated the wild raspberry plant, and selectively bred it for larger and larger berries. Would it be plausible for these berries to reach the sizes of ...
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Would honey work as money?
Would honey be feasible as a kind of money? It seems ideal to me and I'm wondering if I'm missing something.
Honey is:
imperishable (like gold is)
hard to mass-produce or massively scale production ...
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Is relocating fertile topsoil possible/feasible?
In my world, there are two distinct regions close to each other:
fertile and very densely populated
infertile marshlands and very sparsely populated
During the mid-1900s, the cities in the region #1 ...
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How many generations does it take to domesticate plants?
Modern crops have diverged significantly from their wild ancestors over thousands of years of selective breeding. Not all of this was deliberate, e.g. an early adaptation of wheat was for seeds that ...
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Reasons to settle outside cities on deserts
I need help solving some problems considering civilization living on plains
The World:
there is magic, everyone can perform it, it needs a lot of studying to perform - users need special type of ...
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What sort of weapons manufacturing could be supported by a post-apocalyptic world?
I've just been working on this post-apocalyptic setting and was wondering what level of weapons technology it would be able to support. Essentially a combination of land degradation, global warming (...
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Best real-world location for a self-sufficient villain island?
Villains like to live on private islands, where they have a secret base and can carry out their evil experiments in all privacy.
The Caribbean is popular in fiction, but for my purposes it is just ...
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Are there any crops or agricultural practices well suited for a cool and very wet climate?
I am working on one particular region in a conworld that has a particularly cool, mild, and wet climate, similar to the west coasts of Southern Chile, New Zealand's South Island, or Washington state. ...
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How can I justify that dunes keep drifting and cannot be stabilised?
I have the idea of a fantasy civilization based around shifting dunes. The idea is that the land is largely uninhabitable except for the coasts, but there are large dunes that function as habitable &...
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How realistic is an underwater farm in a glass dome?
Say that hypothetically, I wish to grow plants under the ocean. I construct a large glass dome and house the plants in a greenhouse contained in that done. How deep underwater could I plausibly have ...
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How densely populated can a rural area be?
The state of Bihar, in India, has an estimated population density of 1,307 humans per square kilometer even though 89% of the population lives in rural areas. How much more people could inhabit a ...
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Sustainability of a village of giant creatures
Let's say there is a sapient species around the size of an t-rex, they weigh on average 6000-8000 kg and are omnivores whose diet is mostly composed of plant matter, but with some meat. They are ...
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With genetic modification, can we make naturally occurring popcorn?
I thought it would be interesting if someone made naturally occurring popcorn. Like if we made this genetically modified corn reached a certain temperature, the kernels would dry out and explode. but ...
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Pre-Spaceflight Alien agriculture Part II Predators and carnivores [closed]
This is part two of a question (link to Pre-Spaceflight alien agriculture part I: herbivores and grazers) last time I asked what would Agriculture look like for sentient herbivores, trying to figure ...
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Pre-Spaceflight alien agriculture part I: herbivores and grazers
One of the most important developments in our history as a sentient species was the development of agriculture. When our ancestors decided to grow their food instead of gathering it, it allowed us to ...
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What would the world look like if everone was a wizard? [closed]
In my world everyone has magic powers. They aren't super powerful (no murder on sight spells...) but every single person has limited magic. What political, social, military and agricultural things ...
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Making a world as Agriculturally productive as possible
Basically, God decided to create the perfect world for man to work the land. Even then, he voluntarily decided to follow the laws of physics.
I've investigated about some factors that supposedly ...
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Civilization in a giant Flood plain continent?
Basically, in my world, there is a continent bigger than the whole of Eurasia, it is extremely flat (a 50 meter hill would be considered an important landmark), and its whole surface is a flood plain. ...
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Which Crops/Other Plants Could be Grown in a "Tropical Mediterranean" Climate?
In my book series, the region around the capital city of one of my planets has a very odd climate: while it has the year-round warm-to-hot weather of a tropical climate, it also has an exaggerated ...
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