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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The absolute limits of photosynthesis
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 domesticate giant ants similar to wolves? Maybe even assist them 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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Edible plants that can survive climate change while living 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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Which Crops Could be Grown in a Subpolar Oceanic (CFC) Climate Zone?
In my fantasy series, the area the main protagonist is from is cool and dreary year-round, but never cold and never hot. For example, it never really gets higher than the 60s farenheit at the peak of ...
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How can massive forest burning be an entirely terrible thing?
I'm writing a story about a fantasy medieval world where flightless dragons roam vast tropical rainforests (like Vietnam or Borneo) and preys on animals and people alike. These dragons are so powerful ...
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What is the first problem an agrarian civilization try to solve with bio-circuitry?
Imagine an Agrarian civilisation (whose entire economy is based on producing and maintaining crops and farmland.) had developed a way to cultivate something like Cable Bacteria into large basic ...
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Can horn be used as a substitute for greenhouse glass?
Setting is in an era when glass would be expensive, in a cold, mountainous region with a lot of goats and horned monsters. I know horn was used in lanterns, but I'm not sure if it would allow through ...
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World of All Sentient Races, No Animals [closed]
In a world that has no form of lower life forms, only "sophonts" how would society evolve? I'd say it applys to all animals: land, sea and air. But not plants. Probably. Maybe? Given the ...
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Best and Worst Koppen Climate Types for Human Civilization?
I've already made a Koppen climate map of (the relevant parts of) my world (see below) and I was wondering where most of the civilization and agricultural development should arise here based on that. ...
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A wizard is magically engineering the perfect agriculture animal that will replace as many farm animals as possible, what is he making?
So I have this tyrannical wizard with absurd powers who is the emperor of a large and powerful empire.
Part of his success is not simply down to his ability to murder people but also his brilliant ...
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Where would the best cuts of meat be on a giant insect?
Let's say one had a giant insect the size of a sheep or a cow that some sapient species was raising as meat livestock. These animals would have to be butchered to be eaten and cannot simply be eaten ...
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Inclinatory Cycles and Seasonbuilding
I was doing some tests in Universe Sandbox a while ago and I noticed a strange behavior shown by giant planets on highly inclined orbits. In the simulation I placed an Earth at 1 AU around the Sun, ...
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How much energy is needed to grow an acre of wheat entirely indoors?
I'm building an artificial growing environment for a heavily overpopulated world (because you can always build up, right?). When I started thinking about this, I thought it might be as simple as "...
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Basing a civilization on maize, beans, and squash as staple foods?
In my world, an apocalypse happened, a nuclear war.
Fast forward to the future. In places like Vegas, New Fresno, and Lost Angels (post-apoc LA) I was thinking about agriculture, and after doing a ...
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Best hydroponic crops to support an underground society?
So, in my world, after WW3, a contingent of American government officials, military officials, scientists, and engineers hid out in a specially constructed bunker, where they'd remain for nearly 200 ...
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Best crops to grow in the post-apocalyptic wasteland?
A nuclear-WWIII happens, lots of people and animals die.
Surviving humans are afterwards forced to either hide out in small survivalist compounds on the surface, or self-sufficient underground bunkers....
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Radio controlled sheep
A worldwide pandemic has killed the world's dogs and their cousins the wolves.
In sheep farming countries, dogs have been and still are an invaluable aid to sheep farmers. Some breeds will herd the ...
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What plant crops can grow using only 75% light intensity? [closed]
Are there any plant crops that can grow reliably well at only 75% light illumination?
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How could a world develop where it was necessary to mine all soil for agricultural use
I want to create a world were soil mining is a major industry. Imagine a vaguely Earth sized world where almost the entire surface of the planet is under, ocean, ice caps or is a hot or cold desert ...
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How easily can a medieval granary explode?
The villainous gremlins are attempting to cause as much damage to the lands of the Empire as possible with as little effort as practical. They have numerous plans to this end. One such plan is to blow ...
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How to teach the Mesoamericans seafaring?
I want to have a powerful Mesoamerican civilisation by the 1100s; one that decides to sail east and discover Europe. Earlier versions of the story had them contacted by Zheng He in the 1400s, but I ...
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Could agriculture still be developed by intelligent species that lack the concept of past and future?
Imagine somewhere in the universe there is an intelligent species that is as intelligent as our stone age fore-brothers and sisters but will never establish the concept of past and future events.
...
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