Medieval fantasy with potato agriculture vs Medieval fantasy with grain agriculture

So you've got, access to markets, contact with semi skilled workers and enough protein to build muscle mass.
Any king who feeds his peasants grain is just asking for a revolt. Keep them fed on taters and you'll have happy little hobbits doing your bitch work for life.

Well,if they lacked grain completely I assume their food stockpiles for sieges,failed seasons,etc would be pretty weak. Potatoes don't last anywhere near aslong as grain in storage

So to hazard a guess. Diamonds are like potatos. Good for immediate gain but fucks you over trade wise because there are few end products. Ore like iron and copper is lije grain because while you lose some ore in the making of processed goods the other members of the village can have different jobs

Exactly

>Potatoes
>Diamonds
>Grains
>Ore
Only in Veeky Forums one can hear such stupid crap...

It's an apt analogy.

great post. more like this pls.

The major effect is going to be how open they are to trade and foreigners. Cities that rely on tubers and similar crops is going to more isolationist since they dont have a strong history for trade while grain based societies would be more open to adventurers because they are used to traders coming to town and with it a retinue of people whos first skill isnt in trading. You are looking at escorts and armed personnel looking for extra work

Not really. Diamonds are a pain in the ass to process with Medieval technology because they're so hard and virtually undetectable when mixed in with the coal. They're uncommon until you stumble upon a diamond deposit, at which point the initial set up cost is pretty big, followed by a pay off over several years while the diamonds are being extracted, that is until you dig too deep.

Potatoes grow anywhere there's sulfurous earth and at least one full growing period, but require limited agricultural technology to grow. You literally just plant, grow, and dig them up the same year you plant them. You can plant the potatoes you dug up last year to make more potatoes this year. Unlike diamonds, you can't just pick up and move once the soil's depleted. Potatoes are also extremely easy to cook. They're also extremely nutritious -- a diet of nothing but milk and potatoes is actually balanced enough to live for years upon years, provided you get some fiber from somewhere.

Diamonds, to the Medieval person, are useless except as wealth, and dubiously so when it comes to the lower classes. Metals can actually be used for things, particularly copper, iron, and even gold to a minor extent (since it doesn't rust). But as wealth, diamonds are only useful to kings and people with armies. Having diamonds but no army is a good way to get ganked. Having potatoes is a good way to have a well-fed army.

Some comparisons can be made between agriculture and mineral extraction, but comparing potatoes to diamonds is a bizarre exercise. Frankly it's completely unwieldy and spirals out of control no matter how you address it. It's probably better to compare farming and ecology between grains and tubers than to try and compare entirely different industries with entirely different constraints and purposes in Medieval society.

Im actually really impressed with this anwser. Good for you user, I learned something today.

What about rice? It's a better staple crop than both wheat/barley and potatoes right?

How did you miss the point so much? I'm actually impressed by how far you took this. Are you trolling or like, or did you just not get it?It was so beautiful and then you touched it inappropriately. How?

Read the thread again. It didn't say Diamonds were valuable to medieval peasants.

whoosh

>no pasta or bread
Suicide from absolute existential despair overtakes disease and violence as the leading cause of peasant fatalities.

Beer vs. Vodka, and consequently the amount of rage.

Vodka is traditionally made from grain.

which last for about a month, until the ideas of mashed potatoes and oven fries spread, and then everything returns to normal

Rice is better but it takes relatively advanced irrigation techniques to get the most out of it. Wheat and oats can also be rotated with livestock. where as a rice paddy cannot.

I'm learning so much today! Is it really? I need to wiki this. How much does the taste change with what you use?

>vodka
>taste
If you can taste past the alcohol then they made it wrong.

In so far as I know, most vodka you've likely ever had is made from grain. The flavor changes a little I believe, but relatively little between grain and potatoes. It gets wacky when you do stuff like make it from grapes or peaches. I'm not a vodka guy myself though, so I haven't had many different kinds or understand the nuances.

Zubrowka says fuck you.

You can rotate rice with water buffalo and special cattle can't you?

And those are evidentlly not enormous issues, given the historically massive populations of rice eating countries.

Absolutely but it becomes a question of adoption. Is your medieval fantasy land capable of adopting or breeding the kind of specialized livestock needed to make use of it.

I mean, they would have to wouldn't they? In the same way we're assuming that they breed their animals for wheat, we must also assume they breed their animals for rice.

This isn't just switching them instaneously in the middle of the twelfth century, this is an entire history where the staple crop has been totally different.

Fair point. I think all things being equal, rice is better but I could be wrong.

I don't think you can grow it anywhere with an extended period of sub zero temperatures. So Northern Europe wouldn't be able to feed itself.

Might be wrong about that though.

And you can't feed potatoes to most livestock

Rice is picky with temperatures 20-30c is needed to grow.
High wind can render an entire crop sterile
High humidity causes rot.

Corn is also sensitive to growth environment.

Potatoes are picky with soil consistency an has some crippling illnesses/pests

Wheat has the advantage of growing comfortably from egypt to scandinavia.

Corn is sensitive? Why is it so popular with factory farms in the states?

>Wheat has the advantage of growing comfortably from egypt to scandinavia.

Comfortably... Up here in the north it's "F1" cereal. It feeds the most people per acre when everything goes right, but it's also the most sensitive one, and will fail utterly more than the alternatives (oat, barley and rye, not rice and corn and so on, those would just be non-starters here).

Hencewhy tradewise grain based agricultures will be more robust because it requires different labor demands to process it to something useful. You dont get that with rice and taters

Corn subsidies is my understanding.

Modern pesticides.

>Corn is sensitive? Why is it so popular with factory farms in the states?
As far as I understand it, it is good enough within USA environmental conditions, and the USA government subsidize the shit ou of it, as most of the USA agriculture, for the matter.

Because modern farming, bulk results make up for issues and the US just has vast areas that are spot on what corn likes.

Also throw enough money at it.

Yeah went with wheat as it's the most commonly known grain.

Veeky Forums

Cool stuff.

You get a flinty taste with grain-based vodkas that doesn't exist with potato-based vodkas. The main difference between potato-based vodka and water is the weight of the liquid on your tongue, the texture of it, and the fact that it is alcoholic.

That said, the flavor difference between grain and potato is immense. I was trying Tito's versus Skyy and Absolut.

>Absolut
does that even have it's own flavour anymore? Hasn't it been tweaked and adjusted entirely into generic vodkaness.

Potato based agriculture isn't very good for supporting most livestock either. No cattle, No horses, No sheep. Pigs maybe (though the potatoes have to be cooked). They *can* eat them, but they still need a lot of grain and forage in their diet and it takes time for them to adapt to having potatoes. Green areas of potatoes / raw potatoes are poisonous to chicken and goats.

Potatoes also don't keep for long periods - they last about 2-3 months (four if you really stretch), which kind of fucks you in winter and you need to have an *excellent* crop rotation otherwise.

Grains however do keep really well even if they aren't as nutritious as potatoes. Grains (and their byproducts) are also decent for feeding livestock (cows, goats, horses, chicken, sheep). Grains also provide the means for alcohol production - beers and such which were extremely important to human society, especially in places without "good/clean" water.

With potatoes you get vodka, which due to the processes used to make it, has a much higher alcohol content and doesn't provide near enough water supplement like beers would.

Then there's also the issue of not as many end products from potatoes, unlike grains.

Pic unrelated.

Rice doesn't *need* to be irrigated, it just turns out that the primary pests for rice can't survive the flooded fields, unlike the rice which can.

I've also heard reports of some farmers practicing simple aquaculture with their rice paddies - fish farming among their paddies.

How many potatoes would be needed to trade for a captured cute shark mermaid pirate like this?

Pic now related

All you get from Absolut or Skyy, in my experience, is the flinty aftertaste common to all grain-based vodkas. It's something you notice, but don't realize shouldn't be there until you have a potato-based vodka. Yes, Grey Goose has it too. I didn't mention that one because it wasn't part of the side-by-side tasting I did.

To whoever may want to know:

-There is a wonderful alternate timeline dealing with inuits developing agriculture, based on two local plants, trenches and black stone walls to develop microclimates.
wiki.alternatehistory.com/doku.php?id=timelines:lands_of_ice_and_mice_-_an_alternate_history_of_thule

-Even now, we are learning of new stuff. For example, a chef started to promote a kind of black rice that some people grew at the Amazon Basin. Don't know if it's local or from somewhere else though.

>I've also heard reports of some farmers practicing simple aquaculture with their rice paddies - fish farming among their paddies.
I've seen this in two ways: either at the same time as the rice grows, or using the paddy after the rice was harvested.

She needs to eat meat. There are no underwater potatoes.

>aquaculture
Is actually very common, but not really rotation the way it was asked.

I personally really like the idea of making a whole setting that uses 'acorn' bread. Ie; their main grain crop are acorns mashed into powder for bread.

From the navy who captured her, she wouldn't be for sale otherwise.

>Potatoes also don't keep for long periods
Yes, if you only have white potatoes.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chuño

I'm really unsure about the viability of it
How long do acorn trees need to grow until they grow acorns?
How is the percentage of acorn mass to tree mass? is it even remotely enough in the early stages or would you have to use another crop to pad until you get enough harvest from it?

psst, buddy, there's exactly one end product to grains like there is potatoes: food.
You don't grow grain or potatoes as a cash crop in a pre-industrial society. You grow it to feed the mouths of all the people who actually are doing cash work.
Whether you feed the tanners or tobacconists or cotton farmers colcannon and vodka or bread and beer doesn't really make a difference. You keep them fed and happy and working.

>spain is not good

The fuck you just said about spain, bitch?

He thaid you don't talk tho good.

Everyone would be ginger and chugging whiskey as opposed to English and chugging beer.

Holy shit, did you miss the mark so much. Are you unironically autistic?

>Not being Roman and chugging wine
0/10
Plebeian Tier.

>acorn trees

They're called oaks, user. I can't say if they'd be effective or not as a crop, but I live in an area that has shit-tons of them, and they do drop a fair amount of acorns per full-grown tree (IIRC the average time from acorn to full-grown tree is 20-30 years, dependent on species)

#&@%$!

While acorns may not be the most reliable food source oak is sure as hell a sturdy wood.

it's been a think historically. One of the most populous cultures in pre-Columbian America were the peoples of California who used acorns as a staple, and it was used as a major food source in ancient Spain and Japan, among other places.
It's objectively not as good as staple as domesticated grain, but if you don't have domesticated grain, it's pretty damn good.

jesus christ dude

>there are no underwater potatoes
citation needed

Oh, for sure. I'm no kind of biologist or anything related, but I get the feeling that you would grow oaks for lumber and use the acorns as a supplementary food, not the other way around.

this is why you dont let humanities majors talk about economics. they say stupid shit like this and then try to impliment their ideas in real life, but somehow along the way 100 million people starve to death

Who ARE able to give competent and unbiased talks on economics?

Hell anything?

Nice argument, my dude, but I think it would benefit from some substance.

Not so sure they're wrong though.

I mean you guys are missing the point about diamonds = potatoes, it's not about potatoes being worthless or valuable, it's that the steps necessary to process them (compared to grains and metal ores) are far shorter and require fewer steps, thus fewer tools, and fewer jobs. Ignore the fact that diamonds are only valuable (in a medieval society at least) because people place an arbitrary value on shiny rare stones.

A lot, and I mean -a lot- of modern technology is derived from the steps necessary to turn grain into flour and then into bread.

We're talking modern ovens, plow shares, that harness you could stick on a horse, the 3 field system to keep the land fertile enough to grow massive crops of grains, then you have the mills themselves, with various forms of simple machinery power, all of which was derived from the low and middle ages following the fall of the roman empire who used slave power to grind grain into flour mostly rather than gear assemblies and water wheels.

Because of the centralization of grain milling, you couldn't have one on each and every farm, they had to be in specific locations and required a lot of stone and wood, they were relatively expensive to build compared to clearing the land necessary to grow grain itself.

So that necessitates a trade network to get the grain to the mill and then back from the mill to the bakeries because only a MAD MAN is going to put something specifically for making and keeping fires next to anything that produces tons of dust.

That then has to get the bread back to farms, making an interlinked trade network.

>cont

This is the single most interesting thread on Veeky Forums, but to the point:

You can do "crop" rotation with Rice in the sense that you can stock the rice paddy with tilapia and then harvest both the fish and the rice at the same time. Afterwards you stock the remaining paddy with shrimp before finally draining and harvesting that and letting it sit/fallow for a bit.

Some people however skip that last part and instead use the paddy land for raising ducks, but I'm not 100% sure on those details.
Either way though the point is you're left with a completely functioning paddy that yields large quantities of rice, shrimp, and fish.

Potatoes don't need any of that at all, so you have no impetus to invent shit. You don't need to plow fields to grow potatoes either, nor live in specific locations. Sure, you can live and grow and live off them anywhere, and then use your spare land to grow grass and make hay for your livestock for milk, but you have no drive or impetus to expand, compete, or change how you do things because you support a pretty decent population on that and hunting or slaughter assuming you grow hay on your remaining land.

You see where I'm going with this?

You never get out of the Low Middle ages if your primary food economy staple is something as easy to get out of the ground and easy to eat as the potato. Or, at least, you take way longer to do it.

Yes, what he meant was that diamonds are like potatoes in every aspect. He wasn't trying to just make a simple comparison about how they are traded.

>I've also heard reports of some farmers practicing simple aquaculture with their rice paddies - fish farming among their paddies.
We do that in louisiana but with shrimp and rice.

It's not like people didn't have small mills in their homes.

In so far as I know, rice is a lot simpler with far fewer mechanical steps but the Chinese still managed to locally develop a great many technologies that could have theoretically and practically put them ahead of Europe many times in it's history. Mass production of at least workable iron and steel being one of the most notable.

Harder to grow.
Meanwhile Potato can use shit soil, so long you remember that you need to rotate crops.

Wait until he learns what Mortle and Pestles are.

>Whether you feed the tanners or tobacconists or cotton farmers colcannon and vodka or bread and beer doesn't really make a difference. You keep them fed and happy and working.

It isn't about food, it's about the consequences of the process and how they change the economy around it:

-When you grow potatoes your only immediate product is the potato itself. Agriculture begins and ends with the potato.

-When you grow wheat however you create numerous other jobs. With wheat you at least now require both a miller AND a baker: one person to grind the grain into flour (using a mill) and after that you need a baker to bake the bread.

Even the waste byproduct of wheat opens up another level of industry because it can be used to feed livestock- where as potatoes produce potatoes and you either eat THEM or you feed them to your livestock; which is kind of a waste, but the only option available as every green part of a potato is poisonous.

The point is you're not seeing the forest for the trees.
You're having a high int, but low wisdom, moment.

that is not how jobs work, you fucking nigger retard.
if you have a more efficient production system, the money you save can be spent on other shit.

OH FUCK WE HAVE A MIRACLE FOOD THAT DOESNT REQUIRE MILLING AND BAKING!
NOW FOOD IS LESS EXPENSIVE THAT IS AWESOME!
WE CAN SPEND OUR SAVED MONEY ON OTHER SHIT THAT OTHER PEOPLE WILL MAKE, HOW COOL!

the milling and baking jobs lost will be replaced with new jobs because everyone now has more money because they saved money on less expensive food.

It also has super specific places it can be grown and you can't live off rice alone, you need a whole bunch of other stuff beyond the species of rice they grow in Asia. And you need technologies for irrigation and such which you don't need for potatoes.

That still supports a very diverse economy and tech base.

Or everyone just grows potatoes and small livestock on their own and never bothers to form towns and villages because they have almost no need to interact with one and other beyond defense and luxury trading which no one will be able to afford because no one actually makes any money because all the farmers do is eat their own potatoes instead of selling them.

You are thinking like a modern man user.
You don't need a miller or a baker.
What you need is somebody to create the milling equipment.

If there is a specific occupation as miller, either you have created some form of labor specialization, or you have created tools to allow for labor specialization.
Being "a baker" is even more laughable, because it won't actually be a occupation until you got a segregated trade economy, where you don't really bake, you just make exotic sweets 90% of the time.

actually the weight of evidence shows that's actually how things work until you hit a breaking point of survival versus entertainment value in terms of production.

IE: the reason we didn't advance away from subsistence farming for about 30k years of our existence was due to how fucking -risky- it was to change and invent things.

Then post agriculture things still didn't change very much for about another 7000 years when you start getting economies, money, and trade between communities going.

The balance of evidence suggests that without grains, the first crop we ever mass produced in the fertile crescent, then we'd be way less advanced today than we are. I doubt it would have stalled us flat out, but it would have slowed things down considerably.

Humans don't take, or fund, risks to their well being unless the price of that risk isn't 'the whole community I am part of might starve to death'.

Neat fact. The Clovis Point spear tip went unchanged for about 3-5000 years probably not because it worked so damn well, so much as trying to vary that shit up to be more effective would have risked lives to starvation that could be better spent hunting giant armadillos into extinction.

My understanding was that vodka was traditionally made from potatoes. That might have just been the Irish though.

>mix water with vodka
>????
>safe drinking water
They didn't drink beer neat 24/7 mate. It was usually pretty weak and they'd cut that down with water to give to children. Apply the same principal with the potato based liquor.

Or they form towns and villages for common protection because they aren't retarded like you. Or they form towns and villages because people like to socialize with other people, unlike autists like you. Hell, who knows. Maybe while socializing someone will come up with a tool to make potato harvesting easier so they have a surplus to sell and trade to other people.

You can distill potatoes into alcohol.
I have yet to see anyone get me a cup of diamond juice when asked for (maybe I'm asking the wrong people, though).

>The Clovis Point spear tip went unchanged for about 3-5000 years
what are you smoking?
Clovis Point is a shape thats easy to make without access to forging, because it turns out rocks are brittle, and creating arrow pointy rock is hard work with low yields

You can make those from everything with starch in it.

Just gotta get creative

>no need to interact with one and other beyond defense and luxury trading which no one will be able to afford because no one actually makes any money because all the farmers do is eat their own potatoes instead of selling them.
yeah, it is obvious that you know nothing about early human history from this comment. towns formed for the purpose of defense. that is why they formed. so that people dont get murdered to death by random nomads and all their shit stolen. towns will form regardless of the need for milling.

> all the farmers do is eat their own potatoes instead of selling them.
wrong again, fagboat. the farmers will produce a surplus which will be used to buy other goods and services. a more productive crop means a bigger surplus that can support more people doing stuff other than farming

>subsistence farming for about 30k years
LOL, the neolithic era started 10k ago retard. you know literally nothing about this subject. the rest of your post is outright bullshit coming from that ignorance

Veeky Forums is full of fucking dumb niggers. seriously. are you faggots all 15yo? do you have any education in the subject at all?

this board is garbage.

>t. armchair historians believe that because history happened one way, it can ONLY happen that way in any alternate timeline, world or history

Let me give you a little hint; the potato did not cause the industrial revolution. It was a cause OF the industrial revolution.

You can make vodka from nearly any organic matter. I think it can even be made out of sawdust

>everyone ate turnips before potatos