Worldbuilding

What is the difference between rice and wheat agriculture? Is one superior to a low tech society?

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The amount of available standing water.

Rice requires large amounts of water to stand in to germinate and grow,. No standing water, no rice.

But in exchange, I think rice bears a much larger harvest than wheat.

Rice can be harvested repeatedly from the same paddles and doesn't require crop rotation, gives larger harvest and doesn't require as intensive care as wheat does.
On the other hand, rice requires irrigation.

It's dangerous to go alone, take this.
www.reenactor.ru/ARH/PDF/Adamson.pdf

actually, rice doesn't require standing water to grow, but it does grow in it, so it is done that way for weed control

Not OP, but which is more versatile as a food though? I know rice and wheat can be made in a variety of other food products, but which has the most variety?

nigga you just taught me something

by weight, yes
by nutritional value and potential reuse, no
plus, rice patties are a hotbed for parasites, and waterborne illnesses and also rice concentrates arsenic in it.
but, ease of growing is certainly a thing to consider. a few generations of families working the fields will build up immune responses.

OP, i suggest you consider quinoa. Its a grain that is super fucking high in protein and vitamins. is a fucking superfood and about the same difficulty to grow as wheat, but it may require slightly warmer climates.

They are pretty similar as far as the function goes.
They both can be used for noodles, bread, cereals, alcohol etc.
The main difference I can name off the top of my head is that rice is only used in flatbreads, while wheat can be used both in flatbread and regular (yeast) bread. Don't quote me on that, though.

the largest difference between the two is that rice doesn't contain gluten. Gluten, as a viscoelestic protien, is incredibly important in a ton of baking processes, but that's about it.

You can make mochi with rice, which is fucking good shit

That's not really unique to rice, as similar wheat delicacies can be made, provided wheat is glutinous enough. The wheat strains required just weren't available until recently (and no one bothers with growing it besides a few Asian countries, because durum is objectively superior), but it's not reaching too far that OP's world might contain such a wheat strain.

The ponds that rice are kept in are also part of the reason rice doesn't need to be babied as much: frogs, crayfish, bugs, and other doodads all live, shit, die, etc.. In the rice paddy and cycle a bit of those nutrients.
Some cultures even go the extra mile and DO go through a very basic crop rotation of rice, fish, and shrimp to maximize gains.

It has more to do with climate. Rice grows in wetter areas with standing water, where wheat grows in drier climates

Where is the flora and fauna more abundant - in a savannah, or in a marsh?
And what are the predominant types of crops one can grow in a savannah or in a marsh?

Go back to school

Seriously, what the fuck is even this question? Are you retarded or something?

>2017
>Rice has less nutrition than wheat
user... Did you get a memo 19th century ended?
Also:
>Produce 6 times more grain
>B-but it has lower calories value
How? You've just produced 6 times more grain, which is inferior in sheer calories-to-weight by about 4%. And 2.5% is the threshold of statistical mistake. So explain to us all how the FUCK producing 5.76 times as much of calories is somehow less than just making 1.

Did you drop out of school just like OP did?

But rice grains are small

Wheat is the least land efficient grain imaginable. Literally ANYTHING else is better: rice, barley, maize, rye, sorgo... And then there are non-grain plans, that are even better. Nothing depletes soil as fast as wheat does, nothing puts as much water stress on land as wheat does (not even rice!), nothing is this weather-sensitive as wheat does and in the end all those requirements do not translate into any increase of anything at all. Wheat is just awfully wasteful plant that doesn't provide any "bonus" for the strict requirements, long germination and heavy impact on soil degradation.
The only reason why it's still in use is Europeans being used to eating wheat-based products and thus importing wheat-based agriculture all around the world, usually leading to amazing mismanagement and crop failure due to high requirements of wheat and its inability to grow in given situation, while in the same time removing local plants and varieties. By the time anyone wised up enough to notice, it was already 1970s and it was too little too late.

You can get more nutrient from the same area by planting fucking common walnuts than setting up a field of wheat, that's how bad it is at feeding people.

Jesus Christ... Not him, but are you seriously this dense? Grain is always accounted in WEIGHT. Meaning the final weight of yearly rice crops weight six times as much as wheat. By the sheer virtue of having 2 or even 3 harvests of rice a year, you can easily outpace wheat. Which is one of the reasons why wheat is so bad - you can only have single harvest of it yearly and it grows for so long you can't plant any other grain, even if the local climate supports multiple harvests.

Rice is always superior, but especially in low-tech situation

Rice
>Two harvests per year (can even be three if you are in tropics)
>Can be stored unmilled for decades
>Replanting grants futher increase of yield
>High labour requirement for setting up fields, low maintance
>Relatively easy for winnowing
>Non-machine threshing barely affects grain loss
>Requires only green manure to stop soil degradation

Wheat
>Single harvest per year
>Can be stored only for few years, wheat has shelf life of two decades tops
>Impossible to replant
>High labour requirement for setting up fields, medium maintance
>Requires machines for efficient winnowing
>Non-machine threshing is the main source of grain loss
>Depletes soil in quick succession without heavy fertilization

The only situation where rice is inferior is climate that makes it impossible to grow it. But they you are better off planting barley and rye than wheat, as they come with much higher yields, shorter growth and much slower soil degradation.

Depends on the marsh, depends on the savannah.

There are savannahs which are just a rainy day away from being Gardens of Eden, with most of the flora and fauna "sleeping" until such days, and there are some which are barely a thin layer of grass roots on top of sheer bedrock. There are marshes which teem with life above and below the water level and there are some where plants have to resort to be carnivores to get at least some nutrients, with most of their food washed out of what's left of the soil long ago.

>t. someone who never saw husked wheat
Let me guess - coconut is full inside, right?

Pic related
There is climate, soil composition, amount of seasonal and yearly rainfall, daily temperature differential...

>Wheat is the least land efficient grain imaginable. Literally ANYTHING else is better: rice, barley, maize, rye, sorgo..

That... is fucking stupid. If wheat was so bad, Europeans would have abandoned it in favour of oats, barley, spelt, rye etc, but they didn't. Nobody keeps growing a sub-optimal crop for thousands of years when it's the only thing you have to eat on a regular basis.

Rice is a mid-tier grain: It takes more work to acquire smaller grains, than wheat, and doesn't have all the necessary vitamins, which is why we've had to genetically engineer golden rice with added nutrients for poor fag asian countries with no better staple to stop them suffering vitamin A deficiencies

Rye is susceptible to ergot infestations, which makes people go crazy

Maize has the problem that if you don't soak it in alkali water and it's your only staple, you get pellagra because your body can't get any niacin from it

Wheat is superior in pretty much every meaningful way.

Climate

>superfood

hipster murderhobo detected

>That... is fucking stupid

People... are fucking stupid

Most europeans did eat barley, rye and oats for most of history. Wheat was a cash crop for consumption by richer folks while the majority of peasants made do with other grains. In any case crop rotation mitigated soil depletion to an extent and provided fodder for livestock, which is an advantage over most rice farming communities.

Which brings us to matter of why go to all the trouble of growing a crop with low yields and vulnerability to climate? Wheat just tastes better than other grains. People like eating wheat bread more than barely bread for the most part. Which is exactly why wheat was a luxury for those who could aford it but most people ate less tasty but more productive and affordable cereals.

The same actually holds true for rice as well. Barley and millet were the primary food crops for the ordinary farmer in China or Japan while rice was the luxury cereal for the wealthy in most areas. Rice didn't become the staple in Japan until well into the 19th century.

People want to eat tasty food even if it less efficient when they have the option so sterile facts about cultivation requirements and yield don't tell the whole story.

>Being this fucking stupid
>Complaining about others
Let me guess - you know that all from reading wikipedia, right? Never even saw a farmland IRL

>Wheat is inferior in pretty much every meaningful way.
Here, ftfy
It's the worst cereals you can cultivate when it comes to productivity, calories or just about anything else. A luxury that due to truly staggering technological advances managed to become a stample in past century or so, but can remain as such solely due to related tech and machines. But since OP asked for low tech society explicitly, you are going to starve while planting wheat. Assuming it will grow at all.

And this user gets it.
It's like beri-beri. You get it from lack of B vitamins, that you could easily get from eating unhusked rice. But since husked rice requires extra labour, it's also more expensive, which makes it a luxury in pre-modern milling. Which make beri-beri a rich man disease. Nowdays it's the exact opposite - due to how cheap dehusking is, it's the poor people who eat white rice, because it's cheaper than unprocessed grain, which would require special shipment.
Ironic, if you ask me.

>If wheat was so bad, Europeans would have abandoned it in favour of oats, barley, spelt, rye etc, but they didn't
What if I told you nobody planted wheat on anything even resembling wide cultivation until mid 19th century? Hell, the whole Central and Eastern Europe to this day plants barley and rye, so they make kasha out of it and use rye flour extensively in their cuisines. In fact, a bread baked from rye-wheat flour mix is the best thing imaginable, both nutrient- and taste-wise, while also being able to retain rye-only ability to stay edible after more than two days.

And from all the diseases and issues you've mentioned, you somehow managed to ignore the fact wheat can't grow in most climates, has lowest yield per hectare of all stamples (nothing is this low) even in extensive modern agriculture, requires the same amount of water as rice (despite not growing on a paddy) and leaches nutrient from soil so hard you just can't plant it without heavy fertilisation. And without heavily machined threshing, dehusking and milling process, about 2/3 of already meager yield is going to be simply lost.
Also, just like dehusked rice, wheat lacks any sort of vitamins. Guess what kind of wheat is the ONLY edible form of it.

>Rye, on the other hand, was the grain most easily grown in the British Isles and northwestern Europe (Scandinavia, Germanic lands, Netherlands, much of France), and remained the most common cereal crop until the end of the eighteenth century.
>William Ashley, The Bread of Our Forefathers: An Inquiry in Economic History. (Oxford, 1928), p. 2
Wow you're retarded. It's only been since the 1800s (you know, post-agricultural revolution) where wheat really took off as a grain, before then the aristocracy loved it, but everyone else ate what was easiest to farm.
>Muh "europeans are literally the worst" rhetoric

>Rye is susceptible to ergot infestations
So is wheat. Along with few other very common diseases (known also as blights) that either kill your entire crop in late stages of growth (but all the soil nutrient was already drawn) or make the grain unedible, unless you plan on dying or going mental.
Wheat is susceptible to more diseases than barley and rye combined.

And like already pointed out by other anons, nobody was planting wheat. It wasn't even a true stample until tractors became a thing. Next thing you are going to be surprised maize wasn't popular outside US before interwar period.
Want a better one? Kale, widely considered currently a part of "hipster cuisine", was European stample up until WW1.
How about this one - Korean "traditional" cuisine can't exist without a trainload of imports from New World that reached Korea in late 18th century.

Pro-tip: think before you post.

Not even him, but it's like you deliberately missed the point, then wrote exactly what the point was and jumped on him for missing the point. Are you by chance off your meds?
And yeah, European agriculture up until imports start coming in was fucking horrible. A fall-out of Greco-Roman god-awful agriculture.

user was trying to say the europeans were all retarded and used wheat as a staple crop everywhere despite it being bad, and ruined the world.
I'm saying everyone but the aristocracy ignored wheat until the agricultural revolution, when it became a feasible crop due to advanced farming techniques.
It's indisputable that wheat is inefficient as a crop, and the only reason it's eaten so much is because it's tasty, but user was rambling something about europeans already being used to eating when when they started global empires, and spread it everywhere because reasons, when that's just wrong.
I mean my country lives off of potatoes and beef.

>>Muh "europeans are literally the worst" rhetoric
God-awful farmers, yes. Dutch plough and Dutch winnowing machine are literally Chinese tools transported by VOC to homeland to copy. Poles made a literal fortune by planting just a bit of wheat to sell it to Western Europe, while eating themselves barley and having grain-to-crop ratio almost twice as high thanks to not wasting time on wheat for anything else than cash crop.
And let me riddle you this one: how do you think China reached such high population historically, looooong before mechanised agriculture? Same applies to rest of East, South East and South Asia, but China is the most prominent one in pre-modern period.
>muh superior europeans rhetoric
Deal with it, we were the bottom scrubbers for most of history.

What is the difference between whites and Asians? Wheat can be cultivated by a single individual, but rice farming requires a community.

>contains inflammatory lectins, increases gut permeability
>superior to rice

Pick one.

Can't you also use those doodads to supplement the cuisine if bigger, meatier shit isn't around due to shortages?

I guess we read two different posts then, at least regarding the first part.
But the part about forcefully introducing wheat is actual and sad reality. Starting with scramble for Africa and full-blown colonialism, up until the post-Green Revolution, all sort of institutions, private initiatives and what not was pushing wheat. Not because its superiority, fitting into local ecosystem or whatever else. Not even the taste. Solely because it was believed to be known enough to plant it efficiently.
So if you put it in chronological order, it does make sense. Like Germans forcing wheat in Tanganyka not because it was suitable for realities of Kenya, but because it made a great cash crop, at least on paper. Before they figured out this shit won't work, they've already lost their colonies... but Brits decided to continue the program, since infrastructure for it was already in place, perpetuating the whole issue another 30 years. Then post-colonialism happend and up until early 80s, Kenya was busy trying to feed itself with wheat. Since it was unsuitable for Green Revolution varieties, it only further aggrevated the whole issue. It doesn't help that UN itself in its early relief programms was force-pushing wheat too, until they've started to hire actual experts rather than running on wild assumptions of "if it grows in Kansas, then it will surely do fine in Ghana"

tl;dr it all boils down to how cheap something appears to be

Potatoes are king.

What about more rare crops? Like buckwheat or millet or sorgo or amaranth?

Spaghetti and bread are both made wheat.
Wheat wins.

>mfw relief programmes do more harm than good
Maybe we should just leave that particular continent alone for a while, guys.

>Wheat can be cultivated by a single individual
... who owns a fuckload of machines

Jesus Christ, people like you never stop to amaze me. How the FUCK do you think the so-called agricultural revolution happend? From where all the sudden masses of cheap, unqualified labour came to fuel industrial revolution?
A single farmer, unless owning a seeder (so at least a seed drill, but anything above also works), threshing machine with winnowing fan, a horse with steel plough, a horse-drawn mower and a handful of other applications (along with the horse, of course) is not going to farm anything at all. Because, surprise surprise, it also requires a communal effort to tend fields, you stupid motherfucker. And rice can also be planted by an individual if proper tools are at hand.
Guess from where the masses of cheap labour in early 20th century Japan and modern China came from.

What has this to do with Veeky Forums?

You could make noodles and breads with a load of other cereals.

Kasha is made out of barley. Bread is made out of rye. Both make a great feeder.
Barley and rye win.

>hurr durr, worldbuilding in MY Veeky Forums?
Granted, I expected the likes of you to pop up much sooner.

>He eats wheat-only "bread"

>Deal with it, we were the bottom scrubbers for most of history.
You're fucking retarded.
Jesus fucking christ these selfhating hipsters who construcz their worldview from bits of trivia get worse every year.

...

Not bottom scrubbers, but definitely worse off than the East, be it Middle or Far

Inferior

I eat mostly protein and some fat nowadays, carbs are for pleasure

No.
Solely because they've finally figured their shit in late 80s and early 90s. It's FINALLY working. Abandoning it right now, when it started to show effect for real would be the worst decision imaginable.
But honestly, the whole Sahel is fucked precisely thanks to white people "helping" from late 40s to late 50s by drilling fuckload of wells, in a stupid assumption of more water => more livestock => more food, entirely forgetting the animals need also feed on something and not just drink, so a sudden spike of water made herds grow, herds eat out everything in their vicinity and in late 50s the cyclical drought (for every 40-45 years Sahel either gets drier or wetter, currently it's slowly getting wetter again) started, killing of remaining plants and Sahara started moving south.
But nobody cared, since they've packed their toys and left, as all those places got their "freedom" and "independence" from colonial masters. When it started to be a global issue, it was already late 70s and it was waaaaaaay too late to do anything about it other than sending food and pacifying situation until rain will start again.
Which in turn goes to global warming, as this made the rain late for a fucking decade.

This goes in circles, really. But at least in current stage the relief effort for Africa finally works at max efficiency considered the funds at hand and how it's all handled. At least they've stopped doing it top-down. Agriculture never works out when run top-down.

>Complains about retards
>Is absolutely ignorant to history
Europe was a complete shithole until mid 17th century. EVERYONE was better than it up until that point. It started to catch up and for another century finally did so. It didn't become any sort of power or a semi-good place to stay around for ANOTHER century.
But sure, we wuz sailors and explorers and shiet.

>Spaghetti
>not inferior to buckwheat noodles

>wheat bread
>not inferior to rye or rye-wheat bread
Hah!

The middle eastern fetishism is also garbage, Muslims conserved knowledge from greece and transported it from india, but every great “muslim“ scholar was either a Zoroastrian who was forcefully converted (especially in math and astronomy) or a christian/jew.
It got a tiny bit better later on, but pretty much all “Arabic“ inventions, like algebra or their numbers come from india and Greece.

The tech level of the middle ages was higher in many regards than people think and the “dark ages“ are a retarded, outdated myth only perpetuated by wannabe historians

>Wheat bread
Which is only good for making toasts. And as much as I like toasts, I can't imagine eating them constantly.
Wheat-rye and rye bread, on the other hand...

Nope.

Mixed bread my man.

Please explain to us all why you are sperging now about dark ages meme?
Because I fail to see how the fuck any of your rambling related so anything. Especially agriculture, which in case of Europe was shit-tier until Dutch brought bunch of tools from China and English started to experiment around breeding farmstock.
Which was all 18th century and utterly unrelated with Middle Ages at all.

>fell for the low carbs meme

Enjoy your low testosterone.

Buckwheat noodles are fucking radical.

>It's dirty Pollack wanking about his golden age
Like pottery.

To be fair, adapting to an entirely new crop package is hard expecially the further back you go. Sticking to what you know is the natural instinct particularly when you are only two failed harvests away from famine. It's not an environment that encourages risk-taking and innovation. Look at how long it took for Europe to adopt the potato, it turned out to be the wonder crop that ended regular famines and caused the population to explode but to farmers at the time it was a new,strange and untested crop that they'd be starting from scratch in understanding. Meanwhile they know what they are doing with wheat, rye and barley so it's not until everyone is starving to death and Old Fritz literally orders them to start eating potatoes that it catches on.

This is not restricted to Europeans by any means, but colonialism and early exposure to new world crops do provide us with some dramatic examples. Civilisations tend to stick with the crop package they know even in areas where they are sub-optimal.

tldr: farmers are generally conservative and new crops are scary and new.

The only thing testosterone is good for is getting bald.
Are you enjoying your headbeam already?

tldr: poor people are generally conservative [with their livelihood] and new [unproven] crops are scary and new.

Fixed that for you.

>Sticking to what you know is the natural instinct
Unless of course you are saying "either you start planting what we tell you, or we stop the relief effort". UN did some really fucked-up psyche job in the early days of post-colonialism.
So it's not about famers being conservatives and new crops being scary and, well, new (even if that's how agriculture works most of the time), but about how the whole thing was handled. It's one thing to prepare a solid analysis for a agriculture resturcturisation and relief like the so-called Green Revolution, which was a project running for almost 30 years before the first batch of grain was implemented at all, and still as a test and completely another story when you roll in all cocky and starts ordering people with thinly-veiled threats backing your actions, while never planning anything ahead at all.

I think the worst thing done in this particular case (agricultural help) in Africa was top-down handling combined with lack of training. Rather than explaining to anyone why and what for this or that is supposed to get planted, it was simply delivered, almost forcefully planted and then everyone waited for 5 years to collect data about crop yield, all while people were actively starving to death.

I'm between low and mid carb and very happy with both my gains and my testosterone, user.

Learn to read, nigger.

Read the whole thread, think, then respond, you're not the only person here.

Sure, smartass, sure...

...

Oh, so you are just a dense motherfucker?
What a lack of surprise...

>angry, selfhating lanklets
;^)

I think potato’s are pretty good.

Onions too.

Another is the whole maize-bean co-planting. It can work, and it does work pretty well, but it assumes everyone knows what they are doing, plant in tight schelude and most importantly, the field is relatively small, rather than being above 10 hectares. Otherwise the bean yield will barely cover seeding, while also depleting (rather than increasing) soil nutrient. One of the doctors in my university made his habilitation about this, but used freshmen instead of untrained farmers and actual, well-instructed farmers for the test group. It was really hilarious watching it all and documenting it for him. Either way, if people don't know how to handle this or only know the basic concept, the crop yield is disastrous and the costs of it all increase significantly without any profit whatsoever.

This is the power of a meathead

Corn is frikken sweet.

Where does Sour Dough fall on this entire "Wheat, Rice, Barley, Rye" thing? Because I love me some sourdough.

Sourdough is just regular dough except with extra fermentation isn't it?

I don't know shit about baking though so I could be wrong.

Add to it barley and raddish/turnips and you are set. A vegetable garden to get supplementry food and/or cash crops. I also heard them champignons sell pretty well for something that grows on horseshit.

Correct. Sourdough is a method of making bread, not its own type of grain.

Venting on the internet won't get you a gf, user.

I bet you eat bologna

Trying to get buffed won't get you one too.

t. married guy

>rice concentrates arsenic in it
>This meme again
Yes, and plums contain Prussic acid, so? You know, the extremely poisonous hydrogen cyanid

I suppose the best take away from this thread is most cultures will plant a mixture of grains depending on need, climate, and sophistication. A low tech civ will cultivate one or two, quick growing crops while more advanced cultures will grow a small variety for various needs, with highly advanced societies will focus more towards monoculture, with specific crops choices focusing more towards desirability than need.

Fair enough?

I already am and already have one.
How are your kids?

>A low tech civ will cultivate one or two, quick growing crops while more advanced cultures will grow a small variety for various needs
It's reverse

Wasn't rice the go to crop in Japan due to how mountainous the region is?

Rice requires more labor and care. Wheat is a plant and forgot crop. It results in different farmer personalities.

>tfw anons start talking about their kids, make friends

We can dream :3

Rice has a lower per acre yield. Lower than most staple crops.

Potato is highest, wheat is middling high but is very tolerant.

>Wheat is a plant and forgot crop
I do not believe this is accurate, sir

has anyone made a space setting before? I want to do a game in space but my players are going to basically demand a whole host of alien races and i just get lost in everything stacking ontop of one another.

We all know that potatoes are the best crops.

Since this is now /farmgen/ I have a question.

I'd like the main agricultural deity for one of the cultures in my setting to also be a sun god, a combination which seems to actually be quite rare historically with Inti being the only major example I can find. What sort of crops and environment would prompt a solar/farming god?

Inti ruled over maize which needs lots of sunlight but I'm worried about the effects of introducing it into an iron age Mesopotamia-style setting. Sorghum seemed a good candidate for the staple crop since it thrives in temperatures above 90F and is very drought resistant.

Bit of the opposite, actually, especially as you went further up north.

>tfw I have come to realize that I will never have kids because I am socially autismal creep who has never even held hands with a grill in my 24 years of existence.

I love children. Many of the most emotionally fulfilling moments of my life have been watching over my younger relatives. There is nothing better than witnessing the genuine joy, wonder, curiosity and affection of a child. My dream is that one day, I will have my own family with 3-5 kids, summer cottage by the lake on whose shores I spent my childhood summer's, and a doggo.

Too bad none of that will ever come true.

>literally bible verses about not pulling up weeds around grain fields because you'll reduce the harvest
>not sow and forget
Grains like wheat, barley and rye are the least labor intensive crops in the pre-industrial world.

biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew 13&version=NIV

MATT 13

27 “The owner’s servants came to him and said, ‘Sir, didn’t you sow good seed in your field? Where then did the weeds come from?’

28 “‘An enemy did this,’ he replied.

“The servants asked him, ‘Do you want us to go and pull them up?’

29 “‘No,’ he answered, ‘because while you are pulling the weeds, you may uproot the wheat with them. 30 Let both grow together until the harvest. At that time I will tell the harvesters: First collect the weeds and tie them in bundles to be burned; then gather the wheat and bring it into my barn.’”