Estate Farming

Let's suppose we have a group of characters, 1st-3rd level, who are prepared to suspend their usual adventuring ways and instead take some time to settle themselves upon a plot of land.  This creates an interesting decision to be made, one that could easily intrigue a party for an hour or more, once they fully grasped the question.  We'll assume I'm asking the question of you, dear player.

Where would you like to settle?

We have the question of whether or not you'd like to find some land within the existing settled environment, or truly virgin land.  I have plenty of both to offer.  Being the 17th century, there are very few places in the world where every acre of ground within a 20-mile hex has been broken.  All around Holland of course, and the environs of Paris, London and Vienna, and a good deal of Italy ... but still, there are options.

You can buy an existing farm anywhere, for a pretty penny.  You can find some sliver of untilled land between existing farms most everywhere except those few places I've mentioned.  And you can find quite a lot of virgin land if you're prepared to settle on the borderlands ~ and the further out you go, the better the chance that those virgin lands will have a lovely rich soil.  America is virtually untouched in 1650.

Of course, you don't have to choose farmland; you could decide upon a whole range of possibilities.  There are varying kinds of forest land (which you could clear, or not), desert lands, jungle, tundra ... even an oasis, though you'd likely have to wrest that away from some tribe by force.  And each of these have a hill option: grassy hills, hill plains, hill forest, hill desert, hill tundra ... even the hills of some arctic wasteland.  There are mountains as well, though unless you intend to mine these, you would be looking at the valleys between the mountain ranges and not the mountains themselves.

And all of these have a coastal and river option as well.  Rivers produce possible trade, but they do offer fewer options if virgin territory is your intention.  The coast provides islands, too ... but again, more often than not, the best islands are already settled.

You can see that this offers a lot of choice ~ but it is a bitter choice, because you can't really have them all.  True, you would probably want to shoot for a forest-covered grassland adjacent to some hills and a river, not far from the sea, with good soil in case you do decide to farm, and hopefully a chance at other raw materials like an iron, copper or gold mine ... but it isn't like every place like this hasn't been found and settled already.  Chances are, wherever you choose to settle, you'll have to settle for the best you can find.

I've been considering some measurements for this, keeping with work I've done in the past with food, hammers and coins, plus reading I did lately on the subject of hides.  The hide isn't a specific unit of area, but rather a unit measuring the land sufficient to support a household, including obligations for food-rent, maintenance and so on, paraphrasing wikipedia.  In the real world this is hardly a consistent thing, but I'd like to codify a hide in terms of actual food supplied, for game purposes.

To do that, I'd like to propose a unit, called "person diet," or "pd," this being equal to a sufficient number of calories necessary to give one person enough food over a period of one year.  It doesn't matter that we don't know how many calories that is.  We can argue that it's still possible to live on 0.9 pd per year, but that this is unpleasant and unhealthy; we can also argue that many children of various ages can survive on 0.2, 0.4 or 0.6 pd per year, depending on their age and to what degree they are starving.  These are details that can apply to other matters ~ they don't need to apply to the mean average comfortable food requirement for a theoretical "normal" person, which we can then use to guess a the production of one hide of land.

After some consideration, I'd like to set a hide-unit as equal to 15 pd.  We don't even need to know the exact nature of food being produced.  This number allows 2.5 pd to replant, 3.75 (one quarter of production) as tax, rent or maintenance, 7 pd to support a ten person family with six children and older dependents, eating various ratios of pd, plus four fully grown adults, or some combination thereof.  That leaves a cushion of 0.75 pd for storage against famine (4.5 pd in six years) ... plus more if the family is smaller, or the taxes are lower, or the particular kind of food doesn't have a 6:1 replant ratio.

The actual size of the hide then depends on the land itself.  We can rate dry plains as producing 2-7 pd (d6+1) per 120 acres (known as a "carucate," so that the physical size of a hide-unit would measure between 257 and 900 physical acres of land.

Grassland is better soil, and we can divide this into two kinds.  If the grassland has already been settled, then the best land is already part of a farm ~ so the best virgin land that can be found will give 8-14 pd (2d4+6) per 120 acres, so that the physical size of a hide-unit would be 129 to 225 acres.  On the other hand, if the grassland were truly virgin and untouched, the best sort of grassland could be found, offering 15-21 pd (2d4+13) ... in which case a hide-unit would be 86 to 120 acres.

Potentially, even better land could be found, upon flood plains that would offer between 22 and 49 pd per 120 acres, but those are most likely already occupied and in any case, would be quite small in size.

But why use a "hide?"  The unit itself is the actual tilled area within the greater physical area ... so that a 900-acre hide would still expect to have 120 acres of tillable land.  This land was divided into 8 bovates of 15 acres each, the amount of land that could be tilled by 1 oxen in a season ~ that is, between the time the land was ripe for ploughing and when the seed had to be in the ground.  An acre itself is defined by how much land an oxen can plough in a day, so the window of days to plant a bovate is 15.  Two oxen could move faster, ploughing twice as much in a day.  With six oxen working, three working ploughmen could manage six bovates (three "virgates) within planting season ... and the fourth plot, at least by 1650, the time of my world, was left fallow.

My suspicion is that the window was not as tight as described, and that more than an acre could be plowed in a day, as I've seen documentaries that depict more land than a bovate being plowed by one team of two-oxen, but these are the measurements as dictated ~ perhaps accurate to the 9th century, then overcome by horses with horsecollars and such.  Teams and animals likely made their rounds of the neighbourhood and more research will probably reveal the actual amount of land an ox team could plough circa 1650 ... but for my purposes now I'd like to stipulate that it requires three grown workers of age 15 to 65 to farm a hide, of which one must have the farming sage ability (which I realize now has to be rewritten to fit this model, but that's how it goes), so that a farmer and his two sons/daughters could manage the space.  Each, then, can till enough land to produce 5 pd of food supply.

That works also, though it's a bitch if that one farmer has more than 4 other pd to feed, but life can be rough.  My goal is to argue that the characters, if they wished to till land, would need one of them to be a farmer ... in which case three of the characters could pitch in and help farm.  And if enough animals could be found, the characters could manage perhaps more than a hide.

And if the land was truly virgin, so that no taxes were required, that would produce 7.5 pd that could be sold or stored each good season.

Incidentally, ballpark, using the food rules I've postulated, and assuming half the year spent at labor and half the year spent at relative rest, a pd = 1,080 lbs. of food.  Not realistic, I know, for real life, since different foods have different calorie values, but this is a game and overall the concept works.

It would need some moderated mechanics for plantations, but that's doable, eventually.

None of the second half of this post addresses the other possibilities than farming.  Lands could be hunted, they could be mined and the coasts fished, the main purpose may be clear-cutting a forest, or building a desert castle, etcetera.  I'm only giving an example of how the numbers might be managed, and quite simply, so long as we're all willing to circumvent the need to be too precise with our definitions.  The above can be quickly expanded to fifty, a thousand or ten thousand farmers without much adjustment.

And do note, that if the players are free to explore virginal lands, they don't need to settle for 2 or 4 pd per 120 acres.  They can settle on the best dry plains, or the best grasslands, once they've explored enough.  Noting of course, that the lands immediately adjacent may not be as wonderful.  It's a question of how much exploration the players want to do before they settle down.