[LT] Poor cattle farmers

[chimchim]

Originally Posted by Green-Neck

I'm sorry if this has already been discussed, but my google-fu has failed me.

I'm writing a TL2 story involving villagers who live by herding.

An iron-age age farmer has $750. Cattle cost $1200 each, and goats $420.
Even an iron age famer has to be comfortably wealthy to own one cow or two goats, and Very Wealthy to own 4 cows or goats.

How should I model the herders without everyone being super rich?

Thanks in advance.

In gurps the monetary value of wealth (the 80% non liquid assets bit anywsy) is the liquidation sale value of this farmers assets which would be considerably lower than actual new value of those assets.

[Polydamas]

Originally Posted by RyanW

Adventuring budget and purchase price are at best tangentially related to net non-liquid wealth of the common folk.

Yes, the price/wage/starting wealth figures are useless for worldbuilding, but great for answering "how much kit can I start with?" and "I want to buy an X ... how much does it cost?" without requiring the GM to spend six months researching economic history. If you want to model economies, read a book from a university press or maybe Harn Manor.

[Varyon]

Cattle farmers were historically rather wealthy - as were goat and sheep farmers. The herders may have been less wealthy - in Biblical accounts at least, such herders were always responsible for someone else's flock - but the owners were typically rich.

What you want are farmers that own their own cattle but are nonetheless rather poor. There are a few options for this. One is to go with low-quality cattle, as suggested - these would produce less milk and meat, and if used for labor would be rather poor at that. Another is to simply drop the prices of cattle across the board - cattle are expensive largely due to being more rare than other animals (as they require so much land), so if they're common enough that a poor TL 2 village has a lot of them it would make sense that they simply cost less; $450 each would make them as expensive - relative to starting wealth - at TL 2 as they are at TL 4. A final option is to simply have the villagers pool their resources, such that rather than each villager owning a cow there are several villagers per cow, making the herd a communal thing.

[Novembermike]

Yeah, keep in mind that a society where everyone owns a few cattle is probably a lot more egalitarian than GURPS expects. Here, everyone is going to be "comfortable" or so instead of the traditional stratification where you have one guy that's legitimately wealthy that owns the cattle, a few comfortable enforcers that keep everyone in line, a few people at the normal levels and a lot of poor people.

[Crakkerjakk]

What I've read about typical European peasants was that freemen who owned their own land typically had chickens, and usually a pig, but if they had a bad year they sold the pig. Families who owned a cow were generally the richest in their village, and would sometimes rent them out to other families to help plow.

All this goes out the window when you're dealing with nomadic herdsmen though. And I don't think GURPS really covers that well, since it doesn't charge the people for the land that farmers might own and bundles that into CoL/Status.

[Peter Knutsen]

Originally Posted by Novembermike

Yeah, keep in mind that a society where everyone owns a few cattle is probably a lot more egalitarian than GURPS expects. Here, everyone is going to be "comfortable" or so instead of the traditional stratification where you have one guy that's legitimately wealthy that owns the cattle, a few comfortable enforcers that keep everyone in line, a few people at the normal levels and a lot of poor people.

Yeah. I don't think a Status 0 farmer ought to own even one cow. More likely, the whole village owns a pair of oxen, that they use for plowing, and a dozen cows for milk, al held in common, and then each fmaily are assigned a long narrow strip of the village's farm land.

Examples from early TL3 history of viking farmsteads (e.g. in Icelandic sagas or "The Long Ships"), each with their own herd of cattle, are not owned by Status 0 farmers, but at least Status 1 and possibly 2. And they're also fairly populous. GURPS Fantasy classifies them as "isolates", that is units that are larger than a typical family home but not as large as a village. Also the farmsteads tend to lie some distance from each other, rather than clustered together village-style.

Another way to look at it is to skip the monetary value of the cow, or goat, or pic, and instead see it as a source of income, and buy it that way. The animals you own provide a regular caloric income for at least some months of the years, and also provide other goods such as leather, and on top of that you can "eat" your flock by butchering some of them in an emergency.

GURPS' Independent Income advantage gives you money, but it is possible to tweak it, somehow, so that it gives food calories instead.

[David Johnston2]

Of course there's the obvious recourse. Lower the price of cattle in your setting. Prices as RAW are after all just guidelines. What the prices actually are is not a rules decision. It's a world-building decision.

[Anders]

Originally Posted by chimchim

In gurps the monetary value of wealth (the 80% non liquid assets bit anywsy) is the liquidation sale value of this farmers assets which would be considerably lower than actual new value of those assets.

Yeah, once you drive the new ox out of the barn you've halved it's resale value. :)

[aesir23]

Originally Posted by Peter Knutsen

GURPS' Independent Income advantage gives you money, but it is possible to tweak it, somehow, so that it gives food calories instead.

Interesting idea. "One Specific Product" might be a limitation in a society with minted coin, because it's less flexible (-40%, maybe).

In a barter society, it's just a -0% feature--milk is a perfectly fine form of currency, especially if you preserve it by making cheese.

[EDIT] On second thought, a lot of work can go into milking and maintaining a cow. It might just be a job.

[Crakkerjakk]

"Milkmaid" ? :)

I don't think it's till later and wealth generally increases that you have enough cows in one place to justify a single person doing nothing but caring for them. Or at least have that be a common enough situation that there's a name for the job.