Pyramid #3/52: Low-Tech II

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by Bruno

What large ones bring to the table are animal traction, and "secondary" products like large sections of bone, tendon, and hide (and heavier duty bone, tendon and hide) that you just can't get off a chicken.

Cattle, goats, and sheep can all be grazed on land that's too rugged to farm; chickens cannot.

[Rasputin]

Originally Posted by Kromm

The "soft" downside is that people get damned tired of eating poultry for every meal

Considering that peasants and serfs were often lucky to have food, I'd say that this is a problem for only a few.

[Kromm]

Originally Posted by Rasputin

Considering that peasants and serfs were often lucky to have food, I'd say that this is a problem for only a few.

Agreed! I offered it mostly as cause for why a landowner might not want to focus on poultry.

[Agemegos]

There are some interesting reflections on the price of poultry (and of pork and dairy foods) in Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations, Book I, chapter 11, ¶202 – ¶205

Originally Posted by Adam Smith

I.11.202
Thus in every farm the offals of the barn and stables will maintain a certain number of poultry. These, as they are fed with what would otherwise be lost, are a mere save-all; and as they cost the farmer scarce any thing, so he can afford to sell them for very little. Almost all that he gets is pure gain, and their price can scarce be so low as to discourage him from feeding this number. But in countries ill cultivated, and, therefore, but thinly inhabited, the poultry, which are thus raised without expence, are often fully sufficient to supply the whole demand. In this state of things, therefore, they are often as cheap as butcher's-meat, or any other sort of animal food. But the whole quantity of poultry, which the farm in this manner produces without expence, must always be much smaller than the whole quantity of butcher's-meat which is reared upon it; and in times of wealth and luxury what is rare, with only nearly equal merit, is always preferred to what is common. As wealth and luxury increase, therefore, in consequence of improvement and cultivation, the price of poultry gradually rises above that of butcher's-meat, till at last it gets so high that it becomes profitable to cultivate land for the sake of feeding them. When it has got to this height, it cannot well go higher. If it did, more land would soon be turned to this purpose. In several provinces of France, the feeding of poultry is considered as a very important article in rural œconomy, and sufficiently profitable to encourage the farmer to raise a considerable quantity of Indian corn and buck-wheat for this purpose. A middling farmer will there sometimes have four hundred fowls in his yard. The feeding of poultry seems scarce yet to be generally considered as a matter of so much importance in England. They are certainly, however, dearer in England than in France, as England receives considerable supplies from France. In the progress of improvement, the period at which every particular sort of animal food is dearest, must naturally be that which immediately precedes the general practice of cultivating land for the sake of raising it. For some time before this practice becomes general, the scarcity must necessarily raise the price. After it has become general, new methods of feeding are commonly fallen upon, which enable the farmer to raise upon the same quantity of ground a much greater quantity of that particular sort of animal food. The plenty not only obliges him to sell cheaper, but in consequence of these improvements he can afford to sell cheaper; for if he could not afford it, the plenty would not be of long continuance. It has been probably in this manner that the introduction of clover, turnips, carrots, cabbages, &c. has contributed to sink the common price of butcher's-meat in the London market somewhat below what it was about the beginning of the last century.

The point here is that poultry fatten on scraps, waste, spills, and gleanings which they collect themselves, which are produced in proportion to the production of staple foods and the consumption of the household. Poultry is virtually free up to the amount that is supported by unavoidable waste: raising less that that amount means less production with no reduction in costs and no increase in alternative production. Or looking at that from the other side, raising poultry is a terrifically cheap way to produce food up to the point that is supported by the irreducible waste of handling grain, preparing food etc. But if you try to produce poultry in greater amounts than are supported free as a by-product of agriculture and household food production, at that point you have to feed them food that you could put to other uses. You have to grow food for chickens, and food for the oxen that plough the fields where you grow the food for the chickens. And once you start doing that poultry becomes dramatically more expensive. It is an error to look at the cost of raising poultry in a system in which they are a cheap by-product of farming and to suppose that poultry could substitute for other production at the same rate of cost.

Remember that unlike cattle and sheep chickens cannot subsist on the grass that grows in the waste ground, and that unlike pigs they cannot eat the mast in beech and oak forests and woods. Cheap production of poultry is limited in proportion to the cultivation of fields.

The economics of ducks in wet rice agriculture is even more interesting (turned out into the paddy-fields they eat pests, fertilise the rice with their droppings, and actually increase production, thus demonstrating negative cost up to a certain proporition with rice production), but sadly Smith was not aware of the facts.



Anyway, the chief reason that landowners didn't specialise in raising poultry was that it is only cheap as a joint product with grain. Specialise, and it becomes expensive.

[Turhan's Bey Company]

I didn't go into it here because the article was already complicated enough (though it was addressed briefly in 3/33), but the prestige of a given crop is going to be a significant economic factor. However, it's one based on culture, not technology. Luxury pricing is going to hit some of these values very hard. In a setting which looks vaguely like historical Europe, the beef and pork prices are going to be somewhat higher, and the chicken prices maybe somewhat lower. And in a world that contains something like a historical Europe paying out mad dosh for spices, those price increases can percolate back through the supply chain so that even producers see a nice price bump. But, of course, those adjustments have to be campaign-specific.

There's one other small thing I didn't factor in since I had zero data, but some things travel terribly. Spices, you can pack up in a chest and ship across the continent. Animals are different. Cattle and pigs can be driven to market, but the exercise burns off some fat, so you need to either sell animals who weigh less (and get less money) or fatten them up again (which costs you more). Then again, since they're self-propelled, you don't need to pay much to transport them, so it's probably a wash. Chickens, though, have to be carried to market and need to be fed grain along the way because they can't forage. That may be below any reasonable level of resolution when taking chickens from a village to a nearby town, but might make it less than profitable to buy chickens in Baghdad and sell them in Samarkand.

[Bruno]

On a non-chicken related subject, I was home sick today and spent my conscious hours tinkering with an Excel spreadsheet for the Low Tech Armor article, although I'm not sure if it'll work in older versions or GoogleDocs.

It brought up an interesting question though: What's the connection between physical statistics, DR/inch, Max DR, and WM for various materials? If I have a fantasy material that is "as hard as steel" but "as light as <x>" I can probably throw together DR/in (not used in any calculations that I've spotted) and WM (used) but Max DR (used) I am not sure how to generate.

It seems like it should be related to density (WM) and tensile strength or hardness (DR/in?), based on my not-a-materials-engineer vague impression? I tried fitting Max DR to a cube root and a log of DR/in and can't. Does being a flexible material factor in somewhere?

[Christopher R. Rice]

Originally Posted by Bruno

On a non-chicken related subject, I was home sick today and spent my conscious hours tinkering with an Excel spreadsheet for the Low Tech Armor article, although I'm not sure if it'll work in older versions or GoogleDocs.

It brought up an interesting question though: What's the connection between physical statistics, DR/inch, Max DR, and WM for various materials? If I have a fantasy material that is "as hard as steel" but "as light as <x>" I can probably throw together DR/in (not used in any calculations that I've spotted) and WM (used) but Max DR (used) I am not sure how to generate.

It seems like it should be related to density (WM) and tensile strength or hardness (DR/in?), based on my not-a-materials-engineer vague impression? I tried fitting Max DR to a cube root and a log of DR/in and can't. Does being a flexible material factor in somewhere?

Uhhh I want this when it's done Bruno. >_>

Kthxbai

[Peter Knutsen]

Originally Posted by Brett

The point here is that poultry fatten on scraps, waste, spills, gleanings, and scraps, which are produced in proportion to the production of staple foods and the consumption of the household. Poultry is virtually free up to the amount that is supported by unavoidable waste: raising less that that amount means less production with no reduction in costs and no increase in alternative production. Or looking at that from the other side, raising poultry is a terrifically cheap way to produce food up to the point that is supported by the irreducible waste of handling grain, preparing food etc. But if you try to produce poultry in greater amounts than are supported free as a by-product of agriculture and household food production, at that point you have to feed them food that you could put to other uses. And once you start doing that poultry becomes dramatically more expensive. It is an error to look at the cost of raising poultry in a system in which they are a cheap by-product of farming and to suppose that poultry could substitute for other production at the same rate of cost.

That's my thinking as well. I've never been able to wrap my head around the hens-per-acre metric from LTC3. You don't feed your chicken by giving them a plot of land. That doesn't make sense to me. You feed chicken by giving them your edible trash. Once you're out of edible trash, your only choice is to feed them grain, and that means you're feeding food to your food, which the medieval poor could not do.

LTC3 has, as I recall, a fairly good metric for how many dogs a household can feed with scrap food, based on household Status. Something like that ought to be used for chicken production as well.

[zoncxs]

Originally Posted by Bruno

On a non-chicken related subject, I was home sick today and spent my conscious hours tinkering with an Excel spreadsheet for the Low Tech Armor article, although I'm not sure if it'll work in older versions or GoogleDocs.

It brought up an interesting question though: What's the connection between physical statistics, DR/inch, Max DR, and WM for various materials? If I have a fantasy material that is "as hard as steel" but "as light as <x>" I can probably throw together DR/in (not used in any calculations that I've spotted) and WM (used) but Max DR (used) I am not sure how to generate.

It seems like it should be related to density (WM) and tensile strength or hardness (DR/in?), based on my not-a-materials-engineer vague impression? I tried fitting Max DR to a cube root and a log of DR/in and can't. Does being a flexible material factor in somewhere?

Originally Posted by Ghostdancer

Uhhh I want this when it's done Bruno. >_>

Kthxbai

I second this if I may <,<

also, what does WM stand for?

[Bruno]

Originally Posted by zoncxs

I second this if I may <,<

also, what does WM stand for?

Weight Multiple/multiplier/thingy.

I'll need to ask Steven if it's OK before I can put it up anywhere - and my preference is really stuffing it up somewhere for people who bought the Pyramid issue, since it in some ways ends up replacing the article :P

I learned how to make checkboxes go in Excel 2013 today! I should be able to back-export to Excel 2003 with relatively little problems, from what I'm seeing. GDocs is probably a no-go, I'm into features it just doesn't do. Not sure about LibreOffice/OpenOffice.