[Fantasy] [Low-Tech] Crops with extremely short cycle and low yield

[Peter Knutsen]

Originally Posted by vicky_molokh

Greetings, all!

What would be the unforeseen consequences of a fantasy setting having crops of extremely short lifecycles but also very low yields. E.g. a crop with 1/300 the yield, but capable of providing this yield (and dying) in just 24 hours. Or 1/50 the yield, but with a cycle of 7-10 days.

I am of course postulating this to be fantasy, not historical low-tech. Some more considerations are that (a) it's probably best to make the crop somewhat picky, so that it wouldn't be able to take over the rest of the ecosystem (or make other plants similarly vigorous) and (b) I'm not sure if I want a setting with seasons or without, so I'm wondering about both variants.

How does the labour requirements work?

1/300 the yield doesn't fly with 24 hours, for in many places, the growing season consistutes much less than 300 days per year.

Harvesting was extremely labour-intensive (planting much less so, as per LTC3), in medieval times, so if you have to harvest every day then nobody would ever get anything else done, at all, during those 100-200 days of the year when it there is enough sun and heat for the crop to be able to grow. People would even be too tired to have sex after a harvest day, so no children would be conceived at all during that period of the year, in the rural areas. And of course almost everybody lives in rural areas, with towns and townspeople constituting only a tiny fraction of the population.