In designing an agricultural world the first thing I discovered was that both Far Trader and Starports were of little use to me. They are based on the premise that trade will be a tiny percentage of a world's economy. A world dedicated to food export, as were many third world island countries in the last century, is outside the parameters of the rules in those books. Trying to find real world data has not been easy. These are the premises I used.
Initially I investigated real world crop yields and the number of farmers necessary to achieve those yields. This got very complicated quickly. So I went to one of the best game and real world knowledge resource I know: the Traveller Mailing List (TML). I used a combination of real world knowledge and TML WEGs to come up with my numbers.
Premise 1: Approximately 450,000 members of Cabrini's population
live on plantations, and are involved in farming. That can not be
entirely accurate. Some percentage of these people will be children too
young to farm or olders too old to farm. They will be in crafts,
probably. So I assumed no more than half would be directly involved in
farming; so 50% were farm workers. This should cover men,
woman and older children. This gave me 225,000 workers.
Premise 2: Based on agricultural yields during the WWI to WWII
period someone on the TML(Timothy Little) postulated that each worker
should be able to produce 1-2 dtons of grain a year and 2/5 of a dton
of meat. He also postulated that if off world, higher TL resourses,
like genetically breed crops and animals, could be used this might
increase by five times. These numbers are as good as any that I was
able to glean from my research on the Internet.
I multiplied these number by the number of farmers and got :
| Minimum Yield |
Maximum Yield |
||
| 450,000 | grains dton/yr | 2,250,000 | dtons/year |
| 90,000 | meat dton/yr | 450,000 | dtons/year |