4 ms·
> If you have redundant food sources such as fishing or small game and a lot of high quality land it's a relatively low effort and low risk activity. It's only
by dualogy 10y ago
> If you have redundant food sources such as fishing or small game and a lot of high quality land it's a relatively low effort and low risk activity. It's only after your population booms
Agreed, farming isn't hard when you do only very little of it on the side because fish and game still abound ;)
- Retric 10y agoIt's about risk not just calorie production as you need a huge surplus to cover poor crop years. After that you need to support non farmers (leaders, warriors, priests). If we want to think about early farming something like a medieval peasant that only supported themselves, and had a surplus of high quality land to work with they might have only needed to work 1/5th or less as much. Don't forget farmers have something to steal in both land and food. A hunter gather only has some tools not much food and are nomadic anyway. But, a village with 1+ years worth of food for 30+ people is a huge and stationary target. PS: I suspect the tipping point was selective breading producing high yield plant strains which kept lowering the effort of farming. Until a population boom prevented anything else from being viable.