Think I'll be okay to stream tomorrow, I'll put out a "schedule" post tomorrow morning

Also re: which soils are best for which crops -

Loam is generally a jack-of-all-trades soil that almost everything will grow in; most cereals (excluding rice) and legumes want a bit more sand; most water-hungry crops like a bit more silt and clay

The points of the triangle are generally bad

Typically yeah

(This is because the High Elves were in a Mediterranean clime with extremely fertile soil - lots of built-up Phosphorus, high Nitrogen Fixation rates - whereas the Dwarves were growing shit on young, thin, mountain soils where the climate is cold and dry)

Also more "fertile" regions need less strict crop rotations

Notice how I had the Dwarves growing three years of alfalfa to graze goats on between growing crops of barley/buckwheat/mustard, while the Elves spend one *season* growing oats and clover and then multiple years growing productive crops

IRL this is usually the difference between soils that differ in "fertility" - crops planted on the more fertile soil will grow larger, and you can plant them closer together, rather than growing FASTER

It's also a big pet peeve of mine when video games represent, like, "fertility" as making crops grow faster when it would be equally simple and far more realistic to give them increased yield instead

They time their maturation to time of year, they don't mature as fast as they can!

There are a number of realistic farming simulator games but they tend to be very much focused on modern, industrial farming and using fertilizer/herbicide/pesticide as ways to solve issues that they don't even model other ways of doing it

I mean trees are very different from annual or biennial crops (and, as I mentioned, don't produce enough per acre to actually feed people alone)

But yeah, you can have some places where the wet season is the Winter and it's Fine™ because other stuff makes up for it

This isn't even good for getting seeds because they make way less seeds this way than if they had gone through the Winter

Biennials furthermore have a tendency to do something called "bolting" where they will infer they will have difficulty surviving the winter to seed next year (because it's too dry, too wet, too hot, too cold...) and will just not grow a storage organ and flower immediately

The Eurasian steppe is a good example, yeah, where most of the rain the steppes get is in early Spring where the wet season slightly overlaps Spring and the rest of the water comes from snowmelt

Like you expect in the Middle Ages things like onions and carrots and parsnips to be grown in smaller gardens as a supplement to the diet rather than in big fields

And the lifecycle being Difficult was a big part of why

Needless to say it is very awkward to integrate biennial crops into most crop rotations, and thus why those crops don't tend to be grown as staples even if they have other properties (productivity, storability, nutritional profiles) that would make them good staples (see e.g. parsnips)

Mediterranean isn't as cold as the places I'm talking about re: being shit for agriculture because the precipitation happens during the Winter (because that means most of it will be in the form of snow rather than rain lol)

I mean some Winter crops get planted in October but yeah, especially in the Midwest, where most of what is grown is Corn and Soy, which are both Summer crops

this drove me up the wall with Fallout 4 specifically. the game starts at the end of October, why are these people all talking like they can set up a farm whenever they feel like it?

8b) Note that sometimes the wet season corresponds with the Summer, and sometimes with the Winter; it really depends

In colder climes when the wet season corresponds with Winter you are more or less fucked re: agriculture, but it makes little difference which is which in the Tropics

A diagram showing the three growing seasons of India: Rabi, Kharif, and Zaid, corresponding vaguely to Winter, Summer, Spring, but based around the wet season and dry season instead

8) Oh, yeah, and you may wonder - how do those growing season divisions apply to places where the temperature is mostly the same year round, like the tropics?

You substitute "Summer" and "Winter" for "Wet Season" and "Dry Season" lol

A map of land used for agriculture worldwide - notice the concentration in places that experience seasonal wet/dry cycles, like the Mediterranean, India, South China, and the US Midwest

7c) You may in fact notice the most agriculturally productive areas of the world are places with distinct wet seasons and dry seasons - arid floodplains, Mediterranean and monsoon climes, etc.

(This is caused by more than just reduced leaching/erosion, but lack of leaching is a big part)

A picture of the Cheltenham Badlands in Ontario, where human mismanagement of the soil caused it to erode leaving only bare rock in its place

7b) This doesn't mean you don't gotta worry about it in thin soils, though. There, you gotta worry about the rain literally WASHING AWAY your soil and leaving exposed rock behind

This is why I emphasized in the Dwarf thread that they make sure SOMETHING is growing on the soil during the warm season

A diagram showing the deep, layered soils of a savanna

7a) This is especially the case in areas with very old soils, which are very deep (many meters before hitting rock)

This is part of why savanna biomes are like that - the soil is extremely old and deep and most of the nutrients have been leached very deep

A diagram showing water leaching nutrients to below the roots of crops

7) "Rain = good" is actually not the case

You generally want MODERATE rainfall for most crops, with some crops preferring more or less

Too much rainfall can drag water-soluble nutrients deep into the soil, too deep for crops (but not too deep for trees - this is why rainforests make bad farmland)

The famous soil texture pyramid

A chart showing how soil pH affects availability of different plant nutrients

6) There are different kinds of soil (not just varying fertilities) that different crops like

Different kinds of roots are better adapted for different soil textures, and the pH (acidity/basicity) of soil can vary a lot too

This is a big part of why different crops are grown different places, lol

5a) The productivity per year per acre is especially bad for perennials (crops that produce every year, instead of growing once and then dying), since they gotta grow in a way that is sustainable rather than just gobbling up everything they can

The exception is spreading perennials like potatoes

A chart showing the yields per acre of different crops

5) The productivity per acre for crops varies pretty dramatically

Cereal grains and a handful of other crops (potatoes, sweet potatoes, yams) have like 5-10 times as many calories-per-acre as most other crops, that's part of why they're such prominent staples, but you of course need a varied diet

4a) This is why rotation systems are often long and complex instead of just, say, switching between a cereal and a legume repeatedly

It takes more than one year for pests and pathogens to leave the soil (esp. relevant with mustards, which need at least 3-4 years between plantings in the same field)

4) Crop rotation is not just about plant nutrition

I already did a thread on this, but fungal diseases can remain in the soil, pests leave their eggs, etc. - the more you regrow the same crop the worse the pests and diseases will get

So you gotta vary to drive out the pests and diseases, too

A diagram showing the lifecycle of an onion

3a) This includes onions and carrots

For example, with onions, you plant them in the Spring, and if you want actual onions to eat, you harvest them in Fall

But if you want onion seeds, you need to leave some onions in the ground until next Summer, which will give you seeds (but not edible onions)

A diagram showing annuals vs biennials vs perennials, though oversimplified

3) Crop propagation is not always as simple as "getting seeds when you harvest the crop for food"

A lot of crops we grow are biennials, where the main edible is a storage structure, and which they will consume the subsequent year to make seeds

This means you get EITHER food or seeds