The Gamba subsector discussion between Rob Dean, Steve Higginbotham
and others about agriculture production and tech levels got me to
thinking.
What prevents a low tech agricultural world from importing high tech
farm equipment(financing not being a problem)? Who prevents technology
transfer between worlds? The Imperium or the local governments? Or is
is even regulated? It doesn't seem to be defined very well in the
rules.
If it's regulated it is relatively easy to bypass these restrictions
and if not it's a non issue. Which brings up the point. Why wouldn't
a world import higher tech items? The only restriction I can see
would be maintenance. But even that can be worked around. If you
import a piece of machinery it would be obvious to import the repair
kit and manuals for it and maybe even a repair robot. Either hire a
technician for a temporary period to train some of the locals or
send some of the locals to schools on the higher tech world.
The scenario I'm thinking about is this:
A rich local or offplanet individual or corporation buys up a large
amount (several thousand acres) of farm land. Basically sets it up
as an agribusiness by importing the higher tech equipment and
training locals or importing the technicians as farm hands.
I've been digging through some agriculture statistics (one of the nice
things about working on a campus - great resources!). I've limited
it to Louisiana only and to those farms that are greater that 2000
acres. These are 1987 numbers taken from the Census of Agriculture.
Number of farms of 2000+ acres 545
Land in farms 2,021,437 a
Total cropland 1,141,716 a
Average size of farm 3,709 a
Value of land & buildings $1,558,886,000
Average per farm $2,860,341
Average per acre $771
Value of machinery & equipment $129,140,000
Average per farm $238,266
Total sales $247,989,000
Average per farm $455,026
Government payments & other income $28,429,000
Average per farm $63,316
Total farm production expenses $186,487,000
Average per farm $342,807
Average Per cent
Crop Production land used Production
Corn 100 bu/a 5 18,545 bu
Sorghum 60 bu/a 3 6,676 bu
Wheat 34 bu/a 4 5,044 bu
Rice 46 bu/a 6 10,237 bu
Cotton 1.7 bales/a 12 757 bales
Soybeans 29 bu/a 35 37,646 bu
Sugarcane 26 t/a 6 5,786 t
Hay 2 t/a 2 148 t
(bu/a = bushels/acre, t/a = tons/acre, bale = 480 lbs)
(bu = 35 liters, in MT 1 ton = 13.5 kiloliters)
Converting the production numbers to MT numbers yields:
85,480 kiloliters or 6,332 tons.
Which is equivalent to 78 free traders or 102 far traders or 32
subsidized merchants. And that is just from one farm of 3700 acres!
It doesn't include animal products either.
The initial investment in the farm would be quite large but loans
could be secured once it was shown that quite a profit could be
made in a reasonable amount of time. In fact the profit from the
above numbers is about $118,000 per year which is pretty good.
And the way MT numbers workout it will probably be even larger.
With the imported higher tech level equipment and methodologies
greater yields would be able to support the local population and
create a large quantity for export.
Mike