Worldbuilding XII: Farming part 1: Introduction · 3:44am Sep 28th, 2018
Farming part 1: Introduction
Welcome to the super happy fun times that are farming!
That’s right; it's time to talk about farming, because no-one else has. Be prepared for a multi-part blog series.
Before we begin, though, I need y’all to understand that I am not a farmer, nor was I raised in a barn on a farm. I’ve done a fair bit of research, but that in no way compares to actual hands-on experience, and y’all can feel free to call me every kind of fool in the comments. I will correct any mistakes and mention them in the next installment.
Ponyville is a farming town. It was founded by Earth ponies who were granted a land charter by Princess Celestia. They moved in, cleared the land, and planted their crops.
Episode Screencap
We also know from canon that Appleoosa is a farming town, and that the thing that the ponies care most about is their apple orchards. When they're debating with the buffalo, nopony says anything about the buildings; it's the orchard that matters.
But what does that mean? Most importantly, what does that mean to us as writers?
Farming towns on Earth revolve around the farms, the crops, and the animals. You do things on the schedule of the plants and the schedule of the animals. You do things based on what the weather does and what you think the weather is going to do, and for all our current crop and farm machine technology, we still can't predict accurately out all that far ahead . . . certainly not for the entire growing season.
A typical day at the farm for a youngster might involve getting up well before sunrise and doing chores. Feeding the animals or mucking out stalls, and when that's done, eat breakfast and go to school. And you can bet when school's over, there's going to be more work to do on the farm.
There's always work to do on the farm.
Over the Fourth of July weekend, it was hot and humid—in my part of Michigan, there were heat advisories and I think the heat index got somewhere in the triple digits. I was driving one of the residents around, and we passed by a hayfield where those poor bastards were out bailing hay. That's a job that's not fun when the temperature is reasonable, but what were they going to do? If they waited for the rains to come and cool things down, they'd lose their hay crop, so they bailed it. That's what you do when you’re a farmer.
You don't have to like it, but you have to do it.
These days, I've heard of farmers plowing and planting all night long if they have a bad spring and get the crops in late. There's a YouTube video of a farmer disking a firebreak in his field while it is on fire because he wants to save as much of his crop as he can [well, I assume that’s his goal; maybe he’s just a maniac].
Obviously, if you've got animals, they have to be cared for every single day. Cows have to be milked, and there's a limited amount of time to get that milk to the dairy before it has to be destroyed . . . the small town I grew up in, farmers would plow the roads sometimes because the milk truck had to get through, and they weren't going to wait for the county to get around to it.
My dad got our car stuck one winter. It was close to home, so we walked the rest of the way, and he waited until the next morning to call a tow truck to get it back out.
By the time the tow truck arrived, the car was gone. It was in a dairy farmer's front yard—it had been in the way of the milk truck, so the farmer had hooked on to it with his tractor and towed it clear, because that was what he had to do.
If you're only growing crops, by contrast, you can afford to slack off somewhat in the wintertime. Of course, you've got no income, which is sorta a downside. And if you're smart, it's in the winter that you're going to be making any repairs that need to be done, and making sure that all your equipment is ready to go for the next year.
Springtime comes, and it's time to plow and plant. Then, during the summer there are various cultivation tasks, along with hay harvests; if you've got fruits or berries, this is also when you're likely to be harvesting many of them. Come the fall, it's time to harvest other crops.
In some ways, ponies have it a bit easier, since they can control the weather. There probably wouldn't be any hay baling on blisteringly hot days; they'd make sure of that. Likewise, Ponyville wouldn't get weeks of rain right before it was time to plow the fields. We haven't seen this in canon, but it's a sure bet that there's a group of farmers that heavily influence the Ponyville weather schedule based on the crops that they grow.
While they’ve surely got the weather under control, one thing that they lack is modern, mechanized equipment. Most of what they've got is pony-powered. We'll get more into detail about that in the following blog posts, but for now one thing that you need to remember is that most of that equipment takes at least two ponies to operate: one to pull it and one to operate it.
Some things are harder to pull than other things. Back when I wrote the series about harnesses, I said that I didn't think there was much practical use of more than six or so horses pulling something. There was the famous exception of the borax teams (20 mules strong) and of course things for parades and shows.
And then when discussing it in the comments, I had to eat crow, because I found a video of a farmer plowing with 46. And not just once to see if it could be done; that was how he did it every day until the whole field was done. The best video of it it now gone, sadly.
Pulling a plow is hard work.
It's a safe bet that some of the ponies have extra help on their farms for the harder jobs. Whether it be paid labor or getting their marefriend or stallionfriend into harness or having relatives help out. We know from canon that Bon Bon is related to the Apples; does she sometimes get up in the morning and help pull a plow when it's time to plant corn? She might.
However it's done, there are some times in the year when other things in town get put off or ignored in favor of farm work—the things that have to be done.
The week that the first cutting of hay is harvested, there might not be a Ponyville market. Everypony is out in the fields with hay rakes and cutters and bailers. Some of them are taking turns with their equipment, using it on their farm and then somepony else's. If there's a livery in Ponyville that rents that kind of equipment, it might be reserved months in advance. And you can bet that the day rate on that machine goes through the roof during the window when the hay is at its prime.
Foals missing school because they had to help out of the farm would go unremarked. When Cheerilee takes attendance and Apple Bloom isn't there because they're getting ready for cider, well, that's a legit excuse.
That's also something that city ponies probably wouldn't understand or appreciate. Apple Honey probably keeps her shop open from dawn until all the work is done during the intense periods of farm work, and she's probably constantly repairing harnesses and making repairs on equipment to at least get it back in the field. If you bring her something else, it goes at the very end of the queue.
[That very thing happened at our shop once. We had a big snowstorm, and over the course of the next day, we got three broken plow trucks. All three of them had to go back out on the road as fast as they could, and anyone who had an appointment for other work on their personal vehicle, well, that was too bad. They got pushed back until the plow trucks were done. Interestingly, since I live in a small town, nobody who got postponed got mad about that.]
Meals might be taken in the fields, and depending on the crop, the less uppity ponies might eat it fresh. After all, mowing a hay field is essentially securing your food supply for much of the year; why not eat it fresh in the ground as you work? Heck, that could be one of the perks of haying for ponies(it certainly isn't when you're a human).
Overall, during those busy times in towns like Ponyville, there would likely be a sense of camaraderie and of unity of purpose. Even though it's not fun and a lot of hard work, that's what Earth ponies are made for; that's what they do. At the end of planting season, there's likely a plowpony celebration, and in the fall, a harvest festival which is probably much like Thanksgiving.
Everypony gets a bit of time to relax and decompress, and then the next day they're back at it again.
Before we get into the next set of blog posts, I want to mention that I’ll be putting theories about how ponies might do it in quote boxes like this one. I think it’s best to let the facts stand by themselves and be clearly separated from actual research on historical practices.
Also, there’ll be four more main parts, and then a conclusion, bringing this series to six total blog posts.
I’ll try to be publishing them a couple of days apart (i.e., part two ought to be published sometime on Saturday), but I can’t say for sure that I’ll stick to that schedule. Depends on work and stuff. The good news is that the research is done [for now] and the bulk of the text is written.
Makes sense - it's not as if having their car fixed will help them all that much anyways if the roads are still full of snow because all the plows are still broken...
Having been a farmer, and exposed to a fraction of what life was like before electricity and gasoline, I can say it's still nothing I want to do for a living, but it's a darned sight better than before. One of our relatives had a gas-powered generator and a bank of actual *glass* batteries that provided DC voltage to the house and to the milk pumps (dairy farm). Ran the generator while milking, had electricity at night until the next morning when the generator needed firing up again for an hour. Rural Electrification was a godsend. Electric pumps meant running water which meant an actual sewage system dumping into a septic tank instead of an outhouse. Electric motors meant that tiny gas engine on the bottom of the washing machine didn't need run inside the house when it was laundry day.
https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/a19827/step-back-into-the-days-of-gas-powered-washing-machines-with-this-video/
4944793
Ha! I'm not the only one that remembers Maytag gas wringer/washers! And heaven help you if you get caught in the wringer.
4944781
That, good Sir, is a disk harrow (a type of cultivator, and a dang big one), not a mower. Not sure what good mowing would be, simply because there is still stuff to burn. Turn up clean dirt? That'll stop it! And though that was his goal, you gotta be a maniac to be a farmer, or off in some way.
Sumer is icumen in,
Lhude sing cuccu!
Groweþ sed and bloweþ med
And springþ þe wde nu,
Sing cuccu!
Awe bleteþ after lomb,
Lhouþ after calue cu.
Bulluc sterteþ, bucke uerteþ,
Murie sing cuccu!
Cuccu, cuccu, wel singes þu cuccu;
Ne swik þu nauer nu.
Dangit, now I'm imagining Granny Smith leading a Maypole dance and Grand Pear decked out in Morris Dancing costume.
I'm reminded of a part of the book The Jungle, wherein Jurgis is out in the farm country and asking a farmer for work, and the farmer says there's no work because it's fall or the end of the season or whatever, and Jurgis says 'do you also turn away your horses for the winter?' Kind of peculiar thinking about that in pony context.
4944793 32 volts DC!
A weird standard, but that's what it was. The Apples seem to be... hmm... 'disconnected' from the rest of Ponyville, I wonder if they have a 32 volt power plant?
I really need to read the entire Laura Ingalls Wilder series. I only read Little House in the Big Woods and Farmer Boy. Spent quite a few summers at Wilder Forest as a kid, though.
ANd now that I'm looking it up, the Wilder Foundation sold the land! That's BS.
https://www.twincities.com/2011/10/12/at-wilder-forest-near-marine-on-st-croix-immigrants-learn-how-to-be-successful-organic-farmers/
And the area was named after Amherst H. Wilder. I did not know that growing up. I don't know if any relation to Laura Ingalls.
That last paragraph, about camaraderie and unity--it reminds me that we've seen Ponyville try to do something like this on the show: Winter Wrap-Up.
I'm suddenly a bit worried about the efficiency of the harvest.
Relevant,
As always, you raise fascinating points. Here's a thought, between Pegasus weather control and earth pony agricultural mastery, famine is extraordinarily unlikely. But at the same time, what do yearly bumper crops do to the market? I find it hard to believe that the apple family hasn't managed to oversaturate the market yet, ponies must have a serious yen for apples.
Wow, 46?
What could make that necessary? They can't really go faster, so I guess the benefit is mainly the amount of force they can apply. Is the soil especially tough, or does he need to plow especially deep?
As to the Apploosa episode, the problem was that the orchard had been planted in the Buffalo's Stampede path, not the town itself.
Oh, this should be all kinds of useful. I already wish I'd had this series on hand for my more Applejack-centric stories.
Or I could've, you know, done more research on my own.
I admit it has been a while since you first told that story, but did you not cited this as one of the instance in wich one hatable ex-customer made a
of himself? And contrasted it with another one who just said "Kay, I'll come back latter then".
Still a relevant anecdote regardless.
Picture this Ladies and Gentlemen....
It's fifty years ago on a small country farm
Johnny McMaster's place
And it's Friday night
You've just finished ten hot days of back breaking labor
And the hay....the hay is finally in
You're sitting around the kitchen table
Under the dim light of a kerosene lantern
Everyone's laughing and joking and telling stories....
about their neighbors
You're halfway through a bottle of....moonshine
And you're getting alllll fired up....for the danccccce
Ladies and Gentlemen....I give you the Mull River Shuffle
That video is epic. We need to get farmers go pros.
Be intresting to see the Span of the plough behind that psycho team, or how long the furrow is, having more on teh team spreading the effort so they can walk longer each day?
4944791
Exactly. Although there are some people who are too dumb to think about that kind of thing. And those weren’t road plows, they were driveway plows and parking lot plows, so those people could at least get going down the road.
There was another winter, we had to dig a customer’s car out of a five foot drift. He called that afternoon and asked if it was done; I told him that it had been buried in snow up to the roof and while we’d gotten it shoveled out enough to get it into the shop, it wasn’t going to melt enough to work on until the next day. He was okay with that, fortunately.
4944793
Yeah, I bet for a lot of farmers things like electricity and tractors made life a lot easier than it had been.
I’m not sure when they got electricity out here. The town’s had it since the 20s (that’s how old the pole in front of our shop is); I’d have to assume that it didn’t get strung out to the farms until much later.
Today I learned that gas-powered washing machines existed, and I want one.
4944807
That, good Sir, is a disk harrow (a type of cultivator, and a dang big one), not a mower.
Gah! I knew that and just stupidly said the wrong thing in the text anyway.
Ah well, I fixed it.
Yeah, mowing the wheat (that’s what it looks like, but I’m not 100% sure of that) wouldn’t do much to stop the fire, but a good thick span of bare dirt would do the trick, and he’s certainly got the right machine for the job.
4944818
I think that’s brilliant.
4944823
If Applebloom doesn’t do her chores, they send her to the orphanage.
That’s probably why Scootaloo doesn’t have parents, you know. She wouldn’t do her chores.
4944831
I really ought to read it, too. Oddly, I never have, and I bet there’s tons of stuff in there I could
stealbe inspired by for pony stories.4945111
Eeyup.
4944836
Well, here’s what I figure. While everypony participates in Winter Wrap-Up, I’m sure that only the experienced ponies (and the ones learning, like farm foals) are out there in the fields doing stuff. No farmer is going to let some incompetent idiot onto her fields, at least not more than once.
Another thing, IRL horses don’t put up with some other horse messing around in harness; guarantee that if there are four of them hitched up to a harvester and one pony is slagging off, the other three will whip him into shape real quick.
4944823
~32VDC was also a common output voltage for old "Wincharger" wind generators. Been thinking it would be interesting to hunt one of those down sometime and fix it up as something to do...
4944863
Although some of that might be offset by monster attacks. How much of a crop can parasprites eat?
A lot of that would, I think, depend on how well they can keep them (and the episode where they get a new apple cellar suggests that they’re improving on that) and how far they ship them, who else grows apples, etc. It’s likely that the Apple Family is the only apple farm in Ponyville; if so, their supply of apples is likely all the apples the ponies in Ponyville get to eat all year long.
But it’s certainly possible that they could oversaturate a market, and if so, obviously the value of their fruit would go down. Unless their apples are crossbred with tobacco or something and that’s why ponies want them so bad.
4944880
They were towing a hell of a plow. The description says it was 26’ wide, and they plowed 7” deep.
The usual number I seem to see turn up all the time is two to three horses per plow bottom. That looks like how most people did it (several videos show the Amish using a four-bottom plow with 12 horses).
4944881
A fair point, but I bet that if the buffalo had asked them to move the town, they probably would have. Easier than moving trees (well, at least IRL).
4944897
Well, you’ll have it for next time.
You should have. Reading about the stuff gives me all sorts of story ideas.
4944964
I think so, yes. I think it was the blog post where I was discussing what kind of customer service--if any--Spoiled Rich might be able to get in Ponyville.
4945021
“The hay is finally in” is something that the ponies in the farming towns probably really celebrate. Even though they’ve got to do it another one or two times before it’s done for the season.
4945022
There’s a fair number of good farming videos I’ve been able to find, at least with horses. There’ll be some more of them in the blog posts going forward, you can count on that.
4945092
Description in the video says it was 26 foot wide; not sure how many bottoms it had. What I tend to see from watching videos is that they use two or three horses per plow bottom.
I’d imagine that the idea is to not make it too hard on the horse. It’s no good to have a horse only be able to plow one row before it’s tired; you need it to go on pulling the thing all day long, and then go out there and do it again the next day, too.
4944863
I think the ponies probably have price that are heavily dependent on the seasons. Price fluctuating with new arrivals is something that does happen in our world.
As for the Apple family, considering that they also produce cider, I would say that a large part of their harvest does not end up being sold as apples.
I love all this worldbuilding. And it really adds so much. In the old Doctor Whooves stories, one of my very favorite bits was when they went to Zebrica in the past and Fluttershy didn't know what a drought was. And there's enough perspective that you know just how many lives and livelihoods saved that represents.
All this ties into my thoughts about pony military, and why Earth Ponies and Pegasuses are so much scarier than unicorns. Especially pre-unification. Fighting Commander Hurricane, forget the soldiers. Your biggest threat is that there's either no rain, or so much all your infrastructure floods and the crops drown. Earth Ponies, meanwhile, have the abilities and talents that make their logistics and food supply astounding. The bit about an army marching on it's stomach? They've got it covered, and then some.
4945116
Those are awesome books, I grew up reading them.
4944818
Now Luna is back, they can do the Dark Morris to bring in winter /Diskworld
4945110
When people talk about labor saving devices, they MEAN it.
4945125
Depends on the monsters I think. A parasprite swarm is rare after all, and most monsters we see seem more likely to eat a pony than anything else.
You know, thinking about it like this, it's amazing how darn useful plenty of talents must be, in a completely mundane way. In a modern society, being able to magically preserve food doesn't mean much. But to ponies?
I think you mean 'baled'.
That farmer discing a firebreak was pretty wild. He might very well be a maniac! That's dangerous! Basically everyone has federal crop insurance (taxpayer subsidized) these days (it would be crazy not to given the relatively low cost and the wide range of disasters is covers, from fires to price drops) so I wonder if he wasn't trying to stop the fire before it got to buildings or some piece of important hardware. A field burning up is annoying and maybe disheartening, but a farmhouse going up is a real disaster.
4945165
I really want to read that story. Which one was it?
4944880
They seem to be using a disc harrow intended for very large tractors. The video shows a certificate for a world record team size, which I suspect was the main point.
So since I forgot to mention, I just love the idea of an alicorn of crops. Maybe Applejack some day.
We can take it for granted now, but there’s a reason harvest gods are such a big deal. And why Demeter can strong-arm Zeus if she really feels like it.
4945222
It’s a really good one. This is the story specifically, it’s part of a series I also can’t recommend enough.
4945121 Neat. I'll bet they're 32v because of the farm standard.
Suddenly I too am very curious how ponies do it in tiny little quote boxes. Are we about to see the first NSFW Biscuit blog then? I can't imagine it not being, if you're comparing historical examples of ponies doing it in quote boxes versus your research into the topic. Somehow.
I'd also be very interested in these supposed sources on pony-quote box interaction...
I finally got around to reading this (yay grad school). I grew up in a relatively large agricultural area. It's probably the dominant industry where I grew up, but it's not overwhelming like in some areas. Plenty of rice, fruit, and nuts as well as some cattle.
I'm really glad I din't have to do stuff like that growing up. I had the lighter growing up in the country version.
although it really depends on the larger area as well. There are times where ponyville might not get the optimal weather in order to make sure other regions get what they need. We also don't know the extent that ponies have control. We've seen areas like the Everfree where apparently they don't have the same amount of control.
I actually think that this is why we have summer vacation actually. Although the dates have shifted a lot since then.
4945165
I think to a farming community Parasprites would be a far worse threat than say a hydra. Sure the Hydra might eat a few ponies but if you've got some ponies left then sooner or later more ponies are going to be born. But if Parasprites, like a locust swarm, just eat everything green they come across then all the ponies are going to starve.
4945513
It’s like doing it in the backseat of a VW Beetle. Once you get everything sort of lined up, the rest just happens.
I think the poop blog was probably NSFW. Almost certainly NSFCW.
Well, it’s fanon that ponies like being in boxes, so it’s only reasonable to assume that they do things in those boxes, y’know?
derpicdn.net/img/view/2015/1/12/804450__safe_solo_rarity_fourth+wall_bath_artist-colon-tenart.png
4945594
Estee likes to call the areas where the ponies are the ‘settled areas,’ and I think that in areas like that they’ve got a very good hold. Outside that, I’d assume much less control. Probably they don’t care about a lot of it, if there aren’t ponies living and farming there.
I suspect so as well. I think that summer vacation covers a lot of the growing season where you’d have kids out in the fields a lot, although of course it would vary by region and crop.
4945873
Totally agree. Plus, if the whole crop gets eaten, lots more ponies are probably going to die of starvation than what a hydra might eat when it raids a village.
4946674
that sounds pretty reasonable. Although there's till places like the everfree, i'd still call that "settled" due to it's proximity to ponyville. Personally, I think that they have more than that under control (or at least they're trying to) but that's a discussion for another day.
It might be for harvesting as well. It's no secret that start times have been pushed forward
4947085
Eh, I’d say vaguely, perhaps. There’s a lot in there that the ponies don’t seem to have under control . . . to use an Earth analogy, could be like a city that’s desert beyond it or something (I’m thinking Las Vegas).
Bit early for most of the crops in Michigan, anyway. But yeah, that totally could have been part of the intent back in the day (I’m not entirely sure that school was as many days back in Ye Olden Times, either).
4948353
There's a difference between climate control and terraforming. Essentially, I think they're trying to preserve the natural environment instead of trying to make things better for ponies. Continuing with the earth example, i think they're trying to undo climate change, not make vegas.
4949786
My own thought on that is that they’ve heavily modified the natural cycles, enough that the birds apparently need help to head north for the summer. But--I think that you’d be right in saying that they’re more towards the preserving end of the spectrum rather than terraforming.