noise."Worldbuilding XII: Farming part 2: Plowing · 12:20am Sep 30th, 2018
We're going to talk about plowing, which is quite honestly probably the hardest part of the job because dirt is heavy. Unfortunately, it's something that you have to do every year . . . at least, if you want a crop that's worth something.
Or if you have trees. Maybe the Apples are smarter ponies than we give them credit for.
The first order of business is to fertilize the field. Most farms had some livestock, who had the side benefit of producing fertilizer in rather large quantities. During the winter it would be gathered and stored somewhere, and in the early spring it was time to put it on the field.
One early type of farm equipment was a manure spreader, which was an improvement over an ordinary wagon and a pitchfork. The wagon had an endless apron or a live bottom, which transferred the manure to the back. There, it would either fall off or else be flung off by a spinning rake, depending on the design of the wagon.
If you couldn't afford a dedicated manure wagon (although really, once you were using it for hauling manure, what else would you want to use it for?) there were kits available to turn an ordinary box wagon into a manure spreader.
A lot of ponies with farms would probably compost their own manure (both from their animals and potentially from themselves). There are of course potential bacterial issues with using your own waste to fertilize a field; however, if properly composted, all the nasties die in the process, and all that's left is yummy, yummy plant food.
For those who live in town, anywhere that there isn't a somewhat modern plumbing system, there would be some variety of pit toilet (which we've seen in canon [and incidentally, flushing pit toilets do actually exist]), and those would have to be emptied out every now and then. Odds are good that there are ponies who do that for a living, and then process it further as needed and re-sell it as fertilizer.
After that, the process on a pony farm would be essentially the same as it was on a human farm.
The next order of business is to prepare the field to receive a crop. What you have to do depends on what you're planting (and to some extent, is beyond the scope of this series).
Generally, plants which can be sown need less soil preparation. Those fields were typically disked. The machine that does that is called a disc harrow and it has cutting wheels that looked like pizza cutters, and it would have a number of 'bottoms'—i.e., the discs. The number of discs and the angle of them was lower on horse-drawn equipment than it is on modern tractor-pulled stuff, because dirt is heavy. A pair of ponies might only be able to pull one with four or six discs.
Besides breaking up the soil, the angle of the discs helped the machine track straight—if they were all pointed in one direction, it would want to turn, but if they're opposing each other on opposite sides of the centerline, the machine should go straight.
Historically, an operator either rode on the harrow or followed along behind. The disc harrow doesn't appear to need frequent adjustments—you set it and go—and of course ponies working their own fields wouldn't need a supervisor pony to tell them where to go. Thus, I think that this machine could be worked by how many ponies were pulling it and no more.
That gives ponies their first crop of the season, too: rocks. Every time a field is plowed, rocks that have migrated to the surface get turned up by the plow, and unless you're a rock farmer, you can't just leave them there.
The stone-boat—basically, a strong wooden sledge—is used, pulled along by the horses while the rocks are picked up and then dumped off at the fence row. Later, they might be used to build a stone wall, or wherever stones and rocks are needed.
If the rocks are too large, the horses would be hitched directly to the stone, and it would be dragged straight out of the field. And if it's too big for even that, then its location is worked around.
[Presumably really big rocks could be shifted either by dynamite or freeze-splitting it, and this might have been done in the off-season; no farmer is going to want to miss his planting window because he's fighting with a rock.]
Next up is a drag harrow, to smooth the field.
The earliest known drag harrows were just logs. Then, they were improved by adding steel 'teeth' to them, which bit into the dirt. Such machines could catch on obstructions—like a rock that had been overlooked—and fling it out or bend or break a tooth or even stop the harrow entirely. They were known to tip on turns, especially if the horses pulling them weren't well-trained.
The next improvement in design was the spring-tooth harrow. Instead of solid spikes, it had thin metal springs (shaped much like the letter C). Those dug deeper, and they also had the advantage of springing over obstructions.
This is another machine that could easily be worked by just the ponies pulling it. It simply drags on the ground, and there are no adjustments to make out in the field. A simpler design such as a spike-tooth harrow might have to be unstuck occasionally, which of course would mean that one of the ponies would have to unhitch and go around and free it, but otherwise it would require no special work. Theoretically, a spring-tooth harrow wouldn't have to have anything done to it while in use.
Now your grain field is ready for planting.
Other crops, such as corn, require more soil preparation. They require a plow.
There are two basic kinds of plows. The simplest, and the one we've seen in the show, is just a single bottom plow.
There were numerous different designs, in many cases because of differences in soil type. The traditional sod-cutting plow didn't work very well in the clay soil of the Midwest, and the breaking plow was invented.
Plows had to be able to efficiently cut through the earth and whatever was growing in the field (grass and weeds and whatnot), but they also had to turn over the soil, and it had to not stick on the plow because once the blade got fouled, it couldn't do its job.
Not only did it require a pair of strong horses or oxen (typically), but the operator had to be quite skilled. Turning was accomplished by angling the handles, and when you got to the end of a furrow, the plow was laid down on its side and dragged into position to start the next row.
Sulky plows were an improvement. That was basically the same plow, except that it was supported by a pair of wheels. For human use, there was a seat that the operator could ride on; IRL many farmers didn't, because it made extra work for the horses, and that was work that better went into plowing a field than carrying around the farmer.
In either case, plowing straight, even rows was a matter of pride to farmers. It was a way of showing their skill and the skill of their teams. The horses learned their usual positions, and learned to follow the furrow.
From what I’ve seen in YouTube videos, fields were generally plowed with two to three horses pulling per plow bottom. So a single-bottom plow (like the one pictured above). Frameworks of various types have been invented to put more than one plow on a single apparatus; each individual plow on that apparatus is generally called a ‘plow bottom.’ So you’ve got two-bottom plows, four-bottom, etc.
For ponies, the overall principles would be the same. As best as I can tell, they'd need some number of ponies—probably at least two—pulling the plow, and another pony to guide it, whether it's a traditional drag plow or a sulky plow. It's possible that the sulky plow requires less guidance and is less likely to veer off-course, in which case only the pulling ponies might be required. They'd have to have a way to raise the plow once they got to the end of the row, but that's not an insurmountable problem; a pull rope could accomplish that task.
Most ponies would probably be happy with single-bottom plows, but if they've got a big family or know a bunch of strong ponies, they could buy two or four bottom plows (or maybe even more) and hitch a bigger team to them to plow the field.
Obviously, the effort required to plow any given field is going to depend on a number of factors, but I think it would be fair to say that in general for ponies, you'd need two ponies or one really strong stallion like Big Mac per plow bottom.
Incidentally, here's another thing worth mentioning. Back in Ye Olden Times (like when I was a kid) corn rows were easily far enough apart that you could walk through them without hurting plants. In horse-drawn days, they were wider—forty inches—since that was about the width of a horse's rear end. Ponies are narrower than horses, of course, but any row crop that needs to be cultivated had better be planted far enough apart that a pony can walk between the rows.
Obviously, there are other crops, but overall the field preparation would be essentially the same.
I-I don't know, Doctor, after what happened last time...
According to Ken Burns, disk plows are often blamed as a major contributor to the Dust Bowl since they tear and disrupt the topsoil more than necessary. Plenty of ancient cultures from the Babylonians to Mesoamericans knew better than to tear up the ground too much. Terraces and contour plowing are always better than straight lines, and not plowing at all is often beneficial.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-till_farming#Issues
And, of course, rotating crops is essential to keeping the soil healthy. My great uncle was a professor of agricultural science, and he had plenty of stories and lectures to tell about George Washington Carver and how peanut butter became such a staple.
Interesting how the circle turns. Plowing, while once a default, is now going away and being replaced with no and low tillage options for greater yields and less expense. It's a Soil Health issue now.
Oh boy, corn!
I wonder how Earthponies would react upon learning about Lysenko. Would it color their perception of all humans that anyone could be that dumb?
I'm quite proud of the U of M accomplishing what he claimed to have accomplished: super-cold-tolerant crops like the Honeycrisp Apple and Frontenac and Frontenac Gris winegrapes. And they did it the good old fashioned Mendelian way with crossbreeding. Of course, the modern backlash against "GMOs" is in a similar vein to the Soviets' distrust of bourgeois science.
But then, maybe Earthponies have such a magical rapport and connection to the Earth that they actually can coax plants to evolve purely from environmental stimuli and conditions.
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Nearly everyone where I live has switched to low/no-till techniques and corn rows are now so close together that you nearly need a machete to get through by mid-season.
In the old days, intensive tilling was a herbicidal necessity. Tilling under the wild seeds meant that they wouldn't germinate that year, giving the purpose-sown seed an advantage against the random weeds and volunteer rubbish on the naked ground. Modern reliance on low-tillage and no-tillage regimes is dependent on heavy usage of serious, low-persistence chemical herbicides. The increasing prevalence of roundup-resistant weeds was quite the crisis, and we've been fighting to get new low-persistence broad-spectrum herbicides into the field that can be paired with GMO engineered to be tolerant of said new herbicides.
Thankfully, this year's fight with dicamba has been less disastrous than last year's.
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yes, but this time... shall be DIFFERENT!!!
hmm, I didn't know much about this process. The ag in my area is mostly rice and tree fruits and nuts.
I believe that tree crops use way more water than other types. Plus there's other issues with fertilization/soil nutrients.
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Hopefully ones that don't decimate bee populations. I've been dealing with invasive buckthorn (and while I'm not a stranger to invasive species, [heck I'm quite fond of sumacs and Japanese Barberry, those buckthorn berries and stumps scare me]), and I was told to not hold back with the strongest, nastiest herbicides that can legally be used.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/roundup-weed-killer-may-play-role-in-widespread-bee-deaths-study-finds/
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Did you see the The Magic School Bus Rides Again episode on modern, experimental farming?
The new show is great, despite the slightly lazy cardboard-cutout animation.
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Seems to be almost as sketchy as that study that chose to test neonicotinoid pesticides as the culprit by feeding bees the insecticide directly. Directly tormenting honeybees results in stressed honeybees, no matter what you feed them. And while roundup isn't a massive poison, it isn't really a plays-nice you-can-drink-it substance, either.
We'll see. Bayer's still trying to get oriented with their new formerly-Monsanto acquisition. They deep sixed the deeply damaged, even toxic Monsanto brand, but they still have all the entrenched roundup paranoia. The irony continues to be that roundup is a wasting resource, mostly because of overuse.
Silly Biscuit, how could you not post the next image of that Horse Wife cartoon?
https://78.media.tumblr.com/4feb494b58ad63fe5e6b2f3c222a7b00/tumblr_or9frv5KTb1uv5tb8o3_540.png
I don't understand what an endless apron is; you would think a farmer would trip over it. And perhaps you'd best explain what a live bottom on a manure spreader is, lest we jump to some unfortunate conclusions.
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A conveyor belt, like the one in the supermarket that brings your groceries up to the scanner.
“live bottom” and “continuous apron” are essentially the same thing for our purposes here.
4945743 Bindweed delendo est!
Wouldn't that partially explain why earth ponies are over-represented in the agriculture sector?
I mean, the show has been rather vague what the whole 'earth link' part of being an earth pony actually means, but there was that one time Big Mac pulled a whole house by himself, and without seemingly much strain.
If your earth pony family of, say, three to low-ball it, can plow a field, spread manure on another, AND have somebody cook for the others, then that family is going to have a real leg up on the family of, say, pegasi down the road that have to strap into a big, clumsy harness to do one of those things at a time.
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Well, in a paradigm where drought simply doesn't happen, and rainfall is thoroughly scheduled, water requirements shouldn't be an issue at all.
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IT'S NOT DIFFERENT AT ALL, IS IT, STEVE?!
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It's more of water supply and transportation issue. that regularly scheduled rain needs to come from somewhere, and more water intensive crops require more rain. That means that there's water that isn't going elsewhere (like more water efficient crops) and it's going to require more expense to set up the rain.
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It’s a complicated subject, to be sure. And as I’ll bring up in a later blog post, different types of pest management bring with them their own problems--of course you only want to grow the stuff you want to eat and not anything else, and you want to do it as efficiently as possible while avoiding the most problems possible. Short of cheaply growing food in labs, though, there are bound to be problems with any technique.
And not to overly dispute your point, but I can’t help but wonder if the Babylonians &c. really knew better or if that was just the way they did it and it worked for them, so they didn’t seek to ‘improve’ their techniques. I do seem to recall that it was Mesoamericans who figured out that you could grow corn and beans as complimentary crops, with the beans using the cornstalks to climb (and as I recall, some other nutrient benefit between the two crops as well).
I assume that ponies do this.
As I recall, it’s cheap and nutritious was the basic drive behind it. But I’m sure I’m probably missing some of the finer points.
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A lot of tech seems to be kind of cyclical like that. I think about that with the surge of electric cars in the market; back in the early days they were also a major player but fell out of favor as gasoline engines improved and batteries didn’t. And likely the improvements in battery tech can be more traced to things like portable electronics and cordless tools . . . kind of wonder if there was a similar impetus towards gasoline back in the day.
I guess in some ways, less labor-intensive options with greater crop yields are always going to be what appeals to the farmer; if you can get similar results with less equipment or less prep, you’ve sold most farmers on the new tech.
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Make me do more research . . .
I think that there are probably ponies who wind up with equally dumb ideas. And I think that the Winter Wrap-Up episode suggests both one of the strengths and one of the weaknesses of the pony system--they don’t seem to want to try new ideas all that much. This protects them from dumb new ideas (Lysenko, etc.), but also retards progress when it really is a good idea.
In Silver Glow’s Journal, she mentioned on more than one occasion how humans knew some stuff about weather that ponies didn’t, while they also didn’t know things that every pegasus knew. I think it would be the same way with earth ponies. I think that there’d be a lot of modern agricultural tech that they’d find appealing; at the same time, I think there’s stuff we do that would appall them.
My own take is that we should be cautious of GMOs because they let you make major mistakes fast, while the traditional methods took time to really f
k up. But they’re another tool in the kit, and there’s no scientific reason I’m aware of why we shouldn’t use them.
Possible, and of course there’s fan theories that different species of animals can interbreed (for example, eagle + lion = griffon; pony + griffon = hippogriff, etc.) which might make weird plant hybrids possible in the pony universe. Like a corn tree.
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Yeah, that’s one thing that bums me out about modern agriculture. Used to like walking through the corn; now you can’t.
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Agreed--and in some ways we’re trading one problem for another. But tech marches on, and we’re certainly able to get higher crop yields using modern techniques than people though we’d be able to back in the day, and hopefully that process can continue. I know some of the farmers around where I live are using GPS and other technology to have a better understanding of their fields and what grows where, where weeds or pests are an issue, etc., and using that to reduce the amount of fertilizer, pesticides, and herbicides they use on the field, which I have to think both improves the bottom line, and helps the environment overall. I don’t know if anybody’s using custom seeds based on their field profiles--at least around here--but it wouldn’t surprise me if some farmers were. I know I often see bare spots where the field got flooded by rain; if they know that’s a problem area, they can potentially plant crops that are more tolerant of being underwater for a while in the spring.
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I have to think that rice uses more water than trees. But maybe I’m wrong about that.
I think the biggest issue overall is planting the right kind of crops for the environment. I think that the ponies probably don’t push that as hard as we humans do. But--with weather management--perhaps they do.
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I used the shorter version ‘cause I’m reasonably certain that I used the entire cartoon in a blog post already.
It’s my poop.
Makes me wonder if the Apple Family has poop that’s more suited to apple trees. And the Carrot Family, carrots. Etc.
derpicdn.net/img/view/2013/12/8/493143__safe_solo_cute_carrot+top_golden+harvest_garden_cutie+top_artist-colon-supernoncutie.jpg
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I think it’s a case of earth pony magic generally being focused on growing plants rather than anything else. I think in general they’re stronger than the other tribes, so that probably does help, but the big thing is their attunement to nature. Sort of like how basketball tends to favor tall people over all other factors.
No reason why other tribes can’t at least do some of the stuff that they do (and in small towns, they probably do; in Ponyville there might be pegasi who are useless at weather or unicorns who work part-time pulling plows or weeding or have some other plant-related specialty. But I think that overall, the balance tips heavily in favor of the earth ponies when it comes to crops, just as weather is mostly left to the pegasi. I think it’s just an innate part of their being, their make-up.
I also think that despite what we’ve seen in the show (which, admittedly, isn’t much) the labor involved is high, and the ponies have to work hard in possibly larger numbers than we’ve ever seen in canon. But--that very much depends on headcanon, and that is rightly left to individual authors. If you want earth ponies to be twice as strong as unicorns (let’s say), that would indeed give them quite the advantage when it came to all the labor of running a farm. Apple Bloom could probably pull a plow that a full-grown unicorn might struggle with, for example.
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Potentially, it still could be. But that falls into headcanon territory, IMHO. We do know that they have to get the water up to Cloudsdale, and if there’s no water to be had, presumably they can’t make rainclouds.
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I think that’s an important thing to remember, even with pony magic. Even with weather patrols, growing water lilies in a plot of land in the desert might simply be unmanageable, and I have to imagine that the pegasi do have somewhat limited resources to work with. Better than what we humans have, but IMHO they can’t magically make water appear from nothing. There are also likely limits in particular weather zones--they might put more or less rain over Sweet Apple Acres to help the crops, but I think they’d have a problem with a cactus farm abutting a willow farm, for example.
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Alongside winter squash.
They had an advantage though: those plant were indigenous from central america, no one else could figure it out without having access to those plant
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I think rice isn't quite as bad as people think (depending on how you get the water source). Most of the loss is the water seeping into the ground, then it goes back into the ground water. I don't think the water is very deep, and it's not flooded year round. At the very least, it's way better than almonds and walnuts. I don't know the exact number, but it's over 1 gallon per nut.
There is a trade off. With some crops, hotter drier climates produce better quality food (trees put more sugar in fruit that grows in hot climates). Plus soil conditions.
Honestly, I was just thinking of the logistics. Like you said, they can't make water so it has to get from point A to point B and it doesn't seem like pegasi would be an efficient way to do that. i agree with you on the limitations for earth pony and pegasi magic. I'm also thinking that they don't really use rain for crops much (i don't remember what the show has said), it doesn't seem as efficient as irrigation. The weather is more for overall climate and things like groundwater.
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Fine-sliced hybrid breeding programs have been in place since before I was born. The major seed companies have cultivars bred for every two CRM in cake-layer slices of the Corn belt going north to south from Canada to the Delta: https://www.pioneer.com/home/site/us/agronomy/library/compare-maturity-corn-products/
They generally rotate the 'varieties' every couple years, and while they're more like clone generations than actual distinct varieties, they do keep rolling on. This is where the GMO meets the road - every three to four years, there's a new generation of in-bred resistance and tolerance strain complexes bred into *all* the 'varieties' as a new set differentiated from the parent stock. Usually there's vanilla cousins without the particular GMO strains, but in general the endless breeding program rolls on, and they tend not to use the old 'varieties'. I used to have a library of over 16 thousand 'varieties', and the vast majority were obsolete four years after introduction.
It is possible to seed different rows of 'variety' seed on the same machine, and there's a deliberate practice of planting 'reserves' in various parts of the field, but it's difficult to georeference this because of the vagaries of the guys using the equipment and the practical limits of GPS at a meter-level scale.
As for low marshy areas and high dry areas, they tend to trade off as you cycle through dry and wet years. A gully that drowns in a wet year is the salvation of your field in a drought, and vice versa for slight rises. We get more into weather prediction when it comes to pesticide spraying - when it rains, and how, is far easier to predict, and rely upon, than precision-ag targeting of subfield problem areas. This is what my company moved into after we got bought by one of our customers. When and how winds and rains come in relation to when you spray has a lot to say about whether your fancy new dicamba herbicide stays in your field or gets up and goes on walkabout in all of your non-dicamba-resistant neighbors' fields.
Why is Bag Mac so sad?
Twilight made a mistake in her spells again and turned him into a field.
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That’s a fair point. I suppose if you haven’t got the plants, you can’t figure out what to do with them.
Which makes me wonder what the Irish ate before they had potatoes?
Maybe there’s a reason there aren’t snakes in Ireland.
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Yeah, I’m not really up on all the technicalities of farming. I know that raising animals for meat is resource-intensive, but not if it’s more or less so than some of the other alternatives. I also think that our desire to have certain foods available year-round has likely changed agriculture possibly for the worse.
Oh yeah, totally. And different varieties of some things do better some places than other. It’s a case of matching the crop to the soil. Where I used to live, sugar beets were big, and they’re not grown much out where I live now--it was onion country. The Kalamazoo area was big for celery back in the day, and Coats Grove, MI, has pecan groves (I actually learned that from an episode of X-Files, but it’s apparently true).
I don’t recall if the show has said, but I personally think that they do. I believe it was implied or stated outright in the HWE episode, and I can’t see why they’d change that. It’s probably a lot easier to bring a cloud than to dig a ditch.
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This is one of those TIL moments.
It makes sense, of course, and it would be dumb to not do it. And probably we can get more specific now than we could before.
I wonder how fast an old strain could be brought back if a new one wasn’t working out for whatever reason? And I can’t help but feel like a lot of it is probably like the flu shot or whatever--the seed companies try and guess what the growing season is going to be like, and I bet sometimes they guess badly wrong.
I have to think that even at the meter-level scale you could get close (probably at a plant-by-plant level, you’ve gone too far). I don’t know if equipment is set up for it currently, or if it’s practical to even do so, but given the other types of machines that exist, I’m sure it would be possible to have multiple hoppers feeding each seed drill and have them rely on GPS to decide which seed to dump in next.
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I suppose in that regard, the ponies might have it better if there are very specific rain goals each year.
Funny story about that. There’s a linear state park near where I live that’s on an old rail line. Runs through the middle of a farmer’s property. He didn’t like that very much (not that there’s a damn thing he can do about it; he doesn’t own that land and never has), so one of his objections was that ‘he couldn’t control his herbicides.’ At which point a few people on the planning board leaned forward and asked if he thought this was enough of a problem that the EPA ought to get involved, at which point he realized that he’d perhaps said a bit too much there.
They did work out an arrangement with him, going around the edges rather than straight through. Which is probably best for all concerned, but if I’d been on the planning board, I would have told him that they were going to put up a fence along the borders of the state property and it was too bad about the access roads he’d had that crossed the old railroad right of way . . . he could drive around.
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derpicdn.net/img/view/2018/5/10/1729415__safe_screencap_big+macintosh_the+return+of+harmony_behaving+like+a+dog_big+macindog_chaos_corn_digging_discorded_farm_floating+island_food_gre.png
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So funny story, one you tube channel about history I follow, nota bene, just did a video on the history of corn culture. Funny coincidence.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fzbywrr0ML0 (It's in french though)
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I just know stuff from having friends that are farmers. I'm not up on all the technicalities either.
meat can be extremely resource intensive, definitely more than most crops, but I haven't actually compared numbers.
I'd say so. There's definitely a difference between supermarket food for in season and out of season. And that's not even mentioning local growers. It's kind of weird considering that a lot of our traditional seasonal food still relies on what would be on season/available at the time.
well, i was thinking of a bit larger scale, say California vs. Arizona. California has great growing conditions except for the water issue, Arizona doesn't.
I think that the show heavily implies it as well, but i don't remember. I don't really think that it's easier to bring a cloud. You dig a ditch once, you have to continuously have pegasi bring clouds every time you need something watered. Plus it doesn't really scale well. A cloud works for a home vegetable patch, what about sweet apple acres? How many pegasi are needed to keep that watered? What about all of ponyville? What about larger farming areas? It gets to the point where at the bare minimum cloudsedale needs to be relocated and pegasi need to be drafted to fuel this type of infrastructure. We also don't get to see the logistics of transporting clouds like this.
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My timing is impeccable.
My French . . . not so much.
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Right, but that’s tradition. On modern Earth, there’s nothing to stop me from having pumpkin pies year round, or apple cider, or cherries, or whatever I want. Growing seasons be damned (obviously, getting it fresh is more challenging outside of the normal season).
Depends on where you go. Not so sure about farming, but Arizona used to be a significant logging state. And the clear skies and presumably long days also would be good for some plants. Lack of water is a problem, of course, and I’m not sure how good the soil is overall.
The thing is that the ponies are likely going to bring the rain anyways, since they want lawns and flowers around their houses and ponds and so on--and if they’re already doing it, why not have it be the right amount at the right time for the average crop that’s grown locally? Like, it’d be a different equation if they were planting an orchard in the desert; that’s more of a logistical problem. In Michigan, anyway, the average rainfall per year tends to stay the same, but it’s more of a question of when it happens, which of course affects the crops.
I suppose it’s not unreasonable to imagine some farming situations in Equestria where irrigation ditches would be practical, and they could easily be filled by pegasi (or of course naturally occurring bodies of water) and used as needed, but I think that in general, that’s not how the ponies do it.
And I also think that relocating towns like Cloudsdale isn’t all that difficult, overall. I believe in Hurricane Fluttershy, they were comparing how much water Fillydelphia had sent up before, compared to what they were going to do, and I’d assume that that implies that they’re moving Cloudsdale, rather than Fillydelphia and Ponyville.
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yeah, I said it was tradition. Although there are practical reasons as well, not every dish is fun to make in the height of summer.
i'm not sure on the soil quality either. I was pointing out that it's not like california, which for some crops, accounts for over 90% of everything grown in the US. Even with the lack of water in the main ag areas, california is great for growing crops. Sometimes the benefits outweigh the drawbacks.
with an artificial climate it's kind of like everywhere is a desert. You need to bring the water everywhere instead of augmenting what naturally occurs. It is a huge logistics problem, you could easily end up needing an extra several thousand gallons to grow crops. Think about how the clouds are going to get there and how many ponies are going to be needed to disperse them for extra rain. The problem isn't going to be anywhere as bad as this, but take a look at the california aquaduct. At peak it can do close to 100,000 gallons per second. Try to do that with semi trucks.
actually there's a fic (i forget which one) where this happens and it's a pretty interesting headcanon. It's essentially trapped in a large eddy. But that's still a large ordeal to set up the air currents to move a city for something like water.
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The advent of air conditioning and modern stoves has changed that equation a bit, I’d think.
Yeah, for sure.
Some of it might be convenience, too; I know that there are some crops that used to be grown in Michigan that rarely are any more (celery, for example). I’m sure there are multiple reasons for that, but I have to imagine that the growing environment in Michigan hasn’t changed significantly enough that celery won’t grow here any more.
Well, yeah, I suppose you could argue it that way. I think that the ponies tend to augment what was going to be there naturally rather than having global weather control, so it’s probably not that bad in terms of labor. But, having said that, given the sheer volumes of water that fall in an average rainstorm, going with full realism there’s no chance that ponies could move that kind of water around. A heavy rain over Ponyville might bring down hundreds of thousands of gallons of water, maybe millions.
Actually, I wonder if somebody clever at math could figure out how much energy it might take? It’d be very back of the envelope, of course, but it might be possible to figure out by knowing how many ponies they needed to make the tornado, and how much energy a tornado has.
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it might be. I might have been kinda weird growing up, my parents tried to minimize AC usage so our AC was set at 80. Plus i grew up in an ag heavy area and there was a bunch of stuff i never really had out of season growing up.
I think the bigger issue is how making those air currents affect everything else.
Reading these in a lump. It occurs to me that we have at least two families' worth of pony names here. The Harrows and the Plows all seem like solid farming folk. Except Sulky Plow. She left for the big city and spends most of her time writing poetry in and about coffee shops.
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Half the places I’ve lived, we didn’t have AC. I don’t have AC now (although, admittedly, it usually isn’t that bad in Michigan, plus since I basically work outdoors, I get used to it). I can’t really remember anything that we did or didn’t have grown up. The only thing I can think of that must be seasonal, ‘cause I can never find them except around Christmas, is kumquats.
Maybe it’s how they aim their magic. Besides the tornado, they were making special wind currents for the Breezies.
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Funny story, even I have amassed more knowledge from this series. I was skimming back through a reprint of a farm equipment catalog I have, and now I know what about 80% of the equipment is for.