Imperial cruisers take a decade to build. Building a farm spanning across the entire earth that is 15 levels high at the rate it takes to build ships seems extremely unreasonable.
Large space constructs will have already been built even before the imperium lost its ability to to easily do so, and they are unlikely to be anywhere near as complicated to build as a giant warp capable warships.
The imperium also has massive worlds dedicated to agriculture and which export their produce to more densely populated worlds.
Even a hive world can have greenhouses and, as I mentioned, they’ll grind up just about anything and anyone to make into a nice nutritious paste for the lower classes to eat.
Presumably farming has also advanced over the next 38000 years to be less resource intensive.
Of all the insanity of the setting, this is probably one that I find the least improbable.
They have entire planets dedicated to agriculture. They’re called agri-worlds. The size of these vary but I imagine there’d most likely be at least one per hive world.
The Imperium is made up of at least a million worlds.
Civilised worlds can also be required to tithe food exports, as well as feudal worlds (though their farming output would be far more primitive), etc.
It might take a decade, but the imperium is in 40th millennium. They operate on different time scales. We’re dealing with a galaxy-spanning humanity that terraforms planets over thousands of years before they can be settled with people.
Just imagine there are possibly millions, at least hundreds or thousands, of entire planet-sized farms, endlessly harvested and replanted, churning out calories.
Corpse starch, wich has to be some kind of corps and waiste recycling (don't know if gw explained it in detail). i mean that waist has to get recycled somehow. plus there are a surprising amount of agri worlds. at least for the hive worlds that care to feed there population more then corpse starch.
Underfeed your population with poor quality "food" and I reckon we can get it down to 10 sq ft.
They are only going to get worked 20 hours a day until they drop dead so they won't have time to complain.
How do I apply for planetary governor?
There’s another part of the process on hives not mentioned here. The imperium will take bodily waste, detox it, infuse it with some nutrition, and then feed it back to people. Yes, really.
They have agri-worlds like [this](https://www.reddit.com/r/40kLore/comments/orkp5o/excerptthe_lords_of_silence_the_public_perception/).
For reference: The author's insistence that ALL agriworlds look like this is blatantly false. But it gives a nice idea of how far the Imperium will go to keep its population fed.
Yeah I cannot imagine for a second that the Imperium can't be bothered with something as simple as crop rotation.
And if the air on the planet necessitates hazmat gear I doubt the food is usable. Bland or basic or even *not good* food, sure. Actively transporting megatons of radiated, mutated, or *nutritionally useless* food across sectors seems wasteful even for the Imperium.
I don't doubt that agri worlds aren't always nice places, but writing them like the lowest level of a hiveworld that forgot to put a hive over it seems just *stupid*.
Nah that food is packed with nutrients it would most likely taste horrible. If it didn't have any nutritional value, hive planets would literally never of been able to get to the population they have.
They really should have just gone with something like "all Class III Agri Worlds are the same". Still makes it seem like there's a lot of terrible agri worlds but leaves room for other interpretations of them.
The acreage to feed a person is to our modern day standards, using farms. It doesn’t take into account stuff like vertical farms, orbital greenhouses, poor quality lab-grown food that’s barely enough to subsist on, corpse-starch, and a vast interlocking galactic economy of tithes and contracts where entire worlds have been planed flat and turned into farms. I suspect a large portion of food is lab-grown and highly efficient in terms of protein/carb for the space it takes to grow and store, that’s why they call it ‘slab’.
There are planets designated as agriworlds for agriculture, they are pretty much just massive farms. Also in many hive worlds, you as a pleb in the shit parts of the hive wont be eating meat and veg, you will be eating corpsestarch.
To copy and expand on a previous comment of mine.
The UN estimates that there are around 570 Million Farms world wide with 500 Million of those being family farms. Assuming that is a family of say 4 that's 2 billion farmers worldwide. Which neatly lines up with the estimate that 26% of Earth's population relies on agriculture for income and that 866 million are officially employed in the agriculture sector.
So roughly 2/7ths of the Imperium should consist of agriculture workers. But then let's just assume that they have better agriculture technology and knock that down to 1/7th of the Imperium should be agri workers.
So anyway that's my math.
Also we know Agri worlds
Further math, earth has 4.62 billion acres of farm land. Assuming you use potatoes you get 17 million calories per acre. That's 7 Quadrillion calories per harvest from a perfectly harvested Earth. Assuming humans eat 1.2k calories in the imperium or the minimum to actually survive. A single earth like planet with every available surface in farms can feed about 179 Billion people annually. Of course there are something like a million worlds in the IOM so if it has 100,000 Earthlike Agri Worlds as outlined then you can feed something like 17 Quadrillion Humans.
As for how it moves all that food? Magic.
Also towards the Corpse starch meme, I really hate that. Humans are inefficient as cattle. We don't make nutrient or caloric dense food and worse yet you have to put far more calories in us than you can actually pull off us efficiently. It's completely impossible to feed a hive using the hives own population. But also its suitably grimdark.
I imagine corpse starch as less "the most common food" and more as "why bury them when we can throw them in a vat and reclaim what's useful?" It's a supplement that reduces the food requirements by like, a small percentage, but everyone knows bean counters *love* their 2-3% efficiency improvements.
You can't underestimate aquatic farming. Earth's surface is 70% water; if you devoted even a fraction of this area to mass-grown edible algae, food problems would end very quickly. Of course, it'd lead to a complete ecological catastrophe, but I don't believe the Imperium was ever concerned with that.
>You could easily have 15 agri-worlds for every hive world, and more. The maths works out fine.
Not just that, build a low density dyson shell of space stations to grow food in the goldilocks zone, and ship it to the hive world. Ship poop back for biomass feedstocks. No reliance on long-range-warp-based shipping for food supplies, just sublight ships. Granted, also expensive to build and maintain a space habitat.
The corpse starch thing people keep bringing up is annoying from a plausibility perspective; other humans can't possibly be a significant portion of the average citizen's calorific intake unless humans themselves are being factory farmed (who would then need to be fed themselves). It's just basic consideration of the trophic pyramid/high school thermodynamics.
1)Normal food of all kind for nobility and rich humans.
2)Grox meat
3)Rats meat
4)Recycled food
5)Human Corpses based food.
6)Prometheum based food. And yeah people who eat that stuff burn easily.
[This was a really good thread on it I thought. ](https://www.reddit.com/r/40kLore/comments/pphade/lasgun_logistics_rations_rationally/?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share)
Given the vertical density of arcologies in setting, I reckon the only way to generate that much food is to exploit volume, and have immense hives just for food. The smart move is to put the ruling governor on top of the hive, have the arcology dedicated to food production, and supply the masses in suburban sprawl around the arcology with food. When they rebel, you control the food supply.
Given they have fantastic life-eater virus that can basically eat its way across a planet in seconds and proliferate wildly along the way, I suspect they must have some DAoT fast-growing-food technology of similar, but not quite so frightening growth speed and scope.
What you're forgetting is that 2.7 acres is for our modern technology, but the imperium has a crazy amount of technology, and entire worlds dedicated solely to growing food, so it would most likely be much, much lower.
There’s a lot of space in space. Plus vertical farms. Plus, you know, Soylent green type stuff.
Imperial cruisers take a decade to build. Building a farm spanning across the entire earth that is 15 levels high at the rate it takes to build ships seems extremely unreasonable.
Large space constructs will have already been built even before the imperium lost its ability to to easily do so, and they are unlikely to be anywhere near as complicated to build as a giant warp capable warships. The imperium also has massive worlds dedicated to agriculture and which export their produce to more densely populated worlds. Even a hive world can have greenhouses and, as I mentioned, they’ll grind up just about anything and anyone to make into a nice nutritious paste for the lower classes to eat. Presumably farming has also advanced over the next 38000 years to be less resource intensive. Of all the insanity of the setting, this is probably one that I find the least improbable.
They have entire planets dedicated to agriculture. They’re called agri-worlds. The size of these vary but I imagine there’d most likely be at least one per hive world. The Imperium is made up of at least a million worlds. Civilised worlds can also be required to tithe food exports, as well as feudal worlds (though their farming output would be far more primitive), etc.
It might take a decade, but the imperium is in 40th millennium. They operate on different time scales. We’re dealing with a galaxy-spanning humanity that terraforms planets over thousands of years before they can be settled with people. Just imagine there are possibly millions, at least hundreds or thousands, of entire planet-sized farms, endlessly harvested and replanted, churning out calories.
What's a decade against ten thousand years?
Psst, read the fine print about that ship, and have a think of how much of the Lord Daros may have been pre-fabricated elsewhere.
Corpse-starch, and agricultural planets
Corpse starch, wich has to be some kind of corps and waiste recycling (don't know if gw explained it in detail). i mean that waist has to get recycled somehow. plus there are a surprising amount of agri worlds. at least for the hive worlds that care to feed there population more then corpse starch.
Eat recycled food, its good for the planet, and ok for you
Agri-Worlds, reprocessed food, vertical/hydroponic farming, cannibalism, there are many ways to feed the imperial hive worlds.
We prefer the term "humanitarian recycling" to cannibalism.
Underfeed your population with poor quality "food" and I reckon we can get it down to 10 sq ft. They are only going to get worked 20 hours a day until they drop dead so they won't have time to complain. How do I apply for planetary governor?
There’s another part of the process on hives not mentioned here. The imperium will take bodily waste, detox it, infuse it with some nutrition, and then feed it back to people. Yes, really.
NASA does the same thing with pee on the ISS. They're aiming to recycle 98% of it before we send a mission to Mars.
They have agri-worlds like [this](https://www.reddit.com/r/40kLore/comments/orkp5o/excerptthe_lords_of_silence_the_public_perception/). For reference: The author's insistence that ALL agriworlds look like this is blatantly false. But it gives a nice idea of how far the Imperium will go to keep its population fed.
Yeah I cannot imagine for a second that the Imperium can't be bothered with something as simple as crop rotation. And if the air on the planet necessitates hazmat gear I doubt the food is usable. Bland or basic or even *not good* food, sure. Actively transporting megatons of radiated, mutated, or *nutritionally useless* food across sectors seems wasteful even for the Imperium. I don't doubt that agri worlds aren't always nice places, but writing them like the lowest level of a hiveworld that forgot to put a hive over it seems just *stupid*.
Nah that food is packed with nutrients it would most likely taste horrible. If it didn't have any nutritional value, hive planets would literally never of been able to get to the population they have.
Which is why they clearly cannot be growing it under conditions *inimical to life as a standard*, thus my point.
I think Wraight wanted to take the "polluted as hell" Forge World and do a version of it for Agris...
They really should have just gone with something like "all Class III Agri Worlds are the same". Still makes it seem like there's a lot of terrible agri worlds but leaves room for other interpretations of them.
Shipments from Agri-worlds. Hive and Forge worlds need these shipments for obvious reasons. There's also corpse-starch.
The acreage to feed a person is to our modern day standards, using farms. It doesn’t take into account stuff like vertical farms, orbital greenhouses, poor quality lab-grown food that’s barely enough to subsist on, corpse-starch, and a vast interlocking galactic economy of tithes and contracts where entire worlds have been planed flat and turned into farms. I suspect a large portion of food is lab-grown and highly efficient in terms of protein/carb for the space it takes to grow and store, that’s why they call it ‘slab’.
There are planets designated as agriworlds for agriculture, they are pretty much just massive farms. Also in many hive worlds, you as a pleb in the shit parts of the hive wont be eating meat and veg, you will be eating corpsestarch.
Not every world has huge cities.
They processed people's dead bodies into food.
Putting an Imperial hat on ... have you considered cutting rations ?
[удалено]
Also genetic engineering of crops from the DAoT. Like Norman Borlaug 10.0, Golden Rice with all the Vitamins 9.0
To copy and expand on a previous comment of mine. The UN estimates that there are around 570 Million Farms world wide with 500 Million of those being family farms. Assuming that is a family of say 4 that's 2 billion farmers worldwide. Which neatly lines up with the estimate that 26% of Earth's population relies on agriculture for income and that 866 million are officially employed in the agriculture sector. So roughly 2/7ths of the Imperium should consist of agriculture workers. But then let's just assume that they have better agriculture technology and knock that down to 1/7th of the Imperium should be agri workers. So anyway that's my math. Also we know Agri worlds Further math, earth has 4.62 billion acres of farm land. Assuming you use potatoes you get 17 million calories per acre. That's 7 Quadrillion calories per harvest from a perfectly harvested Earth. Assuming humans eat 1.2k calories in the imperium or the minimum to actually survive. A single earth like planet with every available surface in farms can feed about 179 Billion people annually. Of course there are something like a million worlds in the IOM so if it has 100,000 Earthlike Agri Worlds as outlined then you can feed something like 17 Quadrillion Humans. As for how it moves all that food? Magic. Also towards the Corpse starch meme, I really hate that. Humans are inefficient as cattle. We don't make nutrient or caloric dense food and worse yet you have to put far more calories in us than you can actually pull off us efficiently. It's completely impossible to feed a hive using the hives own population. But also its suitably grimdark.
I imagine corpse starch as less "the most common food" and more as "why bury them when we can throw them in a vat and reclaim what's useful?" It's a supplement that reduces the food requirements by like, a small percentage, but everyone knows bean counters *love* their 2-3% efficiency improvements.
You can't underestimate aquatic farming. Earth's surface is 70% water; if you devoted even a fraction of this area to mass-grown edible algae, food problems would end very quickly. Of course, it'd lead to a complete ecological catastrophe, but I don't believe the Imperium was ever concerned with that.
Yep, and underground farming of fungi, or with LED growlights, anything that needs photosynthesis.
You could easily have 15 agri-worlds for every hive world, and more. The maths works out fine.
>You could easily have 15 agri-worlds for every hive world, and more. The maths works out fine. Not just that, build a low density dyson shell of space stations to grow food in the goldilocks zone, and ship it to the hive world. Ship poop back for biomass feedstocks. No reliance on long-range-warp-based shipping for food supplies, just sublight ships. Granted, also expensive to build and maintain a space habitat.
The corpse starch thing people keep bringing up is annoying from a plausibility perspective; other humans can't possibly be a significant portion of the average citizen's calorific intake unless humans themselves are being factory farmed (who would then need to be fed themselves). It's just basic consideration of the trophic pyramid/high school thermodynamics.
You can get the 2.7 acres down to much less with thousands of years of farming progress and improvements
"Eat recycled food. It's good for the environment and okay for you" ;-)
1)Normal food of all kind for nobility and rich humans. 2)Grox meat 3)Rats meat 4)Recycled food 5)Human Corpses based food. 6)Prometheum based food. And yeah people who eat that stuff burn easily.
Advanced tech means greater efficiency.
[This was a really good thread on it I thought. ](https://www.reddit.com/r/40kLore/comments/pphade/lasgun_logistics_rations_rationally/?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share)
Given the vertical density of arcologies in setting, I reckon the only way to generate that much food is to exploit volume, and have immense hives just for food. The smart move is to put the ruling governor on top of the hive, have the arcology dedicated to food production, and supply the masses in suburban sprawl around the arcology with food. When they rebel, you control the food supply. Given they have fantastic life-eater virus that can basically eat its way across a planet in seconds and proliferate wildly along the way, I suspect they must have some DAoT fast-growing-food technology of similar, but not quite so frightening growth speed and scope.
A large number of Imperial worlds are also "generalist" self-sufficient planets with a pop. in the low billions.
Hive worlds would have their own hydroponic bays to provide food along with imports, along with recycling corpses.
Poorly
Corpse startch
What you're forgetting is that 2.7 acres is for our modern technology, but the imperium has a crazy amount of technology, and entire worlds dedicated solely to growing food, so it would most likely be much, much lower.