@lordabdul commented recently on the lack of background economics, especially around trade, for Dragon Pass and for Glorantha more generally. This... is not that. What this is is an examination of Sartarite clans to see what we can determine about their land use, productivity, and so on, and from there potentially construct a kind of grain-and-meat-and-flax economy that can be extended further.
Let us begin with an archetypal Sartarite clan, of 1200 people. 600 are children, 500 are adults participating in agricultural production, and 100 are adults outside of production (elderly, disabled, ritually proscribed). This clan has 200 hides of land. This clan, for the demands of thought experiments, grows nothing but barley on that land. We will assume that the hides are placed and sized so that, ranging in size from 80-120 acres of cropland, they manage to produce a consistent crop for a given hide size. We will also assume that the median productivity of the barley, beyond pure reproduction, is seven bushels per acre. So a hide will produce 700 bushels of barley in a year, all else being equal.
Let us now incorporate the Harvest roll from Runequest Glorantha. In a famine year, production is 40% of normal, while a bad harvest is 70%, a good harvest is 130%, and a superlative harvest is 175% of normal. So production per hide ranges from 280 bushels to 1225 bushels per year. I will ignore the Income roll for the moment, but if we interpreted it as representing the direct efforts of the PC to produce more grain , then we could have a production ranging from 0 to 2450 bushels of barley per hide! Which is why I am ignoring it, this will already be swingy enough.
A bushel is 27 kilograms. So this amounts to between 7560 kg and 30,375 kg of barley per hide per year. The clan as a whole, with 200 hides, will produce between 1,512,000 and 6,075,000 kg of barley annually, or between 1.5 and 6.1 kilotonnes of barley per year.
How many calories do people need per day? The typical daily recommended value is 2000-2500 kilocalories (or Calories), if you're in the United States. But that is for people who are overwhelmingly not engaged in heavier physical activity, which can demand up to 4000+ calories per day. Let us set the median as 3500 kilocalories per day, which applies to all 1200 inhabitants. Thus, the clan requires 4,200,000 kilocalories per day for everyone to be nourished.
Barley has a caloric value of 1230 kilocalories per kilogram. So we have between 1.9 billion kilocalories (1.9 teracalories) and 7.5 billion kilocalories (7.5 teracalories) produced annually in barley. Let us divide this by the 294-day year. There are thus between 6,500,000 and 25,510,000 kilocalories available per day to the clan. There are 1200 people in the clan. Every day, they have between 5400 and 21250 kilocalories available per person to eat. Thus, there is a caloric surplus per person between 1900 kilocalories and 17750 kilocalories, every day.
Or, to convert things back into bushels, between 20,286 and 188,454 bushels of barley are available for storage or export each year. Thus, in a famine year, this clan eats 64% of its total production, leaving 36% for export or storage, and in a good year, this clan eats 23% of its total production, leaving 77% for export or storage.
Or, to put it more simply, in a famine year, this clan supports itself, and provides food for 650 other people. In a bumper crop year, this clan supports itself and provides food for 6100 other people.
On average, such a clan will produce 3.8 kilotonnes of barley every year, equivalent to 4.7 teracalories, which works out to 15.8 gigacalories per day, which works out to 13,100 kilocalories per person per day, which works out to 9600 kilocalories of surplus per person per day, 7.9 kg of barley per person per day, 2,313 kg per person per year, 2.8 kilotonnes of barley in surplus per year. 102,800 bushels of barley in surplus, per year. 73% of the crop is surplus.
What, then, is the value of barley in this scenario? We know that the annual income from a hide is, on average, 80 lunars. As such, with 700 bushels of barley, each lunar buys 8.75 bushels of barley. Each clack buys 0.875 bushels, or 23.5 kg, and each bolg buys 2.4 kg of barley. You could support 8 people on a clack a day.
Obviously, this clan does not exist, because it boggles the mind to imagine. But after exploring this alley, we have discovered the possibility of a new route- now that we know how much the clan eats, we can reason backwards. Which will be the subject of the next post, as this one is already long enough.