But what we're talking about is how much a population dedicated to growing food can load onto starships and send off to another world.
Do we need that many people for that anyways? How many longshoremen, teamsters and warehouse/grain elevator/stockade workers do you really need to maintain an established, mid-tech bulk shipping network? The process is already pretty automated at current Earth tech levels.
And many of those people will be starport personnel. I honestly forget: do they count as planetary population? Or is that one of those infamous Traveller debate points that never gets solved?
That 'directly involved' is one slippery concept. What about those indirectly involved? Like the factory workers that make agricultural machinery and the miners that dig out ore to melt into metal to make the machinery out of? Yoiu need to count them too.
Not quite so slippery, as we're talking about US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) data. According to them, it doesn't matter what you build in that factory: if it's a factory, you're a factory worker (or rather, in a 'production occupation'). Agricultural workers do, on the other hand, include the likes of fishermen, trappers, forest rangers, and loggers -- at least according to the BLS.
Here is a link to the most current raw data, and the current labor definitions that go with it:
http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat09.htm
http://www.bls.gov/cps/cenocc.pdf
There is one previous statistical error I made, however: it turns out the 'less than 1% in agriculture' refers simply to those in the US labor force, rather than the entire US population. This is a considerably lower number than I previously understood. According to the raw data (above), barely more than a million Americans are currently classified as
bona fide agriculturalists -- which in this case also includes loggers, conservation workers, et al.
Does 'the average American farmer' include his family as well?
As a direct benefit of his production? Not really. His product goes right to the open market, where the end result ultimately does get eaten by his family, but only inasmuch as they are American consumers too. A certain amount of homemade food does make it to their tables, of course, but that's 'invisible' and doesn't really make its way into the stats. People haven't really kept track of things like that since the old Victory Garden days of WWII.
But you still need people to build the machines.
By my book you could just as easily import the machinery from offworld. Either individuals, co-ops or combines could make the deals, or the world itself could arrange reciprocal arrangements with its more developed neighbors as a matter of economic policy.
Of course, a more isolated or isolationist agricultural world wouldn't be able to make such arrangements. But they're also much less likely to have the interest in nor the opportunity to be feeding billions of people.
Men without families? Men who would be part of the census figure?
Inasmuch as those family members are agricultural producers, no. My understanding is that about half of all migrant workers are US citizens. Even so, the US census does make an effort to count everyone involved (it's a census, not a citizenship tally) -- although, of course, the undocumented workers are considerably more difficult to nail down precisely.
And those people are often used because they're cheaper than automation, not because automation isn't available. A world with no population surplus could invest in automation and pass the cost along to its customers. Or they could simply recruit
gastarbeiter to coffinjump over for seasonal, under-the-table work. Do people that purposely avoid being counted show up on the UWP? Or, since they're seasonal itinerants, wouldn't they be just as likely to be counted as part of their homeworld's UWP?
I don't doubt it. I just think that they should be counted. If one agricultural worker can produce food for 155 people (and I have to back down on that part, I find), one agricultural worker and his family can produce food for, what, one quarter of that per family member?
That
would make sense, based on the notion of a farm economy as a community of small to modest-sized freeholds forming a collective market together. But this is not the case, at least in TL8 USA. While the vast majority of farms are still smallish family affairs, they really don't matter as much, from an economic perspective. It's the huge farming operations that make an impact, production-wise: large-scale operations only account for 12% of US farms by number, but make up for 84% of the agricultural output by volume.
In those industrial farming operations, family members are going to be far outnumbered by regular employees. What a family consumes or eats for itself is going to be a drop in the ocean compared to what that farm produces.
Even if an agricultural worker can produce food enough for 155 people, a population of 10 million people do not contain anywhere near 10 million agricultural workers.
True, but you're going to have a considerably higher percentage of the workforce involved in agriculture, so even a 10 million population Ag world is likely to have millions of people involved in food production.
It also occurs to me that, at least after a certain tech level, the limiting production factors are not population, but arable acreage, potential per acre crop yield, and availability of markets. The US could certainly produce much more food than it does right now, for example, even at current acreages and worker numbers, but there's simply no money in it for them to do so. Or at least it's not worth the extra investment. And US universities are constantly investing in new ways of increasing crop yields, often with dramatic results.
Similarly, any typical T-Prime world has billions of arable acres available for production, regardless of how many people are on it. You could fill that up shore-to-shore with gigantic monoculture farming operations and still have a global population just in the low millions. This is exactly the kind of thing, after all, that responds very well to economies of scale.
I figure that's the most likely ultimate development for any agricultural world within easy jump distance of a rich or high population system. Unless those local agworlders have racial, ethical or cultural reasons to avoid this. Agricultural worlds run as breadbasket colonies of high population worlds are almost certainly going to be run this way.
) who uses 30-40 year old equipment. They are way in excess of 1:155.
