Sweetbreads....

saber964 wrote:

WinterBurn wrote:I'm glad to see the amount of discussion here. I feel less nitpicky As noted, sweetbreads plausibly work as a fattening food, if not as well as sweetmeats.

Interesting point about the meat diet, though I doubt that it necessarily applies to Safehold.

Yes and no, Remember they can't keep meat long term with little or no refrigeration. The only real preservation methods for meat at Safeholds level of tech is probably smoking, pickling, drying and salting.

You are forgetting they have canning. So Spam is probably still around.

Remember, for canning all you need is a pressure cooker, which they have.

Might be a good idea to avoid lead solder for seams, but I suspect that is covered in the Writ.

WinterBurn wrote:I'm glad to see the amount of discussion here. I feel less nitpicky As noted, sweetbreads plausibly work as a fattening food, if not as well as sweetmeats.
Interesting point about the meat diet, though I doubt that it necessarily applies to Safehold.

Meat is resource intensive and low yield, so you either need a lot of grass (which equals land, that in a terraformed environment is restricted) or you need to divert labor and grain that could be feeding people to feeding livestock. Until this century and the advent of mechanization in agriculture the only people eating meat regularly were the very rich or hunters (and I am not entirely sure about the digestibility of the local wild life.) The poor or middle classes would have only had such meat as their waste would support - chickens, duck and possibly pigs and in winter the male and un-feedable female offspring of their milking and wool herds. The vast herds of beef cattle we run wouldn't have room as the un-terraformed areas wouldn't support them (and if you need to manually clear land you know every inch costs).
The comparable era on Earth would be the late 1700's or mid 1800's on the frontiers of the America's, Africa, Siberia or Australia. An average farmer would only have a few cows, and killing one for meat (unless it was already sick) would be like emptying your bank account.

yeap I remember Sweetbreads, Freezing Workers morning and afternoon tea snack. Throw them in a Frying pan with butter and onions a dash of garlic. MMMMMMM Yumy hehehe LOL ours were usually Lamb. Gee my spelling really bad and the gramma doesn't get any better

Meat is resource intensive and low yield, so you either need a lot of grass (which equals land, that in a terraformed environment is restricted) or you need to divert labor and grain that could be feeding people to feeding livestock.

Land unsuitable for crops are quite serviceable for livestock use. Livestock can also be turned out on croplands after harvesting to clean up anything lost during the harvesting process. So used correctly livestock will widen a communities resource base.

Also,The first land was terraformed by Shan Wei's crews using Federation equipment. I cannot comprehend a reason that wouldn't have terraformed sufficient land for crop, livestock with a sufficient buffer for immediate population growth. Since crops require better quality land, it is probable that livestock can be fed on land that hasn't been sufficiently terraformed to be usable for crops.

The comparable era on Earth would be the late 1700's or mid 1800's on the frontiers of the America's, Africa, Siberia or Australia. An average farmer would only have a few cows, and killing one for meat (unless it was already sick) would be like emptying your bank account.

Therefore the cattle barons of the American west couldn't possible exist. Except they not only existed, they dominated the economy of the American west at that time by making what at the time were fortunes by grazing cattle and raising horses.

Easternmystic wrote:

Meat is resource intensive and low yield, so you either need a lot of grass (which equals land, that in a terraformed environment is restricted) or you need to divert labor and grain that could be feeding people to feeding livestock.

Land unsuitable for crops are quite serviceable for livestock use. Livestock can also be turned out on croplands after harvesting to clean up anything lost during the harvesting process. So used correctly livestock will widen a communities resource base.

Also,The first land was terraformed by Shan Wei's crews using Federation equipment. I cannot comprehend a reason that wouldn't have terraformed sufficient land for crop, livestock with a sufficient buffer for immediate population growth. Since crops require better quality land, it is probable that livestock can be fed on land that hasn't been sufficiently terraformed to be usable for crops.

The comparable era on Earth would be the late 1700's or mid 1800's on the frontiers of the America's, Africa, Siberia or Australia. An average farmer would only have a few cows, and killing one for meat (unless it was already sick) would be like emptying your bank account.

Therefore the cattle barons of the American west couldn't possible exist. Except they not only existed, they dominated the economy of the American west at that time by making what at the time were fortunes by grazing cattle and raising horses.

However on Earth the cattle barons were running cattle on buffalo grass - Safehold's native plants are toxic to terrestrial herbivores. We also have textev that the terraforming process was massively incomplete - significant ongoing manual labor was needed to expand the farmed areas as the population grew. Feeding people has priority over feeding livestock. A better comparison would be the areas of the world where forests had to be cleared to make way for farms - and the massive meat trade we now see around the world was built on refrigeration and rail roads - neither of which is present on Safehold to date.

AirTech wrote:However on Earth the cattle barons were running cattle on buffalo grass - Safehold's native plants are toxic to terrestrial herbivores. We also have textev that the terraforming process was massively incomplete - significant ongoing manual labor was needed to expand the farmed areas as the population grew.

Off Armageddon Reef
eARC wrote:It was a guide that deliberately falsified the basis for many of the lessons it taught and the religious laws it handed down, but it had provided the basic framework under which humanity had expanded from its initial enclaves on this planet. The Book of Sondheim dealt with agronomy and farming, including, especially, the necessary steps to prepare Safehold's soil for the essential terrestrial plants humanity required. The Book of Truscott did the same thing for animal husbandry—for native Safeholdian species, as well as imports from Earth.

We aren't given much textev about just how that "significant ongoing manual labor" is applied. I suspect that sowing grass or other terrestrial ground cover to condition the soil to be conducive to higher-order terrestrial plants would be a logical first step.

The logical second step is to use that grass for grazing terrestrial animals so their feces and urine will add to the conditioning of the soil.

Once the soil is conditioned by terrestrial grasses and animal wastes, it can be used for more complex crops and the animals can be moved on to another patch to be terraformed by natural processes.

AirTech wrote:However on Earth the cattle barons were running cattle on buffalo grass - Safehold's native plants are toxic to terrestrial herbivores. We also have textev that the terraforming process was massively incomplete - significant ongoing manual labor was needed to expand the farmed areas as the population grew. Feeding people has priority over feeding livestock. A better comparison would be the areas of the world where forests had to be cleared to make way for farms - and the massive meat trade we now see around the world was built on refrigeration and rail roads - neither of which is present on Safehold to date.

"as the population grew" Which would mean at the earliest, when the first generation reached adulthood. That would be 16 to 20 years after landing on Safehold.

Also, the process of terraforming is extremely unlikely to be instantaneous. In the transition between being natural Safehold vegetation and being suitable for growing crops It makes sense to use the land for raising livestock.

Also, who ever said anything about a global meat trade?

To put it bluntly, Livestock can be raised on land that can't be used for anything else. I have given a plausible example of the type of land that could be available on Safehold as the settlers cleared new land that could be used for livestock but not for crops. Which you have ignored in favor of a strawman argument.

Maybe he meant SHORTbreads (cookies)?

Given that Safehold agriculture and terraforming explicitly hinges on gene-modded species, it may be erroneous and even presumptious to base one's assumptions on historical Terran models.

Take, for example, pork. Pigs are much more prolific than cattle, and produce significantly more meat for a given amount of feed - much (if not most or even all) of which can consist of byproducts and/or waste. Chickens are even more efficient in that they produce dozens or even hundreds more offspring and utilize feed even more effectively - and both species can be largely self-sufficient (though in the case of chickens at least some protection might be needed. It is certainly not difficult for me to imagine a scenario where these animals, properly modified, could be the linchpins of a terraforming scheme. IIRC, it has been said that pigs were part of what might be termed a "Euroforming" scheme in our own history, where they were seeded on islands by sailors exploring the New World - though perhaps these colonies were merely escapees from settlers who did not thrive.

Applying the same science of genetic modification to cattle to increase efficiency, output and aid terraforming would seem a logical step as well. Whether or not it would be trivially easy to allow them to ingest native Safeholdian fodder is not for me to say but given the nature of the turn-key environment Langhorne and the Archangels seem to have striven to impart to the world it doesn't seem like a stretch to imagine. Free-range cattle terraformig ranches a la the old West seem to me to be at least plausible.

Thus my questioning as to whether certain arguments are necessarily applicable to Safehold.

..and none of which addresses my initial ponderment - though short of an ex-cathedra proclamation it seems best to rely on the text

Thanks all for an interesting discussion thus far.