District Nine

[kawuli]

So today I was harvesting maize (corn) by hand in 95-degree (35-sensible-degree) heat. For my job this counts as a good day, but only because I don't have to do it every day.

Harvesting maize does not require my full attention, so I started thinking about Hunger Games things,like you do when you're avoiding thinking about stressful things (oh, is that just me?). And because of harvesting maize, I was thinking about District 9.

I don't think many people actually think about District 9, just like not that many people think about, say, Nebraska, or South Dakota, or Manitoba on any given day, but I think it could actually be fascinating.

No really, hear me out.

Agriculture in the Great Plains is already super mechanized, there are tractors and combines that are the size of small houses and harvest thousands of acres in a day. Panem has a problem with low population, so I'm pretty sure they've got very good at producing a lot of food with a few people and some very sophisticated machines (this is where, earlier today, I wondered if Panem has sattellites generally and GPS in particular, which is relevant but not critical to this agro-tech ramble).

Which means that District 9 probably has a few scattered crop-production centers with something like 10 people responsible for growing hundreds of square miles/kilometers of row crops, probably with zones for various (rotations of) cereals/legume field crops and some seed-production and research areas (with visiting scientists/geneticists from 3). If those have North-South gradients (which is likely), the settlements might actually move as planting/harvest season shifts from south to north (this is a thing that happens now with custom combine crews). Maybe in the winter they all come to a central town to work. Central town probably looks more like Six than Eleven (where they produce horticultural crops that require a lot more manual labor). No really: equipment maintenance, grain mills, ethanol plants, lots of trains bringing grain from all the far flung outposts. There's probably fertilizer storage (hey, Rebellion, want some ammonium nitrate?). Nine is probably a huge consumer of (expensive, relatively scarce) diesel fuel, unless someone has invented a solar-powered combine (I doubt it).

What I'm saying is that this is actually a much more interesting district than "Grain" seems to indicate and someday I will maybe actually write something about it. But in the meantime, maybe someone else wants to think about a lonely combine driver in the wilds of Manitoba just waiting for harvest to be over so she can go hang out in the booming metropolis in Des Moines (or wherever) for the winter working in a tesserae packing plant or an ethanol refinery and talking to more than like 6 other people. Or not, and I'll just keep this here as a brain-dump for later.

Comments

[lorata.livejournal.com]

I'm too tired for thinky thoughts but the book actually does say that Nine is actually heavily urbanized because so much of the district is devoted to the actual refining of grain into other things, not the growing of it, so yeah, exactly.

I grew up near an ethanol plant, so my headcanon for Nine is that the cities always smell like toast. ^^

[penfold-x.livejournal.com]

It does? That wasn't in one of the tie-ins? Augh, I wish I had the ebooks. Can you by any chance find this??

It totally makes sense to me, FWIW, that there's a lot of plants in Nine to do that refining, since there's no obvious other place in Panem that would do that (surely the bakeries in the Capitol don't work from raw grain?).

[kawuli.livejournal.com]

Here's a relevant bit from Ch5 of CF (which made me remember that I wish we'd gotten to see more about the districts on tour):

"We descend the steps and are sucked into what becomes an indistinguishable round of dinners, ceremonies, and train rides. Each day it's the same. Wake up. Get dressed. Ride through cheering crowds. Listen to a speech in our honor. Give a thank-you speech in return, but only the one the Capitol gave us, never any personal additions now. Sometimes a brief tour: a glimpse of the sea in one district, towering forests in another, ugly factories, fields of wheat, stinking refineries. Dress in evening clothes. Attend dinner. Train."

I couldn't find anything more specific...but maybe it exists somewhere?

[penfold-x.livejournal.com]

FWIW, I read that as references to separate districts, but I think that the grain processing still does have to take place in Nine, because I can't think of where else it would be. :/

[lorata.livejournal.com]

okay i'm back so your poor lonely combine driver makes me think of my teacher in 7th grade who talked about the Alaskan border, and how the border guard was standing in the road and WAVING HIS ARMS and when my teacher showed up he was like omg would you stay for dinner omg could we get drinks omg I have not seen another human being in two weeks PLEASE CAN WE JUST LIKE PLAY CHARADES OR SOMETHING and now I have the giggles

[kawuli.livejournal.com]

That is the best story. I love that story. Now I'm giggling too.

And yeah, the actual growing of grain ALREADY takes almost no people so I'm guessing in Future Panem it's a very lonely job. Making traveling through Nine pretty creepy. I guess I've also seen where people don't have 9 growing the grain, only processing, but that's no fun either. Giant semi-autonomous terrifying farm equipment should totally exist, too.

[penfold-x.livejournal.com]

Maybe in the winter they all come to a central town to work. Central town probably looks more like Six than Eleven (where they produce horticultural crops that require a lot more manual labor). No really: equipment maintenance, grain mills, ethanol plants, lots of trains bringing grain from all the far flung outposts.

Oh, yes, this totally makes sense to me. There's the issue of who else would do all this refining and packaging, if not in Nine (like those other logistics issues we were laughing over this evening), plus the fact that farming is really intense for a few months/half of the year, but the other parts are probably full of a lot of down time.

I could see it go a couple of ways, but I tend to think you're right in that if they have the tech, the Capitol will want to use the modern mechanized systems for farming. In some places it does seem like the Capitol willfully lets some of the population struggle along with less technology than they could have to do their job (most especially Twelve), and in some places there probably aren't a lot of great alternatives (eg, I think some fruit and vegetable farming in the US is still highly labor intensive because there haven't been many recent innovations in harvesting, which is harder to do given the delicate nature of many of these crops, so I see Eleven as having a very large population). But letting any land go fallow, or paying out a lot of extra tessare for a massive number of grain farmers does seem pointless.

[kawuli.livejournal.com]

Yeah, in 12 they're clearly not interested in increasing efficiency--which makes me wonder how much coal they actually use, since you'd think if it was truly critical you'd worry a little more about getting it out efficiently. And I agree the stuff in Eleven is the more labor-intensive horticultural crops, which will stay more labor intensive--you can't just throw strawberries in a truck like you can with grains. But then, I think the current estimate is that one corn farmer in Iowa produces enough calories to feed 125 people, and it'd be straightforward to increase that, just get bigger equipment.

Incidentally, (CAUTION: HUGE GEOGRAPHY TANGENT) the corn belt now is determined mostly by soil types, which won't change with the "catastrophes" and climate, which would, but can be to some extent dealt with by plant breeders. Which is why in my vague Panem map D9 includes most of Illinois, Iowa Missouri, up into southern Wisconsin and Minnesota. I put D10 southwest of that, in the drier part of the great plains with the border passing through Nebraska and Kansas, and D10 can also have Oklahoma and Texas just for kicks.....then if I keep D8 in Minneapolis as in your map you can have an almost sensible progression starting from 12, going south to 11, then west to 10, then north to 9 and then 8 and 7, if "central 7" is somewhere in northern Ontario (which works with forest cover maps--the other obvious option would be the Pacific NW which screws this up). Then you can duck back down to where I put 6 (central town around Chicago, with iron-mining outposts in the UP of Michigan and smelting occurring somewhere in lower MI)--and then it all gets wonky because 5-4-3-2-1 do not go in sensible order, but hey, it's not too bad.

Damn. I should probably draw this.

[penfold-x.livejournal.com]

which makes me wonder how much coal they actually use, since you'd think if it was truly critical you'd worry a little more about getting it out efficiently

Yes! FWIW, I think that almost nothing in the Capitol runs on coal--their electricity needs are enormous, and I just don't see 8,000 people in Twelve being able to support that (though I have no real capacity to analyze that). I'm guessing that the Capitol uses electricity generated from Five. OTOH, I think the power lines out to the outlying districts could be dodgy (there's a lot of distance to cover between the Rockies and Appalachia/Atlanta), so perhaps the coal is used predominantly by 9-12, in rudimentary local power plants, plus perhaps actually in homes, as an alternative to wood stove heat where there aren't a lot of trees? If the power is as dodgy in Nine/Ten/Eleven as is described by Katniss for Twelve, I can see a need to use coal in homes during the winter (well, maybe not in Eleven).

Damn. I should probably draw this.

YES YOU SHOULD

[kawuli.livejournal.com]

Yes on the power generation/transmission thing: there's no way all of Panem runs off of power lines from one district, you would lose waaaay too much in transmission. So coal would help solve that. Plus you need some for making steel. Then whatever happens in D5 is mostly for the inner districts, which is more feasible.

I blame you for the absolutely ridiculous post i just made on Panem geography and etc. Just FYI.

[penfold-x.livejournal.com]

I blame credit you for the absolutely ridiculous post i just made on Panem geography and etc. Just FYI.

FTFY

What's the Population of Panem?

[livejournal.livejournal.com]

User penfold_x referenced to your post from What's the Population of Panem? (http://penfold-x.livejournal.com/109758.html) saying: [...] day equivalent: Evanston (IL), Andorra Nine: 50,000 has been educating me about modern farming [...]