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. ^^

[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

[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.

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 [...]