A Peasant Farm is a farm building in Empire: Total War that can be built on a farmland site. Its equivalent is the Rice Paddy.
Description[]
The basis of all agriculture is the humble peasant, laboring in the field to bring in his master's crop, or to keep his master's animals alive.
Day-to-day life for a peasant farmer has barely changed in a thousand years. It is a short, hard life of abject poverty and backbreaking labor. He can expect nothing better than to work and die in the same village, tilling the same fields, his life bounded by the same horizon. Peasant farms are not terribly efficient: the landowners have little interest beyond their rents and tithes. The problem for them is that peasant economies are, by their very nature, cash poor and most income is in kind, and there is a limit to where you can spend a goat!
Historically, life for a peasant was pretty much the same all over the world: work from dawn to dusk. In Russia, the peasants were serfs tied to the land and the property of the landowner as much as any cow or goat. In India, peasants were a caste locked into their social position by hallowed custom. The system eventually broke down in Western Europe thanks to industrialization needing a constant supply of workers and changes in land usage.
Rice Paddy Description[]
Rice is a staple foodstuff for many people, and produces the best crops when grown in a system of flooded fields.
Paddy fields require back-breaking labor by farmers to plant, maintain and harvest the rice crops. Flooded fields do not readily lend themselves to any kind of labor-saving devices; and all domesticated draft animals (other than the water buffalo) suffer when used to cultivate rice paddies. A large amount of manual labor is also required to maintain the elaborate system of waterways and dykes needed to keep fields flooded to the right depth. Too much water will ruin a rice crop just as surely as too little. All of this needs manual labor, a class of peasants to work the land constantly.
Historically, rice is one of the oldest cultivated crops; no one is quite sure when and where it was first domesticated. Humans have domesticated wild rice streams more than once in separate parts of the world, including dry field variants that grow like other cereals. Rice remains one of the vital food crops of the world.
Cost[]
- Level 0
- 1 Turn to Build
- 300 Coin
Abilities[]
- 1 Turn to Build
- +0.3% to Population Growth
- Reduces the chance of food shortages
- +X Coins to Region Wealth (Depends on Yield of Farming Region)
- Enables research of Common Land Enclosures, Improved Animal Husbandry
- Enables Tenanted Farms
.png "Peasant Farms (Sheep).png (41 KB)")
.png "Peasant Farms (Wheat).png (50 KB)")
