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Message: <blockquote data-quote="LordBP" data-source="post: 9023980" data-attributes="member: 7041678">I would think the grain silos/granaries would be located in towns/Waterdeep, so they could be defended.  You would definitely want a lot of grain in Waterdeep itself in case of siege.  Goldenfields is an interesting subject as it was around 20-30 sq miles (12,800-19,200 acres).  If you go with the what you have for wheat (around 1 million calories per acre or 600 lbs per acre) and assume the entire acreage can be used for crops, then it could support 12,800-19,200 people.  Now if you say that it could produce the same as the average we can today (around 15 million calories per acre (for corn/potatoes) or 9,000 lbs per acre ), then it could support 192,000-288,000 people for an entire year.  Since Goldenfields is right by the river, it should be using it for the transport of the grain/food downstream to either Zundbridge (which doesn't have the dock space at all) or Waterdeep directly as it would be much faster and much cheaper than sending it via wagon (especially since most wagons would only take 1-2 tons at a time, so you would need around 33,398 to 66,795 wagon trips to supply the 366,000 average for Waterdeep's population).Yeah, I actually started down the path of doing the numbers.  The biggest issue is if we go with the Middle Ages as the standard, all the land around the village wasn't used for fields.  A very small amount was actually used for fields and usually 1/4 to 1/3 was laying fallow at any given time.  A village would need a large amount of forest for firewood, building materials, tool materials, etc.  Also, they would have a large common meadow where all the villagers could graze their animals (house cows, pigs, sheep, goats, etc).  The picture below even has a water mill that would be used to grind the wheat/rye into flour for use inn baking (water power is the way you want to go as hand grinding is possible, but very time consuming especially if you are baking for an entire village).  From the below picture, you are probably going to have less than 1/8 of the total acreage assigned to the village actually plowed under for row crops.<img src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f5/Three_Field_System.svg" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " data-size="" style="" />For the calories in wheat, a pound of wheat contains around 1,551 calories which would be about half of what an average person would need in the Middle Ages (need at least 3,000 calories if you are doing manual labor which most if not all people of the time period would be doing).  I only used the grain/bread as half of the calories per day as that was pretty normal for the Middle Ages (other half was usually root vegetables, meat (pork mainly), eggs, milk, cheese, butter).</blockquote>

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