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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Rothe" data-source="post: 2802393" data-attributes="member: 39813">This sounds reasonable assuming good crop storage.  Here's why, with some rounding on the numbers to make the calculation easy.  40 sq. miles = 25,600 acres.  I'll round down to 25,000 acres to make it a nice 1 acre per person.  Let's let the people eat well roughly 2,000 calorie diet.  1kg grain = 2,000 cal.  Thus, each acres needs to yield 365 kg.  Numbers are generally available by volume.  1 cubic meter of grain weighs about 750 kg, or 0.75 kg per liter.  Thus, 365 kg grain = 487 liters.  Yields of grain can vary.  Wheat is much lower than say rye and barley.  A yield, for example, of rye/barley of 500 liters an acre is pretty conservative (700 liters might be better).  Thus, it appears that 40 square miles could readily provide enough grain to feed 25,000 people.  The grain will mostly be rye/barley/millet/spelt etc. and not wheat.  This accords nicely with the medieval diet.I have ignored the effects of exhausting the land and loss due to crop storage.  Wheat, besides having nutritional advantages, was often preferred because it could be made into white flour.  White flour keeps far better than whole wheat flour.A note on "Magical Medieval Society."  Population density numbers contain many more variables than pure crop yield.  A good example of this is to compare the size of medieval cities to those of the Roman Empire.  Using medieval data a city the size of Rome (1 million, some say up to 2 million) wouldn't be possible.  Yet we know it was and it lasted for centuries.  It sounds like your lands are rich, well supplied with water, use iron ploughs (with moldboard? and/or horses?), possessing a fine climate and the people practice crop rotation.  Other things being equal, I'd suspect your population densities to be greater than the historical ones found in medieval Europe.If you are interested in some more information, see what you can find on the Buster Ancient Farm Project.  This was an actual experiment conducted to explore the yields of iron age farms in Britian.Finally, to get an</blockquote>

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