@Maxperson you're still leaping to extremes & into "that thing doesn't work that way" to preserve bad worldbuilding of the plot armor supported halfling monoculture.
The scale & lackadaisical effort you are giving to halfling
farmers when it comes to selling their crops implies oe or more of a few things to keep from developing roads & all of them are problematic
- You are describing a hobbyist gardener who can afford to "take some stuff and get what you need for good eats." & live off something else procured by the servants in the background while such an important person is otherwise doing important things.
- This is just not reasonable as nothing suggests that halflings live like that sort of nobility
- You are suggesting that plants will magically grow what you need in the yields you want when you want them ready
- This... plants don't work that way even with druidcraft & the plant growth spell. If plants did work that way it would result in a world with an indescribably bizarre economy.
- You are suggesting that crops will fruit all year long & can be left on the vine/stalk/tree/whatever until you are ready to pick them.
- Some crops* will indeed fruit most of the year in some climates but largely it is a slowprocess that depends on when they are planted & other factors the farmer only has so much control over. Crops not harvested within a rather short window will rot on the vine or go to seed & the market price of rotten produce/grain is generally rather low even in times of famine.
- * such as many root vegetables & green leafy vegetables where you eat the leaves
- You are suggesting that whatever crops halflings grow can simply be thrown into storage indefinitely & kept both free from pests as well as in a sellable state & simply pull them from the shelf so they can bring just the right amount to another town for trade.
- This is a difficult task even with modern methods today & there is certainly nothing to suggest that the phb halfling monoculture has this level of advancement.
Intentionally or not, whatever the intended implication is, you have a serious problem being created to protect another serious problem.
Let's not. Specific beats general and we know from the Halfling lore that they don't.
Then offhand I'd say that were I Halflings that love food, I'd grow some pepper. Or since, you know, orchards can have some mulberry trees and silkworms, bring silk to trade. Or, since you know, Halflings trading and not generally selling is part of the lore, bring cooks tools, fine clothes, etc. to trade.
This might be a language barrier thing but the spice pepper (
Piper nigrum) & the fruit from
Genus Capsicum known as peppers are two very different things with different needs from many crops. You can't grow those in the same place as say wheat barley or hops. & the amount of water needed for something like peppercorn makes them difficult to grow alongside many other crops without modern irrigation. You can see this first hand today by going around the grocery store produce to see what countries the fruits & vegetables came from.
The silkworm, like the coffee bean, is a product that is very region specific where merchants & nobles spent fortunes in bribes & political favors attempting to transport the worm/plant back home in hopes of developing the ability to produce silk & coffee locally to avoid the expensive trade route. Even today with modern knowledge this is a difficult thing to do unless the climate is jut close enough to perfect in enough aspects for the worm & tree in the case of silk or for the coffee bean itself to develop right in the case of coffee.
If silk, coffee, or even spices like pepper were on the table as a crop/trade good for halflings they would be displaced by merchants offering money or merchants hiring armed forces willing to do dirty deeds to some less valuable area to make room for productive farmers & silk producers.
If the halflings
were productive farmers who produced crops in volumes like a farmer or valuable tradegoods like people who make a living producing them we again run into the merchant problem. An individual farmer not living in town might need to bring their crop of whatever to town after harvest, but like the blacksmith there would be a merchant with ties to other merchants who then buys most or all of that crop a a reasonable price & brings it down a
road in a cart or wagon to a larger town or even port city where it can be sold by a trade cartel of some sort.
Bringing wheat would be stupid, since you know, they don't go to town to sell, but to TRADE and who is going to want 200 pounds of wheat? The lore says that they make a lot of goods themselves, so trading some of those would be much more cost efficient when trading for something like pepper................which of course they can just grow anyway.
A merchant who specializes in distribution would want two hundred pounds of wheat, in fact said merchant probably wants two thousand pounds of wheat from the farmer & still more from other farmers. That merchant wants so much wheat because he's got a contract with various general stores in various towns & cities to supply them with hundreds of pounds of wheat hundreds of pounds of flour & hundreds of pounds of other stuff sent across
roads.
Still no. Much better things to trade for that ore. 8 pounds of traveler's clothing made by Phyllis Buttercorn and a sprig of Mistletoe that little Will Dumpling found will trade for 10 pounds of iron.
That goes back to the fact that things take time to produce and aren't going to be ready just when you need them. A store doesn't need two 4 pound "clothes, traveler's" from bob the halfling farmer because there is another merchant already contracted to bring him an entire crate of them along with a bunch of other stuff that was ordered when the next shipment arrives.
Also you are confusing the redeemable price of trade goods with the redeemable price of specific things. There's a reason why weapons armor & "adventuring gear" where those clothes are found typically sells at ten to fifty percent below market price. By your own description of trade habits this farmer isn't a particularly noteworthy customer or even supplier that would make the shop these "clothes, traveler's" might get sold to willing to give a little better price on purchasing
"What if Phyllis Buttercorn makes her living making clothing?" In that case her
profession is "seamstress" just as Bob farmer's profession is farmer and she doesn't really need to give them to bob the farmer because mike the merchant is coming next month to get a whole crate of them that he intends to buy with coin she can use to buy food & other goods from mike or some other merchant with a local shop. It might be she only works part time & mike merchant is only getting that crate of clothing because he's also going to be there in town to get a bunch of other locally produced goods to bring elsewhere over a
road but she's still a seamstress who is only going to buy bob so much salt pepper & ale/spirits before telling him the
story of the ant and the grashopper
Mule carry plenty, because not bringing wheat.
Wheat doesn't magically get transmuted into clothes because you want them. d&d doesn't need ultra detailed economics or anything but even video games tend to have a firmer grasp on things like trade & economies than your recent posts trying to avoid roads from developing are sketching out.
