Realistic Arable Land

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Author: Thaldor

Last revision: 6 Dec, 2022 at 09:12 UTC (1)

File size: 1.76 MB

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Description:

Now updated for 1.1

This mod significantly alters the distribution of arable land in the world to better fit agriculture in the real world.

In the vanilla game arable land is largely distributed based on population in 1836. This results in areas that offer vast expanses of farmland in real life, such as the Great Plains in North America, having very small amounts of arable land in game. This mod instead allocates arable land based on the distribution of farmlands in the modern day using Global Food Security-support Analysis Data, a collaborative effort by NASA and the USGS, as reference.

Altering arable land to this extent obviously could cause catastrophic levels of starvation at game start as hundreds of millions of peasants no longer have anywhere to work so this mod also makes subsistence farms ten times more space efficient. I.e. one peasant will still make the same amount of grain or meat as in vanilla, but you can fit ten times as many of them into a given unit of farmland.

Notes:

• The new distribution was designed to keep the total amount of arable land the same as in the vanilla game and also ensures that every state receives a minimum of 5 units of arable land.
• In general it was assumed that 1sqkm of modern farmland offers about the same potential as any other, however where the data indicates major modern irrigation it was assumed that this land is capable of supporting more intensive agriculture and so it receives slightly more arable land than would otherwise be expected (this is largely a buff for China and India which are already loosing out fairly significantly so, whether it is realistic or not, it is probably good for game balance).
• I’m sure there will be areas where using modern data has resulted in anachronistic levels of arable land, however the goal with this mod is to be better than vanilla, not perfect so unless they break particular countries I won’t be changing them
• The only place where the new distribution differs significantly from what the data would suggest is in Japan, which even with the buffed space efficient farms would still experience game breaking unemployment and so Japan has approximately twice as much arable land as it technically should have.

Data:
https://www.usgs.gov/apps/croplands/home