Robb was with the wetnurse today, rather than accompanying me. Since I was venturing beyond the outskirts of Winter Town, I had decided that Robb should stay safe in the castle, with more than a few household servants to cater to his every need. He was an energetic six month old baby at this point, and had already begun to crawl everywhere. And, unfortunately, had a tendency to put nearly anything he could get his hands on into his mouth.
As such, a peasant's farm just barely in eyesight of the castle was not an appropriate place to take such a young child.
"It seems to be coming along nicely," I commented.
Indeed, the fields to either side were laden with green shoots, perhaps a bit less than a foot tall, gently waving in the breeze.
"Aye, 'tis so, milady," the farmer, a man named Yan, agreed. His voice, like most of the smallfolk, was heavily accented, and sometimes difficult to understand. Still, as my interactions with smallfolk became more common, I found I was gaining an ear for deciphering their speech. Yan continued, saying, "I been keeping a record, like yeh asked fer."
"Excellent," I replied with a smile.
Maester Luwin had found old tax records that recorded farmers paying a portion of their taxes in bushels of barley and millet in the past, and from what he could gather, that seemed to be the norm for more than a few centuries. Apparently, before the coming of the Andals, wheat was rarely, if ever, grown in the North. Some time after Aegon's Conquest, with the increased contact with Andal-ruled southern lands, wheat became increasingly more common until it had almost entirely replaced other grains grown for human consumption. The farmers still grew some barley, but it was generally only used for brewing ale and feeding livestock.
After looking over the findings, I had proposed an experiment. Well, the common tongue didn't have a word for 'experiment', so I had used a word that meant 'trial' instead. I had proposed finding a farmer who knew how to write -a difficult task in itself- and pay him to grow specific crops in four of his fields. One field for barley, another for oats, a third for wheat, and the last for rye. All the while, he would record the weather each day, how well each field grew, how long until harvest, and how many bushels each field yielded. I would provide the seed (including importing rye from Norvos) and pay him for the use of his fields and his labor. He, in turn, would oversee the experiment and record the results.
I hoped that this experiment would prove that other crops besides wheat were viable. If I remembered correctly, wheat reached maturity from planting to harvest in a little more than four months, give or take a few weeks. I had read somewhere that barley could be harvested in as little as three months.
Now, the climate in Westeros was… vastly different from that of Earth. They had 'summers' that could last for decades, and 'winters' that could last nearly as long. For the lands south of the Neck, this was far more literal than here in the North. The Riverlands, according to Catelyn's memories, only ever received snow during one of the long winters.
The North, on the other hand, had 'summer snows'. What this means was that during the long 'summers', the North was the only one of the Seven Kingdoms that experienced a four season cycle; spring, summer, autumn, and winter. The Riverlands, at worst, had a few months of cool, rainy weather each year.
'Which explains why the North struggles more than the other Kingdoms when it comes to food production,' I noted.
The Reach or the Riverlands could plant and harvest all year round. As soon as a field had been cleared, it could be plowed and seeded once more. Villages often staggered their planting over a few weeks, with the entire labor force going from field to field, neighbor assisting neighbor, until the entire village's fields had been planted. Then, once harvest was ready, they could follow the same order, ensuring that adequate labor was always at hand to quickly and efficiently harvest each field as soon as it matured. So long as they were careful to ensure that a harvest did not fall in the rainy season, the Riverlands could ensure two full harvests each year, and with the collective labor, each village could sustain many more fields than a comparably sized village on Earth could, simply because they could stagger their harvests.
The North did not have these advantages. Planting too early might cause the sprouts to freeze in a late frost, which could kill a significant part of the crop. Planting too late might mean the late autumn rains or snows could cause a crop to spoil in the fields. With this rather constrained timing, farming villages in the North often couldn't afford the same kind of collective labor agreements that were common in the South. Instead, farmers and their families either needed to do the work themselves, hire seasonal hands for planting and harvest, or be large and wealthy enough to afford permanent farmhands.
Without the advantages that the South had, in terms of climate, the North was unable to match them in food production. Add in the widely dispersed population and the occasional bandit or wildling raids, and it was easy to see why the North couldn't produce enough food to sustain its population.
However, I think I might be able to change that, or at least offset the deficit. My first inclination was to encourage the growth of winter wheat, but I realized that I had no idea if the local varieties of wheat were capable of going dormant in the winter. I was aware that there were special breeds of wheat that were capable of that, but that not all types of wheat could do so. Given the strange weather patterns in this world, I had a strong suspicion that all varieties of wheat I could get my hands on would be spring wheat, and they would not survive a so-called 'summer snow'.
My second idea caused me to come up with the current experiment. Given that, according to Maester Luwin's research, the 'summer snows' the North was so infamous for generally only occured in the local equivalents of December, January, and February, and that overnight frosts were almost non-existent between April and October, I realized that all but the northernmost regions of the North had a relatively reliable 7 months in which to grow crops. That wasn't enough time to grow two harvests of wheat, but in the more southerly regions, that was long enough to grow one harvest of barley (or another grain with a faster growth rate) and one harvest of wheat each year. More northerly regions would probably have to content themselves with two harvests of non-wheat grains, or sacrifice one harvest in favor of a single wheat harvest.
If this worked out, I expected it to significantly increase local food production. Perhaps not a full doubling, given that wheat generally had a larger yield per acre than other grain crops (at least as far as I remembered), but it would be a major increase nonetheless. Assuming it worked, and assuming I could encourage widespread adoption of the technique.
Plus, my ulterior motive was that, if food production increased, I could encourage the occasional growth of cash crops, particularly flax. Not only would this give the peasant farmers a little bit of extra coin, it would allow my weaving workshop to begin producing linen in addition to wool. As it was, farms in the North were needed to grow food and only food. If that pressure could be alleviated…