The economics of gathering rations (PF)

[JusticeZero]

So I am building a relatively hard realistic setting based on history now. The culture I am using as my base used, essentially, bales of trail rations as their exchange medium.
This leads to some confusion as to how exactly to figure out the short term and long term ability of people to gather and preserve rations, and how to peg it to any sort of historical values. At certain times of year and using special equipment, the historical numbers for gathering were pretty large; at other times the numbers were much smaller and more survival/random encounter based. I'm not sure if there is an existing system that I can use to approximate any of this, which skill to use, etc.

[Honest Tiefling]

Uh...What climate/terrain are we talking? Worrying about food rotting is a lot different when you can just stick it out your window into the snow.

I also doubt that all rations are created equal. Smoked meat/salted fish isn't going to have the same value as say, fresh leafy vegetables. Furthermore, given the value of trail rations, I assume that this is a nomadic culture. Do they have some sort of pack animal to carry stuff along as well?

[JusticeZero]

Boreal forest. There's various types of preserved foods described, but they all seem to be pegged in trade value to that of a bale of 40 fish, dried and wrapped in birch bark (which is highly resistant to decay etc).
Basically, there's a word in the language with the definition "A bale of 40 dried fish, spread and packaged a certain way", and that word is used much like "gp" is.
It looks offhand like one fish equals one person/day of food, so the base currency unit is on a standard of "Trail rations, x40". 20gp, 40lb by core rules, though that might be a bad price to use without further thought? That is produced during a three week window of the year. Other food can be acquired at other times of course.. it's just that when it is traded I see references about how X amount of root vegetable or fruit or whatever is worth X in bales of fish.
Yes, stuff is hauled by dogsled. Travel is done in winter because it's easier to travel then on packed trails, by the accounts I have seen. (Summer is too full of brush and mud and poor visibility/navigation problems, running water and so on.) So transporting bales of food to market is feasible.

[Darrin]

Japanese samurai used to be paid in "koku", a volume of rice that could feed one person for a year. I'm not sure how they subdivided it, though.

[JusticeZero]

My main worry here is actually "What skill to craft rations with? And are there rules for this?"

[Firest Kathon]

I would apply the Survival (http://www.d20pfsrd.com/skills/survival) skill here.

DC 10 Get along in the wild. Move up to half your overland speed while hunting and foraging (no food or water supplies needed). You can provide food and water for one other person for every 2 points by which your check result exceeds 10.
Let's take a Level 1 human commoner. Their Survival bonus would be +1 (1 rank, Wis 10, no class skill). Taking 10, they could survive in the wild but not feed anyone else.
On the other hand, a huntsman may be a human Expert 3. Their Survival bonus would be +10 (3 ranks, Wis 12, class skill bonus, Skill Focus (Survival)). Taking 10, they would produce 5 trail rations each day (6 if they do not need to feed themselves).
If the food supply is better or worse than normal, just apply a circumstance modifier (i.e. the yearly fish migration might give a +5 bonus, resulting in 2 or 3 extra rations each day).

Using Profession (http://www.d20pfsrd.com/skills/profession) instead would broaden the number of available producers as commoners could also contribute:

You can earn half your Profession check result in gold pieces per week of dedicated work.
Our human Commoner 1 woud have a Profession(food producer) bonus of +4 (1 rank, Wis 10, class skill bonus) and would produce 6gp worth of trail rations each week (12 rations, about 2 per day)
A fisherman (Expert 3) would have Profession(fisherman) +10 (3 ranks, Wis 12, class skill bonus, Skill Focus) and would produce 20 gp per week, aka 40 rations or 5-6 per day), about the same as our huntsman above.

[bahamut920]

I agree with Kathon that it should either be Survival or Profession, or possibly both. Any Profession skill for creating the food should include knowledge of how to preserve that type of food, Profession (food packer) knows how to pack and preserve any type of food (but not produce it), and Survival is the "live off the land" skill, which produces less food than the Profession skills, but knows how to preserve any naturally-occurring foodstuff (which would be most of them, in any medieval setting).

I also think that clerics "selling" their gentle repose spells for donations would be a thing in this setting, especially for clerics of agriculture deities. People who help the church out get treated to a bale of completely fresh food preserved only by magic.

[JusticeZero]

There are some times of year when the production rate explodes, and I am hazy how to model that. With a chunk of public works tinkering in some places, and working in a small team of people, I was seeing numbers like '300 fish per work night during the fish run'. One person catching, one person getting the fish from the person doing the catching, and two or so people cutting the fish and hanging it in smoking racks to be dried, then wrapping during off time.
Other times of course that isn't happening, that's basically harvest season.