Stories where farming plays a significant role in the story

[Sapphire Guard]

Just out of curiosity. Most of the time it comes up, the farm is the place people escape from to have adventures or retire to when they're done. So can people think of stories where farming is a more substantial part of the story?

Just to narrow the field...

Preferably not Westerns
Rulers at a map table talking about the consequences of bad harvests doesn't count.

[gomipile]

Maoyu has potato farming as an important plot element. It isn't done directly by the main characters, though. They're helping out farming communities in a manner similar to county extension offices in the USA.

[Rockphed]

Farming is rather central to The Martian.

[ben-zayb]

Dr. Stone
Remember that small bit in episode 2 about how the calcium carbonate from crushed shells takes care of hydrogen ions in soil? Well...

Ishigami village still mainly relies on their hunter-gatherers. The high mortality rate due to famine and harsh winters explain the rather low population, despite having ancestry and oral traditions stretching to as far back as 3000 years ago.

Farming was then introduced for a variety of reasons:
1. to give a reliable source of food for the village in cases of famine and harsh weather
2. to accommodate for the sudden increase in population due the people newly revived by Tsukasa
3. to introduce a kind of food that can be stored for a long time, both for the village and for the long voyage at sea

Later on, one of the main goals involved multiple parts that can be solved with the acquisition of corn. Corn was just so essential in accomplishing the current objective that the main characters braved travelling halfway across the world just to go to the Americas. Now, they are risking life and limb against another group of people with far more advanced weaponry (automatic guns and airplanes in a "stone world") just to acquire their enemy's corn fields.

[Giggling Ghast]

Green Acres, naturally, is set on a farm, though it’s mostly about run-ins with the crazy locals.

Field of Dreams is at least a partial example, since the main character is a farmer and the dead ball players emerge from his cornfield.

Of Mice and Men takes place primarily on the farm where George and Lenny are hired as farmhands.

1922 (the Stephen King film on Netflix) is entirely set on a farm and a man’s attempt to hold on to it by murdering his wife.

Chicken Run is about a flock of chickens on a farm that’s more akin to a concentration camp.

Suits, one of the animated shorts from the Netflix series “Love, Death and Robots,” is about farmers on an alien world defending their farms from giant insects.

I’ve heard the Harvest Moon games feature a little bit of farming. :smalltongue:

[Razade]

Technically speaking, Seven Samurai. Insofar as the plot happens in a feudal Japanese town that is a farming village. It's their food, their upcoming harvest, that the bandits are wanting to take which leads to them hiring the samurai. They even specify looking for samurai who are in need of food themselves, since that's the only way they can pay them. With the harvest.

[Fyraltari]

Farming is rather central to The Martian.

Most robinsonades, really.

[Eldan]

Farming is rather central to The Martian.

A lot of harder Science Fiction, really. Many works where people are building generation ships or off-planet colonies.

[Vahnavoi]

The Silver Spoon manga (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silver_Spoon_(manga)) is a coming-of-age story about a guy studying in an agricultural institute. It was heaps of fun to a person who's lived most of their life next to such an institute.

I was also going to mention Harvest Moon games, but Giggling Ghast beat me to it.

Oh, and there's also this book called Animal Farm by George Orwell, along with all of its adaptations.

[LibraryOgre]

Farnham's Freehold does, as does the Nantucket and Emberverse books by SM Stirling (especially early in the series; later on, in both cases, their agricultural bases are more established, so it becomes less of a concern).

Some of Joel Rosenberg's Guardians of the Flame series, especially The Sword and the Chain, have them setting up a remote colony of freed slaves, and so farming concerns are at least present. Later, at least one noble character is revealed to spend significant time on a farm as a young man, so he knows what the peasants deal with.

And, cheekily, pretty much every story relies on farming, when you get down to it, even if it doesn't explicitly play a role in the plot.

[brionl]

If we are going Heinlein, I'd recommend Farmer in the Sky before Farnham's Freehold.

[jayem]

Charlotte's Web? / Babe etc

Little House on the ...
Swiss family Robinson, secret island
Daphnis and Chloe, Heidi etc...

[dancrilis]

Cain and Abel

[Palanan]

Originally Posted by Mark Hall
*Farnham's Freehold*

So glad to see that the classics are remembered.

[Sapphire Guard]

Thanks all. I have read/watched very few of those, but I'll try to look into them.

Got halfway through first episode of Silver Spoon, it does look interesting but I'll have to power through the initial protagonist stupidity into the real story.



And, cheekily, pretty much every story relies on farming, when you get down to it, even if it doesn't explicitly play a role in the plot.



Most characters eat at some point, yes.

[JDMSJR]

A Farmer's Tale https://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/a-farmers-tale-asoiaf.608353/ is a self insert story where a 30 year old american farmer is born into the A Song of Ice and Fire series (aka A Game of Thrones) world with his memories intact. The story starts about 25 or 30 years before the books and looks at how his introduction of modern farming practices and better farming equipment (among other things) changes things when the North starts to produce a lot more food. Well written and the characters are well developed. It's at about 54 chapters currently and is an enjoyable read.

John

[CharonsHelper]

It looks like no one mentioned The Good Earth yet.

[dps]

Animal Farm

[DomaDoma]

If we are going Heinlein, I'd recommend Farmer in the Sky before Farnham's Freehold.
Farnham's Freehold has the distinct flavor of an author who was commissioned to do a postapocalyptic survival novel but decided it was time he emptied out his story idea grab bag instead. It is the Crazy For You of the Heinlein oeuvre and it really does not have that much farming.

But in that vein: definitely second Dies the Fire by S.M. Stirling. The series suffers from severe diminishing returns, but that book is a stellar stand-alone/trilogy intro.

[Kitten Champion]

There's always Anne of Green Gables. Granted the focus of the work is more about the vicissitudes of 19th century farm life and the relationship between Anne and her adopted mother than agricultural techniques, but I would still say farming is a significant element of the story.

There's also Moyashimon: Tales of Agriculture, which is similar to Silver Spoon but with a more comedic tone and with a slight fantasy bent as the protagonist can see microbes as if they were cute mascot characters.

[Wraith]

A somewhat meta example, but Kingdom Come, the story-arc from DC comics. It's nominally about an ageing Justice League having to deal with the new generation of younger, glory-seeking heroes however the entire story book-ends on a wheat farm in Kansas - without it, most of the crucial plot elements don't exist.

And of course; Superman is a farmer, on his days off from being a hero or a reporter. :smallwink:

[Sinewmire]

The Grapes of Wrath is entirely about the Oklahoma dustbowl of the 1930s. It covers the life of a family of Oklahoma farmers whose crops fail, and whose farm is foreclosed, and their struggles to find farming work and some basic dignity elsewhere. It is very depressing.

[Knaight]

The Grapes of Wrath has a lot of farming.

[LibraryOgre]

But in that vein: definitely second Dies the Fire by S.M. Stirling. The series suffers from severe diminishing returns, but that book is a stellar stand-alone/trilogy intro.

I trailed off after High King of Montival or Lord of Mountains... whichever came second. I just stopped caring about it, and it took too long to do anything.

[brionl]

The Grapes of Wrath has a lot of farming.

ITYM, a lack of farming.

[Gnoman]

Some of the Turtledove series have farmer POVs, where the farming is important. The Timeline-191 series has three.

[DomaDoma]

I trailed off after High King of Montival or Lord of Mountains... whichever came second. I just stopped caring about it, and it took too long to do anything.

Lord of Mountains came second. It is the one that killed off a character I cared very much about, but it took me a moment to remember whom and I still don't remember how. So, that's how much the emotional stakes slipped... oddly enough in exact tandem with the amount of geographic territory at stake. If ever a series was entitled to Think Locally, that was it.

I got to the end of the Rudi cycle, then dropped it gratefully.

[Rockphed]

ITYM, a lack of farming.

Well they are, or rather were, farming. They just weren't growing anything.

[Rodin]

Mirabile has a fair amount of farming in it, albeit not by the protagonist. She's trying to help the farmers.

Mirabile is about a colony that no longer has contact with Earth. They took sample DNA/embryos from as many Earth creatures as they could before they left, and to save space they spliced the DNA together. Unfortunately, an accident during the trip wiped the computer database that told the colonists what creatures were combined.

This results in two things.

1) The original creature often won't "breed true". Plant daisies, and the daisy seeds might actually be cockroach eggs. This is often the only way to get a particular type of creature.

2) Others will combine their traits to form entirely new life, like the dreaded "Kangaroo Rex" - a giant, carnivorous kangaroo.

The protagonist is a geneticist who travels around the colony helping the farmers. Sometimes she's trying to protect the Earth creatures from the native life, others she's trying to protect the native life from the colonists. She's a park ranger who solves thing with SCIENCE!

[Rockphed]

Mirabile has a fair amount of farming in it, albeit not by the protagonist. She's trying to help the farmers.

Mirabile is about a colony that no longer has contact with Earth. They took sample DNA/embryos from as many Earth creatures as they could before they left, and to save space they spliced the DNA together. Unfortunately, an accident during the trip wiped the computer database that told the colonists what creatures were combined.

This results in two things.

1) The original creature often won't "breed true". Plant daisies, and the daisy seeds might actually be cockroach eggs. This is often the only way to get a particular type of creature.

2) Others will combine their traits to form entirely new life, like the dreaded "Kangaroo Rex" - a giant, carnivorous kangaroo.

The protagonist is a geneticist who travels around the colony helping the farmers. Sometimes she's trying to protect the Earth creatures from the native life, others she's trying to protect the native life from the colonists. She's a park ranger who solves thing with SCIENCE!

That sounds like a horrible idea. It also sounds like the sort of thing that somebody would think sounded like a good idea.

[uncool]

The Green Book is a children's book with a group of poor colonists trying to leave Earth and set up on a new planet.

[GentlemanVoodoo]

The Secret of NIHM. It was due to farming that Mrs. Brisby began her journey in the first place.

[Aedilred]

I don't know what genre you're after, but in the realms of historical fiction, Harvest by Jim Crace would be one, World Without End by Ken Follett another (inferior) one.