Planning Out The Farm (Part 2):

After a light lunch, I got back to work figuring out what I should do. The problem mainly lay in the fact that I had no way to figure out what the settlement's exact population would be by the time that all of the trees would finally be able to give fruits for us to eat from. Except for the sweet potatoes of course as those would be ready to eat in 3-4 months.

At first, I was originally planning to just use a formula that was based on the assumption that we would only get 13 new people to join the settlement every 3 months, but I knew that chances were that assumption would be incorrect as it was completely up to luck. At the end after not being able to think of a better way I decided to overcompensate and set the rate to 13 new people per month.

Since a single orange has on average 60 calories, a single avocado has on average 250 calories, a single coconut had on average 1400 calories, and a single Suri bug had on average 249 calories that meant that a single meal containing all three would already contain 1959 without even including the sweet potatoes which was almost the recommended average of calories a day.

This problem could be easily fixed though as most of the calories came from the meat of the coconut. Assuming that we only ate twice a day, then that meant that as long as a single serving stayed equal or slightly above 1250 meaning that all I really had to do was to just cut the coconut in half in order to meet the goal.

That didn't mean that I would do it that way though, as there had to be some sort of balance between the quantities of every fruit and meat involved. So after some rearrangements based purely on calorie count, the result was a diet of ¼ of a coconut with the water being used as a drink highly mixed with water if needed to increase quantity, a single avocado, one Suri bug, one orange, and three potatoes. coming around to a total of 1278 calories per meal.

Honestly after carving that into the price of wood I had grabbed to brainstorm I immediately knew that it would taste disgusting when eaten together. On the bright side though, since I could make a primitive form of coconut oil using only the coconut, I could also make a form of cooked sweet potato that had a rice-like texture which I could pair up with the cooked Suri bugs and the avocado.

Even better, since only a small amount of coconut oil was needed to cook the rice, I could add even more of the other foods into the diet. Re-evaluating everything after planning to make 'sweet potato rice' then the quantities of each food would change to one orange, a cup of coconut water, sweet potato rice made from two sweet potatoes and a teaspoon of 1 coconut oil, two cooked Suri bugs, and a single avocado in total being around 1267 calories give or take.

Finally having set the number of food required per person each day I could actually focus on the layout of the farm. In total, following the rate I had set previously, that would mean that in the worst-case scenario by the time all three trees began to give fruits (15 years), then we would have 2353 people living within the settlement.

Meaning that if each of them ate two times a day the total would come to around 141,180 oranges, 282,360 Suri bugs, 282,360 sweet potatoes, 141,180 avocados, and 23,550 coconuts a month. (Coconut water could be mixed with water if the quantity was not enough, as for the coconut oil one could get 15ml from a single coconut or around three teaspoons of coconut oil).

And although I would have preferred to also have estimated the number of people that would be born in the settlement, I still had no idea what the birth rate of this settlement would be as I didn't know how many children each family would have on average nor how likely it would be for children to not die during birth.

On the bright side though, since I had hopefully overestimated the population number 15 years down the line, a couple of months wouldn't make too much of a difference. Plus now that I had the quantities per month all that was left was to divide that by the production per month of all the ingredients involved, for the trees at least.

That didn't mean that I couldn't calculate for the Suri or sweet potatoes, but since they took so little time to be ready for consumption comparatively I saw no point in doing so. Regardless, since an orange tree produces around 17 fruits a month, an avocado tree produces around 13 avocados a month, and a coconut tree produces around 4 coconuts a month that means that I would need around 8,305 orange trees, 8,305 avocado trees, and 8,138 coconut trees.

Needless to say, no matter which way one looked at this, it was obvious that this would be a very long-term project. Once we had set up everything correctly though, food would no longer be the major concern of the people living within the settlement and I could finally start focusing more on securing goods that might be harder to come by later on.

After figuring that out I decided it would probably be best to take a small break as I was already feeling tired of planning. It was only when I looked up from the piece of wood that I was able to see that a group of people had been staring at what I was doing in curiosity, and although I knew that I couldn't possibly explain what I was doing to them, I did wonder if there would come a time when they would be able to figure it out themselves.