Apologies and a Quick Note on Agribusiness

Despite trying not to, I've managed to miss about a weeks worth of updates, and I'm sorry. Migraine headaches, prior commitments, and passover Seders preceded by intensive cleaning all conspired against me. Probably beginning next week, I'm going to do a solid seven or eight days of posting to catch up.

Farm Funny Business
By the 2050s, meat prices were way up, and herds way down - a matter of giving up land due to climate shifts, lack of water and resources to intensively factory raise animals, and anti-biotic resistant infections.
Nano-vac was beginning to combat the latter problem, but only in animals.

Nanotech derived treatments don't work with plants. Plants don't have the regulation of internal temperature required for optimal results. (Incidentally, they don't work for "cold-blooded" animals either) and their main food source outright destroys it. (Ultra-Violet radiation breaks down nano in minutes.) 

Outright genetic manipulation was required instead. A number of very hardy GM crops were eventually created, but at great cost in time and money. In an effort to recoup these losses, and silence critics who worried about the release of "franken-foods" most of these new plants we're implanted with replication limited telomeres. To put it in layman's terms - slow burning fuses were in the plants DNA, and they self destructed after a few months. Seeds wouldn't form, or couldn't germinate - either entirely, or without special chemicals fed to the plant at specific intervals.


These efforts managed to produce new strains of plants that could grow in marginal lands like warmed tundra or areas of Europe cooled down due to disrupted sea currents. In fact, these managed to be in every way improvements over the primitive GM products of the late 20th century - at leas so long as one could maintain their supplies.


Game Terms
The upshot for most players - is that seed stocks are limited, unless they can find an actual biology lab. A lot of communities find themselves fighting over stocks of agricultural products more so than oil, ammunition, or medicine.

A few places that use organic heritage seeds might be ok - but the work required, susceptibility to problems, and comparatively low output per acre.Finding such a backwater place, and getting them to part with enough seed to start a farm elsewhere is quite a tall order.