It has been around three months since father handed the reins over to me to source food for winter and so far I have done nothing to complete this task. I know, that three months is a long time to sit on my arse for but I have good reasoning.
Father gave me a spare key to go his personal library, which might not be a good reason on its own but its what it contains that matter. The Lord's personal library is a room off to the side of his study and only the Lord, anyone who he allows to and the Maester are able to enter the library, the Maester is only authorized to enter the library because he has to care for the books inside and occasionally copy them, under the watchful eye of the Lord Lannister of course.
The library contains closely kept books, scrolls and secrets, for example: schematics and maps of the interior of Casterly Rock, secrets and evidence used for blackmail since even before the conquest and then logbooks and journals written by the many Lords of the Rock.
Those are just a small chunk of what's in there. Those logbooks are what I need as they document the harvests (among many other things) of the Westerlands throughout the years.
Now I didn't even know of the existence of the library until I was given the key, so I'm sure you can imagine Tyrion's reaction as to when I told him of it, he has a bigger thirst for knowledge than me.
Being the best big brother I could be, it wasn't very hard to sneak out a book at a time for him to read, I will admit that I was a bit wary as to whether or not I should do it but even now, several months later, father hasn't scolded or warned me about not doing it again, so either I haven't been found out yet or he doesn't really care.
As I was saying, the logbooks contains the production of food, ways the production has been improved, which area's are suitable to certain kind of farming, how much food is needed to feed one person and then it also includes the population of the Westerlands.
The fertile land of the Westerlands borders from a few miles north of Red Lake to Feastfires, Farman Isle and Sarsfield, with a few stretches of land around The Crag, Banefort and Silverhill to the south.
The Westerlands are not the most largest, populous or fertile of the realm. However there were around 824,000 people living in the Westerlands twenty years ago, nowadays that number will be much higher, I asked Maester Creylen on what he thought it would be as an estimate and he said it would most likely be around 850,000 or around that number. With most of the population living in the far West, in the more flatlands, about a 1/5 need food in order to not starve as they live in the more mountainous regions.
Using my memories of my other life I have compiled a list of all the things that could improve agriculture:
1. Crop rotation, it stops soil from becoming barren by relying on one type of nutrient. Different types of crops can be planted across a sequence of seasons and the implementing fodder and grazing crops can allow livestock to to bred all year-round.
2. Lynchets, they can be dug into hill-sides to make more room for crops, not the most efficient and takes a long time to do but it is needed due to the terrain of the Westerlands.
3. Irrigation, already in place, find an alternative and more efficient irrigation system but not quite sure how to do that just yet, could link with number 4.
4. Tools, would help drastically if farmers now had better quality ploughs and machinery, however need steel so it would cost a lot of gold.
5. Fertilizer, manure is somewhat already in use but an alternative is linked with number 4.
These are are the only things I could think off the top of my head. Crop rotation surprisingly isn't a thing yet in Westeros, I found this out due to the fact the farmland of the Westerlands is split up into groups where they have been planting the same crops for decades.
Normally this would lead to the soil being unable to get vital nutrients that those crops need, causing bad harvests. I'm unsure as to why this is the case but its probably got to do with magic and shit. Your probably thinking what is the point of crop rotation then? well looking through the logbooks, harvests on those fields many years back produced a far higher yield than nowadays, so I'm hoping that crop rotation remedy that.
Lynchets are kind of like stairs dug into a hillside, it will sort of look like a layered cake. It allows crops to be planted flat instead of on a slope, which can be used to its fullest in such terrain as the West.
Problem is that it will take a long time, a lot of tools and manpower to dig each lynchet.
Moving onto another problem, improved farming tools would be very helpful and would make farmers lives easier, however to make things like steel ploughs and seed drills the production of steel and iron would have to be increased, which isn't a very big problem as that is something I was going to do anyway.
The problem is that it is going to take time to make the steel, design better ploughs and seed drills (which I might enlist the help of Maester Creylen for), and then to convince father that the steel would be better used to make agricultural tools than to be sold off or made into weapons and armour.
Fertiliser is related to the steel situation because phosphate of lime is made during the process and can be used an a fertiliser. Steel is also linked with irrigation as well as I'm sure I could use steel pipes or something like that to transport the water, I'm really not sure as I don't know of any revolutionary irrigation systems.
Now all that is needed is to find a plot of land to 'experiment' on.
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