Though agri-worlds are each devoted to growing and gathering foodstuffs for a ravenous Imperium, each is unique in the ways it goes about this, as well as the actual items it produces and exports. Many rely on staples though, as these are relatively simple to grow, store, manipulate, and process into a variety of forms for human consumption across the galaxy. Some concentrate on rarer items and delicacies that can only be produced on that planet, foods bound for the tables of the connected and powerful. In time, most become renowned for certain exports, as Kalto is for padonus rice or Cel is for its mhoxen. Few agri-worlders, however, share in these bounties from their cultivated fields or packed corrals, and often subsist on discarded grains or meats unsuitable for processing.
Agrarian workforces can be anchored to working a single field, often developing such devotion to their produce that new religious sects can spring up like the plants themselves. Others might continually travel the surface, following local growing seasons to descend like attacking armies on fields ripe for harvest, and scouring the landscape to remove every morsel of grain, stalk, or other edible life. More voracious than any swarm, they leave behind nothing but barren soil before marching of to eradicate the next territory. On some planets, especially where there is a strong Adeptus Mechanicus presence, labourers with bionic scythe-limbs might work alongside monotask harvest servitors while combat servitors patrol the fields and use their heavy stubbers to discourage marauding creatures. Produce fields vary in size and shape, including precisely designed acreages based on ancient decrees, patterns to venerate revered saints, or wild forms based on the seasonal whims of their rulers. Some fields are not on the land at all, such as plankton farms that reap the oceans or underground fungi caverns. Other agriworlds instead specialize in livestock creatures, from the ubiquitous grox to unique native beasts that cannot thrive anywhere else. Like the lora these need not be terrestrial, and could include gargantuan sea-beasts larger than starships, or sky-blackening clouds of protein-rich insects. In some cases these planets might import base fodder, or cultivate hydroponic algae and vat-grown flesh, just to feed these fauna until the beasts are harvested.
Agrarian workforces can be anchored to working a single field, often developing such devotion to their produce that new religious sects can spring up like the plants themselves. Others might continually travel the surface, following local growing seasons to descend like attacking armies on fields ripe for harvest, and scouring the landscape to remove every morsel of grain, stalk, or other edible life. More voracious than any swarm, they leave behind nothing but barren soil before marching of to eradicate the next territory. On some planets, especially where there is a strong Adeptus Mechanicus presence, labourers with bionic scythe-limbs might work alongside monotask harvest servitors while combat servitors patrol the fields and use their heavy stubbers to discourage marauding creatures. Produce fields vary in size and shape, including precisely designed acreages based on ancient decrees, patterns to venerate revered saints, or wild forms based on the seasonal whims of their rulers. Some fields are not on the land at all, such as plankton farms that reap the oceans or underground fungi caverns. Other agriworlds instead specialize in livestock creatures, from the ubiquitous grox to unique native beasts that cannot thrive anywhere else. Like the lora these need not be terrestrial, and could include gargantuan sea-beasts larger than starships, or sky-blackening clouds of protein-rich insects. In some cases these planets might import base fodder, or cultivate hydroponic algae and vat-grown flesh, just to feed these fauna until the beasts are harvested.
—Dark Heresy — Enemies Within
Najan is an agri world. There are templates for such places, drawn up in the fathomless past and never altered by the Administratum. All agri worlds are of similar size, located in similar orbital zones within their void systems and subject to specific exposure to a prescribed spectrum of solar radiation. Their soils have to be within a tight compositional range, and they have to be close to major supply worlds.
The Imperium is not a gentle custodian of such places. After discovery of a candidate planet, the first fifty years are spent in terraforming according to well-worn Martian procedures. All pre-existing life is scrubbed from the rocks, either by the application of controlled virus-chewers or by timed flame-drops. The atmosphere is regulated, first through the actions of gigantic macro-processors and thereafter by a land-based network of control units, more commonly referred to as command nodes. Weather, as least as generally understood, disappears. Rainfall becomes a matter of controlled timing, governed by satellites in low orbit and kept in line by fleets of dirigibles. The empty landscape is divided up into colossal production zones, each patrolled by crawlers and pest-thopters. Millions of base-level servitors are imported, kept at the very lowest level of cognitive function but bulked up by a ruthless level of muscle-binders.
Soon after this process completes, every agri world looks exactly the same – a flat, wind-rummaged plain of high-yield crops swaying towards the empty horizon. A person could walk for days and never see a distinctive feature. Not that anyone sane would choose to walk in such places – the industrial fertiliser dumps are so powerful that they turn the air orange and make it impossible to breathe unfiltered. A single growing season exhausts the soil completely, requiring continual delivery of more sprays of nitrates and phosphates, all delivered from the grimy berths of hovering despatch flyers. The entire world is given over to a remorseless monoculture, with orthogonal drainage channels burning with chem-residue and topsoil continually degrading into flimsier and flimsier dust.
But that doesn’t matter.
A planet can be driven like this for thousands of years before it eventually keels over and becomes a death world. The quality of the crops gets steadily worse, but the quantity can be sustained almost indefinitely, assuming that supply lines are maintained and imports remain consistent. At the end of every season, the great harvester leviathans are stoked up and dragged from their pens and let loose on the grey fields, smokestacks belching and tracked undercarriages sinking deep. These massive creatures of high-sided metal and intricate pipework, the smallest of which are a hundred metres long, crawl across the blasted prairies, sucking up every last speck of pallid grain and piping it directly to antiseptic internal hoppers. Feed-landers come down from high flight, dock with the still-trundling leviathans and extract the raw material, from where it is taken into the city-sized processor vats, blasted with antibiotics, smashed, burned, crushed, then stamped and packaged. Once ready for transport, containers are dragged up into orbit aboard swell-bellied landers, ready for transfer to the void-bound mass conveyers, which deliver the refined product to every starving hive world and forge world in their long circuits.
The Imperium is not a gentle custodian of such places. After discovery of a candidate planet, the first fifty years are spent in terraforming according to well-worn Martian procedures. All pre-existing life is scrubbed from the rocks, either by the application of controlled virus-chewers or by timed flame-drops. The atmosphere is regulated, first through the actions of gigantic macro-processors and thereafter by a land-based network of control units, more commonly referred to as command nodes. Weather, as least as generally understood, disappears. Rainfall becomes a matter of controlled timing, governed by satellites in low orbit and kept in line by fleets of dirigibles. The empty landscape is divided up into colossal production zones, each patrolled by crawlers and pest-thopters. Millions of base-level servitors are imported, kept at the very lowest level of cognitive function but bulked up by a ruthless level of muscle-binders.
Soon after this process completes, every agri world looks exactly the same – a flat, wind-rummaged plain of high-yield crops swaying towards the empty horizon. A person could walk for days and never see a distinctive feature. Not that anyone sane would choose to walk in such places – the industrial fertiliser dumps are so powerful that they turn the air orange and make it impossible to breathe unfiltered. A single growing season exhausts the soil completely, requiring continual delivery of more sprays of nitrates and phosphates, all delivered from the grimy berths of hovering despatch flyers. The entire world is given over to a remorseless monoculture, with orthogonal drainage channels burning with chem-residue and topsoil continually degrading into flimsier and flimsier dust.
But that doesn’t matter.
A planet can be driven like this for thousands of years before it eventually keels over and becomes a death world. The quality of the crops gets steadily worse, but the quantity can be sustained almost indefinitely, assuming that supply lines are maintained and imports remain consistent. At the end of every season, the great harvester leviathans are stoked up and dragged from their pens and let loose on the grey fields, smokestacks belching and tracked undercarriages sinking deep. These massive creatures of high-sided metal and intricate pipework, the smallest of which are a hundred metres long, crawl across the blasted prairies, sucking up every last speck of pallid grain and piping it directly to antiseptic internal hoppers. Feed-landers come down from high flight, dock with the still-trundling leviathans and extract the raw material, from where it is taken into the city-sized processor vats, blasted with antibiotics, smashed, burned, crushed, then stamped and packaged. Once ready for transport, containers are dragged up into orbit aboard swell-bellied landers, ready for transfer to the void-bound mass conveyers, which deliver the refined product to every starving hive world and forge world in their long circuits.
