Agri World
An Agri-World (Agricultural World or Farming Planet) or α-class (alpha class) is a world classification defined as being devoted to food production.[1] Agri Worlds can have various different sub-types, such as an Oceanic sub-type.[15]
Contents
Overview
Despite Imperial propaganda, Agri-Worlds are often harsh and polluted environments ruled by an Imperium that demands ceaseless back-breaking labor from its small populations.[8][17a] Agri Worlds are of paramount importance to the Imperium, for if one falls several others will likely fall indirectly due to a slow starvation. As precious as a Forge World or Mining World, Agri Worlds are often defended accordingly with orbital defences and bastions comparable to Fortress Worlds.[9]
The majority of an Agri World's surface is given over to producing food for other worlds reliant on such imports - the food itself forms part of the planet's required tithe. Governors of such planets are required by the Adeptus Terra to protect the harvest and meet the quotas placed on them. Often inter-commander rivalry leads to attempts to destroy or steal crops and livestock and then blaming them on pirates or raids.[1]
Worlds with 850 parts per 1000 (85%) of the planet's surface covered with forcecrop cultivation, hydroponics, animal fodder, algae lakes, cactus forests, animal husbandry or other types of food production are classed as Agri-Worlds.[2][24] The population usually ranges from between 15,000 to 1,000,000 - which is widely spread across the planet. The tithe grade of such worlds range from Exactis Prima to Exactis Particular.[2]
Varieties
Agri Worlds come in a variety of climates and biospheres. Often stereotyped as world-farms of endless fields harvested in punishing crop rotations - which is accurate in some cases - there are actually countless ways a world can be exploited for massed food production with just as many varieties of food produced. Examples include teeming insect farms, to industrial abattoir cities, submariner fishing clans, subterranean macro fungus farms, inner ring orbital stations of asteroids, and all other forms of husbandry and harvesting of livestock. Even Ice Worlds can boast agri production, facilitated through various means, such as subterranean caverns or seas. These are only a few examples of all the grotesque landscapes created by Humanity's need to feed itself.[9]
Masali, Quintarn and Tarentus form the group of planets called the 'Three Planets' in Ultramar, all of which are desert worlds. They are all classed as agri-worlds because of vast horticultural cities and moisture traps spread across the surface as well as bio-domes under which grow highly fertile forests. They are highly successful at producing vast amounts of food.[3]
Oceanic Agri Worlds harvests typically consist of either its abundant marine fauna,[19] or cultivated flora (such as algae or seaweed), or a combination of both algae and seafood.[18]
To combat soil alkalinity, Agri Worlds often import artificial fertilisers from Hive Worlds who process and manufacture such exports from its organic offal.[16]
World Selection
All Imperial Agri Worlds are of similar sized, being located in similar orbital zones in their respective systems, receiving a specifically prescribed exposure to solar radiation. Their lands have to be within a tight compositional range, and they have to be close to major Imperial supply worlds.[8] Worlds could also be selected due to an axial tilt that facilitates an endless growing season in one hemisphere.[17c]
Some worlds can be converted into Agri-Worlds at later points, if a planetary governor wills it. A Mining World spent of all its resources might petition to be converted into an Agri World, if there are still a salvageable remnants of a biosphere to co-opt. However, changing the tithe classification of a world to that of a different export class could take decades or centuries of work from Adeptus Administratum adepts. During this lengthy interim, many planetary governors could be executed for not fulfilling the tithe as mandated by the existing Administratum records, despite the apparent issues of being unable to do so. A proposed transition, often leads to local social upheaval or even civil wars amongst ruling Noble Houses, Cartels, gangs and general population. If successful, the population of the population of the once terminally unproductive world will be culled and the menials that remain will be worked far harder than before.[17b]
Maiden Worlds created by Aeldari are ideal agri-worlds due to their ancient bio-engineering techniques having created robust biospheres that remain potent and lush despite Imperial abuse. These bioengineered worlds can not just survive the Imperium's crass treatment for longer, but sometimes even recover their lost verdancy.[22] Despite this, it isn't uncommon for humanity to still render a maiden world into an unliveable barren rock through their crude industrial exploitation.[23]
Culture
The Imperium is a diverse collection of worlds and the customs and traditions of from one Agri World to another can vary just as drastically. Some have Harvest Tithe festivals, where the inhabitant's celebrate with increased work hours of back-breaking labour that are bolstered by constant hymn. During the Harvest Tithe death tolls have a huge increase. This has lead many to local Death Cults to arise and incorporate outright human sacrifice, as well. If a Tithe vessel does not come, such as due to the Noctis Aeterna, populations might increase these bloody self-destructive traditions.[17d]
Populations of Agri Worlds might be physically stronger and more muscled than the average Imperial, in general, due to their ceaseless physical toil. Others might be dexterously adept at a single monotonous task their life is dedicated to. Others still might have exceptional organisational system skills from the record-keeping and cataloguing of such vast quantities of imports and exports, a trait that leads the Adeptus Administrum to scoop up such individuals.[17a]
External influences like the Ecclesiarchy or Adeptus Mechanicus might seek to gain influence over an Agri-world through various means. The former could seek to indoctrinate the menial masses into believing that worship of the God-Emperor is shown through fervent labour during their 12 hour shifts. While the latter might seek to automate and increase yields and efficiency through servitorisation of much of the workforce.[14a]
Quote
A passage from the Lords of Silence described the process of creating and maintaining an Agri-World:[8]
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.
There is a quaint tradition in the various propaganda departmentos of the Administratum of marketing agri worlds as quasi-paradises, free of the squalor and overcrowding of a standard urban station, and full of bucolic ease. Vid-cards are dropped into communal hab-warrens, extolling the virtues of a life lived outdoors with the sun on your back and a ruddy-faced boy or girl – subject to preference – by your side. In reality, life on an agri world is as unrelenting, back-breaking and monotonous as the vast majority of other Imperial vocations. There are no trees laden with glossy fruit, only kilometre after kilometre of hissing corn.
There are no gentle strolls under the warming sun, only punishing work details in rad-suits, leaning into the dust-laden winds that howl around the equator with nothing to halt their rampage. Once the new arrivals have made planetfall and found this out, it is too late. Crew transports arrive on agri worlds full and leave empty. There is a saying among the indentured workers – you come for the soil, you end up part of it.
Notable Agri-Worlds
Sources
- 1: Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader, pg. 134
- 2: Warhammer 40,000 3rd Edition Rulebook, pg. 114
- 3: Codex: Ultramarines (2nd Edition), pg. 14
- 4: Warhammer 40,000 5th Edition Rulebook, pg. 116
- 5: Imperial Armour Volume Twelve, pg. 29
- 6: Imperial Armour Volume Two - Second Edition: War Machines of the Adeptus Astartes, pg. 19
- 7: Cadia Stands (Novel), Part Four, Chapter One
- 8: The Lords of Silence (Novel), Chapter 6
- 9: White Dwarf 481, pg. 10 – Worlds of Warhammer: Classifying the myriad worlds of the Imperium of Mankind
- 10: Warhammer 40,000: Darktide
- 11: Magic: The Gathering's Universes Beyond Warhammer 40,000 - Swords to Plowshares - for details see Agri World/Sources
- 12: Imperial Armour Volume Nine - The Badab War - Part One
- 13: Wrath & Glory Core Rulebook, pg. 43 — The Dark Imperium
- 14: Wrath & Glory: Litanies of the Lost:
- 15: The Horus Heresy Book Four - Conquest, pg. 75
- 16: Imperium Maledictum: Rokarth, pg. 15
- 17: Warhammer 40,000 Roleplay: Imperium Maledictum: Core Rulebook (2023):
- 18: Black Industries' Calixis Sector: The Pearl Moon (saved archive page, dated 6 June 2008, last accessed 9 July 2024)
- 19: Black Industries' Calixis Sector: Spectoris (archived Feb 3 2008)
- 20: Codex: Genestealer Cults (9th Edition), pg. 36 — Genestealer Cults of the Imperium
- 21: Warhammer 40,000 8th Edition Rulebook, pgs. 32-33 - Worlds of the Imperium
- 22: Wrath & Glory - Aeldari - Inheritance of Embers, pg. 7
- 23: Dominion Genesis (Novel), Ikaneos
- 24: Codex: Genestealer Cults (8th Edition), pg. 15
