Federation Food

Production

            Although the Federation is an advanced culture it still needs to produce food for its near fifty billion population, according to the available resources and suitability of technological application, multiple methods for food production are in place, with an aim to produce a sufficiency for the population but with a redundancy to account for unforeseen circumstances.

            Traditional agriculture is still practiced in the Federation, especially for plants, which are subsequently processed to form valuable commodities (perfume, medicinal, oil yielding, decorative crops etc.), however the amount of land given over to agriculture is minimised, to retain more of the original habitat, this has become especially important on Federation homeworlds where habitats are being encouraged to expand into previously farmed areas. Colony worlds are also being encouraged to become self sufficient in their own food production, and to a degree supplement the food requirements of more populated worlds, the existing wormhole networks have been employed to efficiently transport food stuffs between worlds. Multiple worlds harvesting in a staggered fashion mean that the reliance on building up large amounts of food stocks is unnecessary as any deficiencies or surpluses can be readily exchanged. The amount of food generated from traditional agriculture accounts for perhaps 70% of the total food requirements.

            However some settlements are not well suited for traditional agriculture, for example where either the space or the environment is unsuitable for traditional agriculture, perhaps the best examples are the asteroid settlements. Rather than make these settlements depend on food imports, advanced agricultural techniques have been employed, predominantly hydroponic farms, where rapid growth and high-density growth trays can produce large volumes of food for little volume. Hydroponic farms  grow plants in aqueous mediums, this allows plants to extract nutrients directly from the growth medium, and can greatly increase yield and growth rate, the hydroponic trays can be stacked o increase density, and artificial lighting to provide the energy for photosynthesis. As the environment is completely under artificial control there is no need to adhere to season and food production is continuous. In asteroid complexes the hydroponic farms are situated inside subsurface caverns, though on some asteroids surface farms, shielded from vacuum can use natural light, providing the sun provides sufficient illumination.

Hydroponic farms can also be found under Federation cities on terrestrial worlds which reduce the pressure on the surrounding land to support the cities population. The cost of hydroponic farms is that they require continuous energy to provide light and fluids control to the growing crop, these energy demands are easily met even by small fusion powerplants, and the energy cost for producing the crop acceptable. For some asteroid complexes additional elements are required for the crops, particularly the organic elements nitrogen and carbon, these elements may have to be shipped in, but not continuously as the food produced is consumed and the elements returned, hydroponic farms are also efficient scrubbers of carbon dioxide, and provide additional environmental support to these closed system settlements. For asteroid complexes hydroponic farms provide approximately 90% of the food supply, the remainder coming from scattered plants throughout the asteroid’s interior, which not only serve aesthetic purposes but additionally produce food. In Federation cities hydroponic farms can supply almost all the required food stocks, though most cities situated at temperate climates only have a limited requirement for hydroponic farms, typically only 30% of their food comes from this source, the remainder from traditional agriculture.

The most technologically sophisticated method relies on replicators, machines that can assemble molecular foodstuffs from atomic assembly, this method is hugely energy expensive and the relative cost of producing synthetic food is highly prohibitive unless there are little alternatives. There are two different ways of producing food by replicators, the first and slightly more efficient, though more hardware demanding, is to use a molecular assembler which puts atoms together to form nutrients, which are then separated and stored, and then use nanites to assemble the synthetic food into the desired shape from these stored building blocks. This indirect method is less energy expensive, and slower than solely using replicators, but makes more sense if enough space is available, and large volumes need to be processed. The alternative is to use replicators not only to assemble the nutrients but also construct the shape of the food, this is more energy expensive but can be fitted into a smaller space, it can also produce finished food relatively quickly, so it can respond to demands as they are made.

Whichever method used this way of generating food requires large amounts of energy, and is only really employed where other methods can not work, the only real practical example is on starships and other spacecraft, where space and material stocks are limited, but there is access to high power generators. On small ships replicators will make up all of the food production capability, though most craft will carry food stocks obtained before a flight, replicators allow for the additional creation of any food. Replicators can also be used to synthesise medical goods on demand, and medical replicators are widespread, they provide clinics with a practically unlimited amount of goods, which frees up any dependence on limited stored goods. Replicator technology can be found throughout the Federation though its use is primarily for material handling rather than food production, it is thought that the current number of the these machines is sufficient to produce perhaps 50% of the Federation’s food demand if all other production methods fail, and with the scope of serving all of the food demands if machines can be spread appropriately throughout the population (as although energy expensive it is not beyond the power networks can provide).