Farm lands any ideas?

[Jalyha]

Well, I don't know about maps, but... Well, I know how to read, and I dislike maps in books that have perfect squares with perfect lines. farmlands don't have straight lines


Furrows in fields are bumpy. In MODERN times, there are some fancier farms that can flatten the terrain before planting, but most can't. So those and other fields have to work with the soil they got.

Also the rows alternate - you need spaces to walk between the rows of crops without damaging them. So I assume that on colored maps the colors would alternate - crops, then dirt, then crops, and so on. That's probably where the lines come in on maps which aren't colored, but even these look more real to me with a bit of shading. Grazing areas wouldn't have lines at all - it's just grass, really.

Farm PLOTS do tend to have rather rigid dividing lines, but they are rarely square. Long ago, though, it would have been as straight as a man without modern tools could make a fence (to keep the animals out of the crops) or to plant a hedge to separate his property from his neighbor's. Now it's as straight as you can drive.

Also, in modern times, people have better equipment, so regardless how much land they own, they're able to farm more of it. So (modern) people can plant plot after plot, all touching... but older societies would have smaller, more scattered plots, taking advantage of the best pieces of land. This still also means that, if the best soil for corn juts out in a weird shaped area, you plant corn in that are.


So....

To make this more map-related, I'll jack a couple of shots from google maps.