I have no idea what you're talking about, CanRay. Horizon is a perfectly legitimate corporation with nothing but your best interest in mind. Just ask Gary! They're so above-board, so open, so reasonable! How could you NOT root for the good guys?

I officially retract my previous comment. A nice Horizon™ employee showed me the error of my ways. They are most definitely not brainwashing people to like them.

You looked into the little red light, didn't you, Halinn? *sigh*

I'll break out the 'trodes.

Which reminds me of this amazing article: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.11/columbia.html

Give me five minutes with a car battery and a set of jumper cables.

i am perfectly content, as long as I continue buying excellent Horizon™ merchandise. i suggest that you all do the same.

I think we're gonna need a bigger battery ...

Time to break out the PAB kit?

OK, one of you wear the copper armor and hold the lightning rod running around in the storm while screaming out "ALL GODS ARE WANKERS" while I hook him up to the table.

"It's looking to be a sunny day in the Sydney metroplex, with a chance of storm spirits and thunderbolt in the afternoon. Back to Guy with the finance report..."

"Thanks Jim. In Finances today, the Nuyen stayed stable because the Corporate Court refuses to allow it to do anything else. The Australian Dollar reached par with the UCAS Dollar at 4 PM, which caused massive trading in commodities of magical supplies, primarily from Aztlan. Oil struck a new high once again, as we've reached 5000 Nuyen per barrel. Other major trades available for download. And now Terri with Sports, Terri?"

I've been reading this fairly excellent thread, and thought some of you might appreciate my demented ideas:

First, it's true that VITAS wipes out a lot of the world population. Even assuming it rebounds well, in 2070-ish it's probably back to no more than 6 or 7 billion. However, the big upheavals (volcanic eruptions, related natural disasters and so on) certainly cleared out a lot of otherwise prime agricultural territory, and likely several major facilities like dams and irrigation schemes. More yet, in at least North America, vast areas of the continent are now in the hands of groups who probably aren't too wild about conventional industrial agriculture, output capacity be damned. Additionally, a lot of supply chains for petrochemicals and related boosters to agricultural output are hurting, running dry, or held hostage to lunatics who do whatever the voices told them to, or just plain power-mad nuts.

So where does that leave us?

Assuming that urbanisation as a trend has continued, you have a lot of very densely packed people who want their pound of flesh every day. This is why you care about krill, seaweed and fungi. It's stuff which can be cranked out in dense facilities with maximal efficiency, especially if you have a hot deal with the local sewage facilities. This means that the stuff on Stuffer Shack shelving has a very low logistical cost, because it was made down the street and packaged next door. It means that you have maximal efficiencies of scale, not to mention maximum insensitivity to weather conditions, which means that food comes in on regularly managed schedules - all things which make it cheaper. If you have hungry people and efficiencies of scale and logistics with clearly managed processes, you have the kind of magic going on which in today's world happens with fried chicken and spuds. Moreover, it can be done with low labour costs, which are a major factor in how much things cost at the checkout slot.

Your delicious amber waves of grain are still there, of course, as are your cattle, sheep, horses, llamas, chickens, ducks, geese, pigs, rabbits and whatever else makes your mouth water. The problem is that conventional agriculture is, in economic terms, a very capital-heavy enterprise, which delivers on a seasonal basis, far from population centres, and takes quite a bit of processing before it's ready to eat. Even your lamb needs to be slaughtered (not complex, but not something everyone knows how to do, and not something everyone cheerfully does), skinned (fiddly job), cleaned (fiddly, too, to avoid contamination), and butchered (not rocket science, but still a skilled job). Even if you manage to rotate your stock to the point that seasons aren't a factor (hard to do with animals which are not polyoestrus, such as sheep), you need fields devoted to grazing and hay, and even a lot of your land ends up devoted to other forms of fodder. All these things make meat expensive, tough to ship, and a specialised business. Then we haven't even touched on your veterinary infrastructure, along with all the animal husbandry skills it takes to raise a herd of steers, care for them and deliver them in healthy shape to the abbatoir. Skilled labour costs money. Rare skills cost more.

Apples! Oranges! Even the humble turnip! Do you like oranges? Do you live in a cool temperate environment? Say hello to globalisation. In today's world citrus from Florida and California end up on tables in Quebec and Ontario. Folks, that's thousands of miles. I'm not even talking about wines from Argentina and Australia. This still costs money. If oil is scarce (quite plausible) then what is carrying those things? Saling ships? Seems likely. And you don't get apples without pollination. You don't even get beans without pollination (depending on some details). And once they've been pollinated (probably by custom-kept apiaries) you need to pick table apples. They can't just be collected as windfalls, because that way they end up too bruised and damaged for the tastes of Damien Knight. In fact today they're picked unripe, and ripened in special ripening facilities. Your turnips, on the other hand, do well in soils and climates which aren't universal either. Some produce goes the other way.

So let's say you're an enterprising Sixth World agriculturalist, and you want to do it all with robotics, and get a premium product to the tables of the rich and famous. If you don't have the storage solution from hell, you can only deliver what's in season. You had better have robots which work like crazy, because any given variety of apple is only in season for a week or two a year. Apple trees deliver a hell of a lot, all at once, and then nothing for the rest of the year. What happens to the leftovers? Sauce. Cider. Something, anything, but not letting them go to waste. The same applies to most other crops. And before you start huffing and puffing about the costs of gangs of mexican labourers doing it in California today, and how it's all a huge saving, think for a moment how many farmers have mortgaged their souls to John Deere and Caterpillar. Those robots don't come free, neither does their maintenance.

But no, you're more cunning than that. Not only do you have a robot army to do your every bidding, but you have greenhouses by the square mile (which is about 640 acres, in case you wondered). Now just building your farm is really expensive. And a greenhouse is not a fire-and-forget system. It needs water management, pest management (because pests love the nice, safe environment of a greenhouse), constant maintenance, ventilation and heat control ... you'd practically need a rigger just to control your greenhouse.

But you're smarter yet. It's hydroponic, it's aeroponic, it integrates aquaculture in a virtuous cycle! You crank out fish, vegetables, fruit and crustaceans by the ton, feeding the equivalent of 100 people a year (about one person for every 440 square feet or so), per acre, in your square mile of robotic madness. Guess what? You're feeding 64 000 people per year. This is massive productivity, but at eye-watering expense, and only a questionably balanced diet. 100 square miles of this might feed everyone in the Seattle Enclave, but is that really what you'll get? No, because first of all that land isn't available, most of it is very inconvenient, and even if it were most sprawl-dwellers couldn't possibly pay you enough.

So realistically, what happens?

You do have greenhouses. They are highly automated, and highly efficient. The corps have the deep pockets and the long term vision to make them work, and the rich and famous get to dine on organic kale and farmed salmon.

You have open air farms, and imports from those in neighbouring countries. Cheaper, but less regular, subject to the vagaries of the weather and pests and sabotage and politics. Most people can have lots of real food, if they really care.

You have some people with window boxes, home hydroponics, dovecotes and rabbit hutches. They do all right, as long as they don't anger various authorities.

And then you have everyone else who gets cheap industrial food because the corps don't want food riots.

(Sidebar: I'm painting with a very broad brush here, but in the real world I actually know a bit about farming, and about economics. Feel free to challenge me on my assertions above - I can back them up. The only reason we're not there now is because of Norman Borlaug's Green Revolution, and rich world government policies which actively encourage massive overproduction. The fact that these rest on fossil fuels which are getting more expensive and harder to extract, should make anyone with an eye to the future worry. A lot.)

So what does this all mean for shadowrunners?

Wow, what doesn't it mean? Runs to get food for gangs who want to get public support by a show of charity. Runs to steal highly valuable animal strains. (Don't laugh, theft of prime livestock is a nontrivial problem.) Runs to save, or sabotage, food sources, for political or commercial gain. Biohazard runs to get samples of diseases to renowned experts without waiting in customs for days and weeks. Runs on thugs trying to monopolise food sources.

Runs because the runners are hungry.

Some time ago someone (whose first language was not English) asked me how to milk a bull. He meant how one milks a cow, but as it turns out I do know how to milk a bull, old school style. I won't go into details here, except to mention that the phrase `massage the prostate' does come up. I recommend that enterprising Game Masters look up the details, and then give the runners THAT as a job. But first make sure they can't read your poker face.

Wow.

And to think one of the first Shadowruns I had a character on involved cattle-rustling.


Just one cow... genetically engineered... we were city folk... and all we had for transport was my character's Bulldog.

You forgot the bit about the cow freaking out and transmitting that it was being stolen.

I just had a scary idea. If you implant a cow with some sort of p-fix (or use a developmental PAB kit), you can reduce the cost of employees/tools like herders and abattoir workers and drones and have a cow that eats compulsively to a certain weight and then gets a strong compulsion to walk into the gaping mechanical maw of the assembly line, with moodchip functionality to keep your beef calm and tender. If you use the cyber, the machines can pull the wires out of the brainstem, ready for implantation into the next generation of livestock.

If the decontamination system malfunctions from sabotage or otherwise, spinal fluid can transfer from one cow to the next, meaning mad cow outbreak. Stock in real meat takes a dive and vat-grown meat marketeers enjoy a boon in sales.

Vat Grown Meat, "The ultimate in sterile conditions for the safety of your family. Why would you serve them anything else?"

There are a few issues which complicate that idea (although it has some potential). Large scale agriculture is a commodity game, which in economic terms mean that your margins are going to be quite thin. Whatever behavioural control you want to exert will have to be cheap - cheaper than handling costs over the life of the animal - to be worthwhile. Also, don't underestimate the ability of current abbatoir designers to use the flight instincts to drive animals in a given direction. It's the same principle as you find in treatment catchpens and so on.

Also, cyberware which goes through bone is not what you want in an animal during its growth from, let's say 100lbs to 800lbs. This is the same sort of thing which restricts cyberware in children.

No, animal management is largely a solved problem in those senses, or sufficiently solved that I don't think cybering them would help much. If I were to think of a tool to help industrial farm management hit the numbers, I'd add telemetry. Add a widget which monitors the blood, the stomach contents and activity levels. Individually monitoring livestock on that scale could add dozens of pounds to a saleable carcass, and save money in minerals, feed, parasite treatments and herd treatment costs in case of infectious diseases. Tapeworm problem? You'd know it weeks earlier, and fix it up front. Anaemia? You could catch it before it happened. Predator attack? You'd get a red alert on their adrenalin readings. And so on.

Then one day, your prize bull experiences SURGE, and you have an Awakened Aurochs snorting and pawing the sod, waiting for the foolish human who dares to approach him.

Even chicken is hard to produce en mass due to cockatrices.

... the Secret Cow Level.

In all seriousness, a quick RFID-chip implant that includes sensors that can check for things like that, would be amazingly useful in the Shadowrun world.

Farms have a much bigger threat than that now...Whimsyshire.

"Thanks Chaz. In the sports world, the NHL has ceased all operations in and around the Philadelphia area as the 100 year anniversary of the last Flyers Cup Win looms. The leader of the local fan club was quoted as saying; "If our boys can't be given a fair game because of these dumbfu[n] zebras, we'll firebomb the hell out of the away team's bus." In Baseball, the Corporate Court has upheld an earlier decision to allow the New York Yankees to actually purchase a World Series title, bypassing the result of regular season play. Appeals are expected. Now to Ted Logan with this weeks Point Counter-Point. Ted?"

... the incarnation of Pure Awesome mixed with Udder Wrongness. ;D

Yeah, we already have a slow movement afoot to deal with the eventual agriculture collapse that we'll see when petroleum products go belly up. Take a gander around your local markets for "Mycoprotein", which is composed of fungi. They won't *tell* you this, because people have an innate revulsion to such matters (Thousands of years of evolution at work), but when they eat it without knowing, things tend to go smoothly for most.

(Of course, those of us with penicillin allergies have to be careful, but, that's a whole other story.)

Wouldn't they hope for a cockatrice? Find a chick hatched as a cockatrice, straight off to whatever they have in place to monetize awakened critters? Even if it's not something you can use as paracritter security, they'd probably raise the things to adulthood in drone farms just to butcher them and sell them.

After all, why dine on regular old chicken when cockatrice hot wings are so much more decadent?

You have to balance for all the losses your likely to have before you can contain the damn thing. I imagine you'd lose at least a few normal chickens and possibly a farmhand before you secure it. Even after selling it, I imagine its going to be a net loss.

Somehow I doubt they come out of the egg killing people. Besides, as was previously mentioned: drones. Even if your chicken farm doesn't use an inhumane (and inhuman) amount of automation, it makes sense to have a mobile cage designed to secure the cockatrices when they show up.

Do we know that they HATCH as cockatrices?

Hrm... You've got a point. Do adult chickens Goblinize into cockatrices, or are they born that way? Maybe a combination of both?

For that matter, are cockatrices necessarily murderous towards the other stock, at least in the time it should take for the monitoring autosoft to identify one Goblinizing and send in the drone?

Questions to be answered in future Parazoology/Going Wild books?

Running Wild, you mean?

Yeah, I just woke up and haven't done cocaine yet.

Breakfast of champions!

Damn. I was hoping for an illustrated copy of Runners Gone Wild.

You're looking at it wrong. You should have bought insurance on the chickens, so they're covered. And that farmhand? Well, he won't be collecting his pay this month. And they paralyze and kill, so all that meat (farm hand included!) can just go right to the butcher if you move fast enough. When you start thinking like a corporation there's no end to the ways to profit.

Yeah, there were issues with the pictures and video never turning out due to the muzzle flashes ruining the shots.

Sounds like lens flares censoring up an otherwise tasteful nude.

"So, how do we mark this one?" "Ground Chuck." "Oh man, Charlie hated puns!"

Farmers tend to deal with new threats by adopting new protocols. Most farmed chickens are hatched from incubators, and hatch into a very controlled environment. Even your cage free birds have substantial buildings in which they mature to pullets - exposure to the elements kills chicks quickly, without a mother to protect them.

If cockatrices hatch as cockatrices, they can be very quickly identified and isolated, either by drones or appropriately equipped farmhands. You don't need manual intervention at the hatching stage, so simple surveillance will get you there. Surveillance with image recognition will solve that problem if they're at all physically differentiable. I'm also leery of accepting the idea that they're capable of much as chicks, but even if so, a farmhand thoroughly protected should be able to avoid paralysis.

If they instead manifest at sexual maturity, that's still fine. The farmer keeps his pullet stock a little longer, identifies the paracritters, and uses a net or tangle trap to immobilise them, or uses a sorting chute. Stuff the cockatrices into their own cages, shove them on the back of a truck, drive straight to the auction lot and listen while Renraku and Aztechnology bid against each other to make the farmer rich.

"Laaaadies and gentlemen, lot number 32, five fine cockatrice pullets, averaging 25kg at three months, from Copper Maran stock. Clean bill of health, ready to go. Let's start the bidding at five hundred, buyer's choice. Can someone start the bidding at five hundred nuyen? Thank, you, the gentleman in the Saeder-Krupp jacket! Any advance on five hundred, do I hear five-fifty? Five-fifty, thank you, do I hear six? Six hundred nuyen ...."

You can buy a lot of feed for the price of five healthy cockatrices.

The paracritters which worry me are the omnivores with massive damage resistance, and huge, razor-sharp tusks. Who wants to tangle with a 3000 pound awakened sow defending her piglets? Or a whole sounder of them galloping down some CAS gully, squealing and grunting like the heralds of death.

You can easily build a run out of that. Even unawakened feral hogs are very destructive. Check http://wildhoghunters.com/ for some ideas.

For a cockatrice problem, if you've got an enclosed run, you could use the rail-mounted drone with a safe-target system or even knockout gas. Every chicken farm is rolling the dice to be a source of telesma.

My mother owns a pair of maran hens. Not copper marans, I don't think, though.
Got 8 others too. Don't recall the breeds off hand. Two Americanas (wikipedia informs me that they may not be). Another pair of sisters that I can't recall the breed for.
One that's very white (aptly named Princess), one very large hen that's a meat/egg mix (that is, the breed does double-duty), and one that's blue (cough, gray) with a floofy head.
</farm life>

If your mother calls you up and asks about them suddenly gaining size, to about 90 pounds, with tails instead of tailfeathers? Let us all know. I want in.

Oh man, the image of a guy in a Saeder-Krupp jacket participating in a country farmer's auction in the sticks is almost as hilarious as the Run possibilities induced by this are awesome.

Great, Ghettoruns and now Redneckruns.

Hey, farmers have same as everyone else, and they need illegal activities done by deniable assets just as much as the next guy.

Besides, haven't you ever wanted an excuse to own one or more of the fine sports rifles published in the books? I could see a Farmer saying "Well, now, lads, I don't have a whole hell of a lot of nuyen to pay you with - now, you'll get some, mind, but not a whole lot... But I have mah gun cabinet." *Opens it up to reveal a cornucopia of weapons, from modern hunting rifles to antiques, to museum piece smoke-poles from the 1700s.* "Some of these have been in the family since 'afore there was a United States. Y'all can have one apiece if you can do this for me, an' I ain't picky as to which, and the money. You boys in?"

Will do.

Well, keep in mind that we're steadily marching past "Farm families" and squarely into "Corporate Megafarms" territory already. Having suit-clad fellows bidding for chickens is right in line.

And I was about to launch into a Thing, but, luckily, I can reach back a decade or so, to when I worked in a local video game arcade and the owner kept the channel on CMT at all hours. It's where I first saw "I kissed a girl", which was being played on CMT around when Katy Perry was in preschool, and where John Michael Montegomery introduced me to the joy of Japanese men in business suits and cowboy hats.

Like so:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oMxio_lrybM

If you can't pluck images of people from this thing...

Dibs on the Percussion Cap Kentucky Squirrel Rifle.

As long as I can have the Percussion Cap Philadelphia Derringer.