Grantville Gazette, Volume IX
Page 45
The next place up-timers can contribute to increasing honey production is in the equipment and techniques for handling bees. The use of bee-smokers and the use of protective clothing or at least the use of veils to protect the head will make bee handling safer.
One cannot forget disease when dealing with livestock, and bees are livestock. Up-time bee-keepers will be familiar with the variety of diseases that can afflict their bees as well as the various bacteria that kill off the brood (larva state bees), often called "foul brood." Possible treatments will be known to up-timers. Unfortunately, knowing what the problem is might not help when they can no longer obtain the known solutions.
Wintering over a colony will be a problem. Up-timers will know how to winter over their colonies, but there is a catch. Up-time bee colonies are fed cheap sugar to make up for the honey that is removed. Sugar is no longer cheap. For this reason it is unlikely that the Grantville bee keepers will come anywhere near the forty-seven pounds per colony that they were achieving up-time.
Discussion
A major problem with sugar is the labor requirement. Actually, it's the source of the labor used that is the problem. In Europe there will be "free" farmers who can grow beets or sorghum for sugar. In Brazil and the Caribbean it is almost impossible to recruit Europeans willing to work in the fields in the harsh tropical sun. That leaves plantation owners with a problem. Up-time, a lot of sugar cane is mechanically harvested. Down-time, machines can be designed and built to do the harvesting. Until such machines are easily available and affordable the plantation owners will turn to the one existing source of labor. Slaves.
It has been suggested that the African-American slave trade could be stopped in its infancy if Europe was to produce its own sugar. The lower productivity of European sugar crops makes this difficult to achieve. Boxer [3] reports that in 1630 (just before the Dutch invaded the captaincy) that the Brazilian captaincy of Pernambuco (the area around Recife) produced 22.4 million pounds of sugar from 9,500 acres (Great Britain alone consumed this much sugar in 1700, By 1885 they imported over 1.1 million tons a year). Using the best modern extractive technologies on the sugar beets of the period and the up-time sourced sorghum, Pernambuco's 1630 production can be matched by planting 14,500 acres of beets, or 15,800 acres of sorghum. That's a lot of land to take out of production of other crops. It is even worse if we assume they try to replace Pernambuco's production using the existing vertical mills (Nearly 83,000 acres of sugar beet or 62,500 acres of sorghum). Now, if we add the labor component needed to harvest that much land. . . .
Conclusions
There is no way Europe can produce sufficient sugar from beets or sorghum to significantly impact the demand for cane sugar. Cane will be king for many years to come.
Sugar cane producers will grab the new innovations available from Grantville as they strive to maximize profit. There are simple changes that can double and even triple current yields (It is possible to almost quadruple production) from the cane they are already processing.
Sugar beet is only going to be economical while there is a high import tax on sugar and some form of government subsidy or price support. Without this price support, production of sugar from sugar beet production is doubtful. (In 2000 the world price for sugar was US$0.09/lb. USA government support to growers in America was US$0.18/lb for cane sugar and US$0.23/lb for beet sugar [9].)
Appendix 1.
Table 2. Commercial sugarcane production in the United States and Puerto Rico
Adapted from USDA/ERS publication #SSSV20N2, June 1995; estimated production, 1995-1996.
Table 3. Sugar Beet production in Europe,1997
Source: IENICA. (Adapted from the FAO 1997 table)
REFERENCES.
1) Encyclopaedia Britannica Eleventh Edition 1910-1911 (Sugar)
2) Adamson, Alan H. (1972). Sugar Without Slaves: The Political Economy of British Guiana, 1838-1904. Yale University Press.
3) Boxer, C.R.. (1957). The Dutch in Brazil 1624-1654. Clarendon Press. Oxford.
4) Eisenberg, Peter L (1974) . The Sugar Industry in Pernambuco : Modernization Without Change, 1840-1910.
5) IENICA: Interactive European Network for Industrial Crops and their Applications http://www.ienica.net/crops/sugarbeet.htm
6) Sugarcane IPM http://ipmworld.umn.edu/chapters/meagher.htm
7) Encyclopaedia Britannica 15th edition, 1997
8) An Overview of Florida Sugarcane http://edis.ifas.ufl.edu/SC032
9) Rural Migration News: Southeast, Florida Sugar, FLOC: http://migration.ucdavis.edu/rmn/more.php?id=488_0_3_0
Images
Note from Editor:
There are various images, mostly portraits from the time, which illustrate different aspects of the 1632 universe. In the first issue of the Grantville Gazette, I included those with the volume itself. Since that created downloading problems for some people, however, I've separated all the images and they will be maintained and expanded on their own schedule.
If you're interested, you can look at the images and my accompanying commentary at no extra cost. They are set up in the Baen Free Library. You can find them as follows:
1) Go to www.baen.com
2) Select "Free Library" from the blue menu at the top.
3) Once in the Library, select "The Authors" from the yellow menu on the left.
4) Once in "The Authors," select "Eric Flint."
5) Then select "Images from the Grantville Gazette."
Submissions to the Magazine
If anyone is interested in submitting stories or articles for future issues of the Grantville Gazette, you are welcome to do so. But you must follow a certain procedure:
1) All stories and articles must first be posted in a conference in Baen's Bar set aside for the purpose, called "1632 Slush. " Do not send them to me directly, because I won't read them. It's good idea to submit a sketch of your story to the conference first, since people there will likely spot any major problems that you overlooked. That can wind up saving you a lot of wasted work.
You can get to that conference by going to Baen Books' web site www.baen.com. Then select "Baen's Bar." If it's your first visit, you will need to register. (That's quick and easy.) Once you're in the Bar, the three conferences devoted to the 1632 universe are "1632 Slush," "1632 Slush Comments," and "1632 Tech Manual. " You should post your sketch, outline or story in "1632 Slush." Any discussion of it should take place in "1632 Slush Comments." The "1632 Tech Manual" is for any general discussion not specifically related to a specific story.
2) Your story/article will then be subjected to discussion and commentary by participants in the 1632 discussion. In essence, it will get chewed on by what amounts to a very large, virtual writers' group.
You do not need to wait until you've finished the story to start posting it in "1632 Slush." In fact, it's a good idea not to wait, because you will often find that problems can be spotted early in the game, before you've put all the work into completing the piece.
3) While this is happening, the assistant editor of the Grantville Gazette, Paula Goodlett, will be keeping an eye on the discussion. She will alert me whenever a story or article seems to be gaining general approval from the participants in the discussion. There's also an editorial board to which Paula and I belong, which does much the same thing. The other members of the board are Karen Bergstralh, Rick Boatright, and Laura Runkle. In addition, authors who publish regularly in the 1632 setting participate on the board as ex officio members. My point is that plenty of people will be looking over the various stories being submitted, so you needn't worry that your story will just get lost in the shuffle.
4) At that point—and only at that point—do I take a look at a story or article.
I insist that people follow this procedure, for two reasons:
First, as I said, I'm very busy and I just don't have time to read everything submitted until I have some reason to think it's gotten past a certain preliminary screening.
Secon
dly, and even more importantly, the setting and "established canon" in this series is quite extensive by now. If anyone tries to write a story without first taking the time to become familiar with the setting, they will almost invariably write something which—even if it's otherwise well written—I simply can't accept.
In short, the procedure outlined above will save you a lot of wasted time and effort also.
One point in particular: I have gotten extremely hardnosed about the way in which people use American characters in their stories (so-called "up-timers"). That's because I began discovering that my small and realistically portrayed coal mining town of 3500 people was being willy-nilly transformed into a "town" with a population of something like 20,000 people—half of whom were Navy SEALs who just happened to be in town at the Ring of Fire, half of whom were rocket scientists (ibid), half of whom were brain surgeons (ibid), half of whom had a personal library the size of the Library of Congress, half of whom . . .
Not to mention the F-16s which "just happened" to be flying through the area, the Army convoys (ibid), the trains full of vital industrial supplies (ibid), the FBI agents in hot pursuit of master criminals (ibid), the . . .
NOT A CHANCE. If you want to use an up-time character, you must use one of the "authorized" characters. Those are the characters created by Virginia DeMarce using genealogical software and embodied in what is called "the grid."
You can obtain a copy of the grid from the web site which collects and presents the by-now voluminous material concerning the series, www.1632.org. Look on the right for the link to "Virginia's Up-timer Grid." While you're at it, you should also look further down at the links under the title "Authors' Manual."
You will be paid for any story or factual article which is published. The rates that I can afford for the magazine at the moment fall into the category of "semi-pro." I hope to be able to raise those rates in the future to make them fall clearly within professional rates, but . . . That will obviously depend on whether the magazine starts selling enough copies to generate the needed income. In the meantime, the rates and terms which I can offer are posted below in the standard letter of agreement accepted by all the contributors to this issue.
Standard letter of agreement
Below are the terms for the purchase of a story or factual article (hereafter "the work") to be included in an issue of the online magazine Grantville Gazette, edited by Eric Flint and published by Baen Books.
Payment will be sent upon acceptance of the work at the following rates:
1) a rate of 2.5 cents per word for any story or article up to 15,000 words;
2) a rate of 2 cents a word for any story or article after 15,000 words but before 30,000 words;
3) a rate of 1.5 cents a word for any story or article after 30,000 words.
The rates are cumulative, not retroactive to the beginning of the story or article. (E.g., a story 40,000 words long would earn the higher rates for the first 30,000 words.) Word counts will be rounded to the nearest hundred and calculated by Word for Windows XP.
In the event a story has a payment that exceeds $200, the money will be paid in two installments: half on acceptance, and the remaining half two months after publication of the story.
You agree to sell exclusive first world rights for the story, including exclusive first electronic rights for five years following publication, and subsequent nonexclusive world rights. Should Baen Books select your story for a paper edition, you will not receive a second advance but will be paid whatever the differential might be between what you originally received and the advance for different length stories established for the paper edition. You will also be entitled to a proportionate share of any royalties earned by the authors of a paper edition. If the work is reissued in a paper edition, then the standard reversion rights as stipulated in the Baen contract would supercede the reversion rights contained here.
Eric Flint retains the rights to the 1632 universe setting, as well as the characters in it, so you will need to obtain his permission if you wish to publish the story or use the setting and characters through anyone other than Baen Books even after the rights have reverted to you. You, the author, will retain copyright and all other rights except as listed above. Baen will copyright the story on first publication.
You warrant and represent that you have the right to grant the rights above; that these rights are free and clear; that your story will not violate any copyright or any other right of a third party, nor be contrary to law. You agree to indemnify Baen for any loss, damage, or expense arising out of any claim inconsistent with any of the above warranties and representations.
THE END
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