Jonathan_S wrote:But I was thinking of something like the Manticoran plague years except something that had adapted to attack the imported planets rather than the humans. So things looked good for decades and then suddenly went wrong and you need some emergency support as you resolve the emergency.
Growing food in space is far less cost effective than growing it on the ground (and it's more exposed to risks from solar flares, meteor storms, hostile ships, etc.) So I'm not surprised that few Honorverse planets seem to set up planetary scale farming in space. But even if they did that just means the emergencies that might make them temporarily dependent on imported food differ -- they don't eliminate the risk of major losses to established food production.
ThinksMarkedly wrote:That's a plague attacking the people, not the food production. It's far easier to quarantine orbital farms than it is to quarantine people. We have direct, incontrovertible, and recent evidence of people's stubbornness to going into lockdown. But if you look at past food production plagues, like mad cow disease and others, they have been managed and contained. At huge cost, no doubt, but they have and they have never threatened our supply.
I'm arguing that the risks in space are different than the ones on the ground, but also that they are far more manageable in space than on the ground, especially for a young colony. I'll address the suitability of the planet in reply to penny below, but the more suitable for agriculture the planet is, the more likely that compatibility of organisms exist to cause problems, as seen in the very Plague Years you're referring to. Therefore, if you have a mildly incompatible planet, you need orbital farms in advance of terra-forming; if you have a wildly compatible planet, you need orbital farms because of the risk on the ground.
We do have one example of a plague that attacked food production in the Honorverse: from Honor Among Enemies:
The original colony ships might not have had the equipment necessary to immediately build orbital farms.Chapter 10 wrote:Like the original Manticoran settlers, Kuan Yin's colonists set out from Old Earth before the Warshawski sail had made hyper-space safe enough for colony vessels. They'd made the centuries-long voyage sublight, in cryo, only to discover that the original survey had missed a minor point about their new home's ecosystem. Specifically, about its microbiology. Kuan Yin's soil was rich in all the necessary minerals and most of the required nutrients for Terrestrial plants, but its local microorganisms had shown a voracious appetite for Terran chlorophyll and ravaged every crop the settlers put in. None of them had bothered the colonists or the Terrestrial animals they'd introduced, but no Terrestrial life form could live on the local vegetation, Terran food crops had been all but impossible to raise, and yields had been spectacularly low. The colonists had managed—somehow—to survive by endless, backbreaking labor in the fields, but some staple crops had been completely wiped out, dietary deficiencies had been terrible, and they'd known that for all their desperate efforts, they were waging an ultimately hopeless war against their own planet's microbiology. Eventually, they were bound to lose enough ground to push them over the precipice into extinction, and there'd been nothing they could do about it. All of which explained why they'd greeted Anderman's "conquest" of their home world almost as a relief expedition.