In a zombie setting the fact that agriculture takes up a lot of space could be really useful from a story-telling point of view. It provides a reason to expand past the walls of the settlement.

It’s weird because in these settings a successful settlement is usually portrayed as basically impossible for the zombies to break into. Then, somebody has to do something stupid to let them in. Movies where things fall apart despite nobody making an obviously stupid mistake are a lot more satisfying IMO.

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bluGill 13 hours ago | parent | next [-]

You don't expand beyond the settlement - your fields are already there. You leave the settlement to tend the fields. You can't wall all the fields but you can wall the village.

expanding is done when the fields get too far to walk there and back in a day. Then you make a new village.

more likely you practice what birth control you can to limit population. Your other choice is go to war and kill some other village so your kids can move there. There was essentially no unclaimed land you could expand into.

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bee_rider 12 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I agree. The main point here is that the inability to put the farm inside the walls provides necessary motivation to have people go out and get bit, which is what we need for the story to happen.

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Cthulhu_ 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> You can't wall all the fields but you can wall the village.

An interesting take on this is depicted in Attack on Titan, where they do in fact wall all the fields - the city (I don't remember if it's like the last vestige of humanity or whatever) is surrounded in concentric ring walls, the outer one which contains villages and farmland having a circumference of about 3000 kilometers for an internal area of 723,822 km², making its area just a bit smaller than Zambia and Chile.

Of course, a 3000 kilometer, 50 meter tall wall is ridiculous. But then again the great wall of China is 21.000 kilometers long. I believe there's more info about the walls and their construction in the source.

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thechao 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Ballpark figures based on the ram earth construction for TGE vs AOT would have the AOT wall be 5-10x the volume & mass of the TGW. The issue is labor — the Great Wall probably represents 20–100 million ma years of labor. The AoT wall probably has at most 100k man years of labor it could've pulled from. That'd mean it's labor-mass ratio is off by 1000–10000x.

	▲	Izkata an hour ago \| parent [-]
		This gets into spoiler territory, but the walls in Attack on Titan weren't made with human labor. The first hint that something funky is going on was at the end of the first season finale, but we don't get the full story about the walls until much later.

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nine_k 12 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Cutting off some forest might help.

	▲	bluGill 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		What forest? Either it was owned by a noble with enough of an army to stop you, your great...grandparents already cut it, or the land wouldn't be useful for farming for some other reason. North America had vast empty forests - but remember just before Europeans arrived disease (small pox) killed large portions of the population. We have very little recorded about what life was like before Columbus, but archeological evidence suggests that the land was already used to the max capacity of their technology. (Europe did bring technology to better use the land - for some definition of better. I'm not qualified to comment on why they didn't develop the technology, but there seems to be some interesting culture factors - perhaps you can find an expert)

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Gravityloss 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Just like in I guess a large portion of human history after farming started. You abandoned the fields and retreated to the walled hilltop when the enemy came. Maybe that's what we have been genetically conditioned to expect and that's why we have these zombie films and series.