So, you’ve set up a colony, got your crops in, wheat, potatoes, maize, and other veg, but… there’s something missing. Something that is land intensive, not very adaptable to hydroponics, and it’s something humans are wired to have. It’s good in your coffee, on your oatmeal, cookies, cakes, and, of course, candy.
It’s sugar.
It only grows in wet, temperate or tropical environments. It needs at least 63cm of rain, but it is one of the most efficient converters of sunlight into biomass. Plant once and harvest up to 10 times before replanting. But your average cane weighs about 1.36kg and only yields 0.12kg of sugar. Yes, there are the other products that can be used, but you need a lot of plants to satisfy the want for for sugar.
So, if you have the right environs for sugar, you grow sugar and ship it, either refined or in cane form to other worlds. If you just want sugar, it’s available. If you want all the products from refining sugarcane, you can get cane, just a lot more of it, as cane is 85% juice, of which only 11% is sugar.
Of course at higher tech levels they just synthesize it. But it’s a major import for those worlds that can’t grow it or make it.
Heh, now I’ve got this mental picture of these huge Second Life vat farms where they ‘clone’ sugar. [SL is a faction in my game that has cornered the market on high tech slavery.]
Fascinating! Though I imagine that colonies would likely use a variant of the Sugar Beet instead, since it’s much hardier than the sugarcane and can grow in more varied climate. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sugar_beet)
And there would certainly be a big bio-engineering market for genetically perfected crops that can survive the temperatures and soil composition of specific planets.
en.wikipedia.org – Sugar beet – Wikipedia
Looks like we have article dissonance. The Sugarcane article says it can grow in temperate climates and that sugar beets are restricted to cold temperate climates. 🙂
Still, sugarcane is the most common crop grown in the world as it’s a grass and grass grows just about anywhere, and sugar beets need special soil conditions to grow.
But, there’s no reason not to do both. And don’t forget honey, though shipping bees to alien worlds would be fraught with peril for the bees. What if the native flowering plants are toxic?
en.wikipedia.org – Sugarcane – Wikipedia
Alternatively, there’s probably a HUGE market for XenoHoney and XenoSugars. Think of all the interesting alien fruits and grains and saps we can make into food.
And then we get into humanity’s #1 passtime since the dawn of civilization: fermenting everything within reach to make alcohol.
“It’s the latest thing! The bright blue Sky Flower honey! It has the flavor of fresh oranges and the tang of lemon!”
Yeah, import bees from Earth! Useful insects, indeed.
The biggest problem is to keep the bees alive during transit. You just can’t freeze the eggs and hope for useful bees. It turns out that they have to learn how to be a bee from other bees. So you need live, viable colonies for that. The average honey bee lives for 25 days. The queen will live for long while, but still, she’s not immortal. Its a real problem transporting bees for more than a few days.
And before you ask, bees are everywhere, so no, they didn’t bring bees with them from the old world. They used new world bees.
Ok, so hear me out: Long-travel Colony Ships with apiary-hydroponics. Hydroponic Honey.
You could do a variant of the gag about hornets as sentient beings in Neal Asher’s Polity novels.