Tatooine and moisture farmers

[Tychu]

I know im streatching this a little but here goes.

When some one says a person makes a living off selling water does it really mean litterly that they make a living off water. In the technical way the Lars family and the other moister farm familys do make a living off water. They harvest water from the atmosphere and grow crops to sell. Those crops cant grow without the farmers getting the water so in the technicaly way moister farmers need to get water to make a living on tatooine

[His Divine Shadow]

"On Tatooine, vaporators (of an unknown number, apparently) set 250 meters apart can be expected to gather 1.5 liters a day."

How can one honestly expect to turn a reasonable profit selling 1.5 liters of water a day? Would it not be cheaper to hire some asshole to fly to a stream on a nearby planet and fill up his tanks with that, go back to Tatooine, and let the farmers sell that back to the people at a much larger price (if water is so valuable on Tatooine, anyways).

Sounds to me that it's 1.5litres per vaporator, per day, say 1000 vaporators for a farm, that'd require a few square kilometers I guess, thats 1500 litres per day, if a season is say 6 months, that'll be 279,000 litres.

Looking around I found that water goes for $100 per cubic metre in places like Zimbabwe and such, anyway, that means a farmer with a thousand vaporators could possibly expect to bring home 55,800$ a year, minus taxes and maintenance.

[PainRack]

"On Tatooine, vaporators (of an unknown number, apparently) set 250 meters apart can be expected to gather 1.5 liters a day."

How can one honestly expect to turn a reasonable profit selling 1.5 liters of water a day? Would it not be cheaper to hire some asshole to fly to a stream on a nearby planet and fill up his tanks with that, go back to Tatooine, and let the farmers sell that back to the people at a much larger price (if water is so valuable on Tatooine, anyways).

Sounds to me that it's 1.5litres per vaporator, per day, say 1000 vaporators for a farm, that'd require a few square kilometers I guess, thats 1500 litres per day, if a season is say 6 months, that'll be 279,000 litres.

Looking around I found that water goes for $100 per cubic metre in places like Zimbabwe and such, anyway, that means a farmer with a thousand vaporators could possibly expect to bring home 55,800$ a year, minus taxes and maintenance.

I will like to ask in what currency that is,if its something like 100 rupees.................................................

But seriously.Hong kong imports virtually all of her water from the Mainland China,and it pays approximately 10 remminbi for each liter.And that's considered to be one of the most exorbitant prices for water.The usual rates is approximately 2-5 dollars per liter in Asia.

Gee golly whiz everyone, how do you transport water? You put it in tanks, strap it on to your speeder, and drive it to the nearest town, that's how. Did it really require that much thought

Gee,do you know how heavy water is?How much water you're going to carry?10kg worth only?

[Spanky The Dolphin]

Are you seriously asking what a US Doller is worth?

And were you seriously not listening? The ICS2 states that you can transport water in repulsorlift trailers towed by the vehicle...

Jesus Christ, you damn Brownie, it almost sounds like you're being this stupid on purpose...

[Patrick Ogaard]

If I'm remembering things right, old Ben Kenobi's little homestead was supposed to be on the edge of the Dune Sea. And, in the latest edition of ANH, that little house of Ben's includes a vaporator. The vaporator is right next to the house, so that it might get more water per square meter than a vaporator in the Dune Sea proper, but whichever way it goes, it should provide 1.5 liters per day since it isn't competing with other vaporators. Ben was likely all but self-sufficient, so 1.5 liters of water daily should be a very rough guide to what a human on Tattooine needs daily to survive. This obviously has to include quite a bit of reclamation and some serious economizing. Non-Jedi probably need at least 3 liters per day, more if they're out and about at length in the heat.

Also, if a vaporator in the less arid regions needs to be set about 250 meters apart from other vaporators, then one square kilometer should be able to support about 4 vaporators. That means a water yield of about 6 liters per square kilometer.

Assuming a tiny farmstead with four people and just one square kilometer of vaporator coverage per person, how does that work out? Let's assume that each person on the farm needs 3 liters of water daily (since sonic showers and near-frictionless toilet bowls likely eliminate two major modern water wasters). That leaves a surplus of 3 liters per square kilometer per day. Over the course of a year figured at 360 days to account for minor vaporator failures, we end up with a total annual surplus of 360 x 12, or 4,320 liters. Sold at the equivalent of US$ 5.00 per liter, that would figure out to $21,600. At $10.00 per liter, it would be $43,200.

Obviously this is a lot of money to be asking for water. But let's say that we have a vending machine dispensing quarter-liter cans of pure, chilled water at $0.60 each: That's $6.00 per 1.5 liters right there, and the price does not seem unreasonably excessive in a desert environment. That makes the $5.00 average per liter received by the moisture farmer at market seem almost realistic.

At the pure subsistence level, a moisture farm with four people and four square kilometers seems to be almost possible as long as nothing goes wrong. Every additional square kilometer successfully worked should yield a further 4,320 liters annually, or $21,600 at $5/liter, though it would also increase the operation's overhead.

Unfortunately, the above is speculation. It's speculation I think is pretty good, but it is speculation.

Now about transporation of the goods. The EGWT mentions that some moisture farmers rely on underground pipelines, and that many moisture farmers keep their underground water tanks right by the farmhouse to be able to defend their harvest. There's also the mention, in the AOTC novelization I think, of water trailers.

If the farmstead is located near a place serving as a cargo transfer station (Toshi Station?), and if there is enough sand cover over the underlying bedrock, then laying a pipeline should be a relatively simple affair. We're not talking about transferring thousands or millions of cubic meters of water in a short time, so something like a heavily reinforced and insulated garden hose should be adequate. Using a vibrating plow, which could be droid-operated, laying such a pipeline at a depth of half a meter, or potentially even a meter or two, under the surface of the sand should not be too difficult a task, even over a distance of several tens of kilometers. If buried deeply enough, the pipeline should be largely immune to water thieves, and sensors incorporated into the fabric of the pipeline could report breaks or leaks, with automatic seals placed every 10 to 50 meters.

If a pipeline is infeasible or too expensive, as would be the case in a rocky desert area, water containers or water trailers would be the obvious choices. A water trailer of 1,000 liters (1 cubic meter) is about right for a smallish farm vehicle. If the large, enclosed speeder owned by the Lars family had a trailer hitch, taking a cubic meter of water to market would have been no big problem.

On the penny ante side, Luke's speeder could easily transport water in 20-liter containers like jerricans. Two jerricans in the passenger seat, one in the passenger side footwell, two more to each side of the speeder's middle engine, where the droids sit, and Luke's speeder could transport 140 liters (or $700 at $5/liter) at a time.

In areas where the moisture farming business is organized like parts of the European dairy business, the moisture farmers could be part of a cooperative that regularly sends a water tanker truck around to the individual farms and picks up the surplus water produced between circuits of the route. A cooperative that can regularly offer a water tanker with 5 cubic meters of water can probably negotiate better terms than dozens of individual farmers offering water by the dozens and hundreds of liters.

Taking the Darklighter Ranch -- with "hundreds or thousands of square kilometers" -- as an example at the other extreme than the tiny subsistence farm, if one were to assume that it devotes a thousand square kilometers to moisture farming for pay, then that would generate about 6 cubic meters of water daily, more than enough to fill a 5,000 liter water tanker daily and have some water left over to cover occasional shortfalls and overhead. If sold at $5/liter, a daily tanker of water would be good for $25,000. Annually that would exceed $1.25 million. If the Darklighters had 2,000 square kilometers, it would be a good $2.5 million annually, a reasonable foundation for the Darklighter fortune.

At a consumption of just 3 liters of unrecoverable water per day per capita, a town of 10,000 would need 30,000 liters daily. That's plenty of work for moisture farmers. And since Tattooine does not appear to have any large bodies of open water, it has a lot of available surface area for moisture farming even if one figures in continent-sized wilderness areas frequented only by Sand People and impractically arid regions like the Dune Sea.

[His Divine Shadow]

I will like to ask in what currency that is,if its something like 100 rupees...

I dunno, there are many online currency converters to use if you're really interested.

But seriously.Hong kong imports virtually all of her water from the Mainland China,and it pays approximately 10 remminbi for each liter.And that's considered to be one of the most exorbitant prices for water.The usual rates is approximately 2-5 dollars per liter in Asia.

And this price in Zimbabwe(a poor country) is 100$ per cubic metre, or 10$ per litre.

[vakundok]

Also, if a vaporator in the less arid regions needs to be set about 250 meters apart from other vaporators, then one square kilometer should be able to support about 4 vaporators. That means a water yield of about 6 liters per square kilometer.

Excuse me, but isn't it 16? (125m, 375m, 625m, 875m and in square) Or even more up to the (unreachable) theoretical maximum of 20. (250m apart from each other means a circle 125m in radius and the area of 49,088 m2) Or the distance is actually 500 meters?

[vakundok]

And this price in Zimbabwe(a poor country) is 100$ per cubic metre, or 10$ per litre.

Excuse me, but as long as I know 1 litre is 1 cubic decimetre, so 1 cubic metre is 1,000 litres (10*10*10).

[His Divine Shadow]

Yes, I forgot myself there.

[Isolder74]

Note the Jawa's want to try and sell a mining droid(the black domed one) to the Lars Family. Now a droid designed to lay mines would be easily modifiable it a pipe laying unit. Since it is autonomonus it should be able to lay all of the Pipe you need 24/7. This is not the first time the Lars have bought droids from these Jawas so it seem logical that the Jawas have consider what this customer has purched before and laid out a sample of their most popular purchased droids. Some of those droids were not the best looking ones in the hold after all(the R1 unit comes to mind). So since The Jawas seemed to think that Owen might buy a Mining Droid might indicate that he does have a pipe network and since a droid never tires it can do alot of work with prouper maintenance. Using Tank trailers simply means they can also sell their water at a farther away market at probably better prices then the nearby lightly populated Toshe Station.

[Patrick Ogaard]

Also, if a vaporator in the less arid regions needs to be set about 250 meters apart from other vaporators, then one square kilometer should be able to support about 4 vaporators. That means a water yield of about 6 liters per square kilometer.

Excuse me, but isn't it 16? (125m, 375m, 625m, 875m and in square) Or even more up to the (unreachable) theoretical maximum of 20. (250m apart from each other means a circle 125m in radius and the area of 49,088 m2) Or the distance is actually 500 meters?

I think you're just about right, actually. It's what I get for trying to think late in the day. Some part of my brain was focusing too hard on the spacing of vaporators in particularly arid areas and didn't tell the rest what it was doing. That brain cramp on my part is further cemented by the fact that for my $5.00/liter basic price for water to work, the quarter-liter can of chilled, pure water I was blathering on about would have to cost the consumer at least $1.50, not $0.60. Apparently in brain cramp world, .25 *10=1.

The numbers do shift, based on that, probably making moisture-farmed water an even more practical proposition. Even on a ball of sand and rock like Tattooine, real estate probably costs something, and getting more out of the land per square kilometer would lower overhead and raise profitability even if the price per liter of water were somewhat lower.

[Ace Pace]

I dont know if any of you have noticed, but in the 25th anniversary star wars trilogy book, page 68

Soon, for the first time, those sands would blossom with food plants. This formar wasteland would see an eruption of green.
The though ought to have sent a thrill of anticipation through Luke. He should have been flushed with excitement as his uncle was whenever he described the coming harvest. Instead Luke felt nothing but a vast indiffernt emptiness. Not even the prospect of having a lot of money for the first time in his life exited him.

this quote says that they are growing FOOD to sell, I don't see anything about water.

[PainRack]

Are you seriously asking what a US Doller is worth?

And were you seriously not listening? The ICS2 states that you can transport water in repulsorlift trailers towed by the vehicle...

Jesus Christ, you damn Brownie, it almost sounds like you're being this stupid on purpose...

I'm asking what that quote means in terms of purchasing power,dolt.

As for ICS2, yes. But, again,how much lifting power does a racing swoop have? A racing car in our time may have a 1,000 hp engine, but its frame can't take an additional load of 1,000 kg. So, is that quote realistic? Not in terms of transporting water to sell.

However, its become more realistic if Owen was using it on his farm, as in to haul water trailers to irrigrate crops. Note the words "vermin traps", something that will also be used on a farm.

And vakundok has shown the actual volume of the sale, that means Zimbadwee sells its water for 10 cents. Looks like my price range for water in Asia is actually even more inflated than in a desert country.

Last but not least, can you counter the words"Luke had grown steadily more acrimonious as the boy's restlessness pulled him in directions other than farming. Directions for which Owen,a stolid man of the soil "

The fact is this. Nowhere in the canon material is the sale of water mentioned as their main economic activity. However, Owen Lars activity is described as farming and the descriptive phrase "man of the soil" does not conjure up a water farmer.