CT Economics of Moisture Farming

So, as is wont to happen in an internet forum thread, there's a little tangent going on in the Solo Box Office discussion about whether Luke was a middle class or working class kid, growing up on the Lars moisture farm. That thread has enough tangents as it is, so I figured I'd start this one to discuss what sort of lifestyle one could expect form moisture farming on Tatooine.

Basically, my premise is that it is pretty damn poor, bottom of the rung working class, though clearly above slavery, and that, like farmers through most of history, its a pretty bleak life.

Obviously, we have to make some huge leaps here, because its Star Wars, and not hard science fiction (if it was, there's no possible way this makes any sense at all), but there's one basic premise that must be true: Farming moisture on Tatooine is preferable, for whatever reason, to just selling their property and moving off world. Therefore, it must be, at minimum, profitable enough to keep the family feed and keep the farm going.

Points in favor of being lower working class lifestyle:
- They farm water. One of the most abundant molecules in the universe. Can't be much money in that, particularly in a galactic economy.
- Their source of water is the atmosphere, which is common property. Ergo, there's nothing to stop another farmer from setting up shop upwind of you.
- Their property is largely non-arable land; its just rock and sand. On a sparsely populated planet, so there's little population pressure to drive land value up.
- They live on a planet that is far off the trading routes, routinely ignored by the government, where whatever former economy there was in the past is well since dead.
- The planet is run by organized crime - hardly a conducive environment to economic prosperity.
- Current canon mentions that, when Luke was young, there was a serious drought, exacerbated by Jabba collecting a water tax.
- All of their equipment is clearly second-hand at best (some of the droids are referenced as being centuries old).
- They don't make enough to have permanent farm hands, and all the work is done by the family itself, and the droids. Owen makes it clear that Luke leaving would be economically devastating to the family.
- The family has to deal with Tusken raiders to greater or lesser degrees - they're problematic enough that Luke's grandmother was killed by them.

There's some circumstantial evidence of their relative poverty, such as the fact that Luke is so interested in joining the Imperial Academy, which one could assume has free tuition, but there's no firm evidence of that, so I won't include that as evidence.

There's also the non-trivial factor in the Lars family life decisions of Luke being literally the most important person in the galaxy, and they're trying to save him from his destiny. That would factor into their economic calculus in a variety of ways, both postive and negative. Suffice to say, the Lars family has a reason for staying in the planet furthest from the bright center of the universe.

If anyone has a list of reasons they think the Lars are doing relatively well, I'll let them make the initial counter point, rather than let myself try to make their argument for them.

 

I think perspective is needed for this discussion. If a real-world example is drawn I think the Lars farm would be considered as a farm in the middle of the Sahara. Not heartland America or another western country. The conditions were more akin to Dune (Arrakis) and is a fictional landscape devoid of comfort and luxury. A barter-based society. Indeed the Jawas may have been paid in water for the stolen droids.

To reiterate my post from the BO thread.

But in all seriousness, a great many farming families are incredibly poor and live below the povity line struggeling to put food in their mouths as they try to maintain making a living off the land that's been in the family for generations. In our country of Australia, the plight of farmers in drought and the inability to maintain their existence is a common theme. It's far from an lower/middle-class life. There are massive cases of suicide, broken families and tragedy. Lukes story is a believable one of hardship IMHO. When they walk off the land they have nothing besides crippling debt.​

 

Very true. The only problem with comparing it to the Sahara is that nobody is farming the Sahara, for obvious reasons. The only problem with comparing it with Arrakis is that at least on Arrakis, there's a very vibrant economy due to the Spice - being a moisture farming there would be quite the lucrative operation (given that the planet has enough moisture locked away to terraformed from a desert). This really runs us up against the fictional setting of Star Wars: we need the galaxy to be interconnected enough that its not too difficult to move to a nicer planet, but not so easy that someone could just start shipping comets (or bits of Hoth) to Tatooine.

 

I'm not sure such discussion can proceed with a real-world example - farming in the erg is nothing common, and subsistence farming there is not viable, nor is moisture farming really a subsistence farming form on Earth.

Closest I can suggest to look at similar environments is farming in the Sahel.

 

I suppose if we had to, we could compare them to societies like the Garamantes, who mined fossil water in the Sahara.

 

In the Star Wars novelization and even the filmed but cut Biggs/Luke scene, Biggs mentions that the Empire is starting to centralize commerce in the core systems. He then tells Luke how it is coming this way(to Tatooine).This implies that it is not in the Outer Rim.So that suggests a level of private land ownership or at least planetary ownership outside a central government.

The Lars' seem to own their own droids/servants. This is like a small miniaturized plantation or small-scale farm with slaves/laborers.

 

I think the hive of scum and villainy is the spice. Farming for water in a wasteland suggests the economics of the farming venture and what has value.

 

Well, many family farmers do have hired hands without being prosperous. The farmers across the valley from my family's farm have a bunch of permanent hired hands, and they are doing much better than we are, enough that I'd call them middle class. So, I think comparing it to a plantation might be a bit too far, particularly with the connotations that has, both economic and social.

An interesting comparison, the criminal activity as compared to the spice. Of course, the spice is a legal commodity and is the most valuable substance in the Dune universe, whereas whatever criminal enterprises being conducted on Tatooine are just underground commerce that could happen anywhere. I guess it would create enough demand that one could justify farming (though then we have to wonder why the criminals are all on Tatooine, as opposed to any more hospitable planet).

 

That it seems to be, although there are no servants around, and droids seem more used along the lines of autonomous hardware (3P0 is acquired as a translating machine and R2-D2 as a reprogramming interface). It's definitely second-hand equipment being used, and there's never really exposition of a credit-based structure to acquire equipment.

The Lars farm isn't quite struggling for life either, considering Owen is hoping to be able to hire a farmhand "next season", if the harvest is a good one. But it's by no means wealthy either - we're literally talking about three people working a farm, whether the third one is a nephew or a hired hand, and that one is also entirely within the small family farm norm.

 

Yeah I intentionally used plantation in my comment not because of economics of scale it might imply(because vast majority of plantations especially in Caribbean were huge) but mostly to suggest that the farmers used a coerced labor force or chattel labor force. This is one of those great unspoken things SW just uses and throws out there but doesn't really address because it harkens back to classic films and stories where those types of social arrangements were also shown and written about.
So the Lars have servants that keep them from being the absolute bottom of society. They seem to also own/lease land where their moisture evaporators are stationed. Then their homestead itself which is mostly underground and has multiple rooms. They don't live in a single or two room dwelling. They have a garage and some vehicles for transport.

Luke also mentioned having a T-16 back home he used to bullseye womprats.
I would put them at solid working class. Hard life of manual labor but make enough to get by.

 

I would argue against using dwelling size as an indicator of wealth, particularly when their home is literally an adobe-clad hole in the ground.

Though if we were, I’d point out that their kitchen is tiny, and everyone knows you judge a home by its kitchen.

 

Solid working class is also where I would have the Lars pegged. They themselves don't quite seem to use coerced labor or chattel labor, but on the other hand droids seem to do the work that would devolve to such labor, with their own specialization, and of course droids aren't paid, but owned.

Slavery is definitely a thing on Tatooine, of course, but I'm actually curious whether the "maintenance" of a slave, notably in water, might just be too expensive to really make slave labor more cost-effective than droid labor in moisture farms. We don't really have hard data there, though.

Luke owns the equivalent of a worn motorbike

 

The other thing to consider is that “Republic Credits have no value” Watto. The suggestion is that its a land that lacks a civilised money system. However I am very mindful that Luke seems to use coins to buy drinks at the Cantina. Maybe the influence of the Empires expansion is well in effect.

Lars may however have claimed his land and never purchased it.

 

Tatooine doesnt seem to hold much value for the Republic or the Empire. It's not a part of either one. Their monetary system is probably just local and composed of whatever the Hutts endorse.

 

There does seem to be a viable currency system (Luke using a form of coinage, so does Han, and I think Owen also buys from the Jawas in currency). Bartering is also clearly a thing of the present, and formalized banking seems to be absent. The latter one would explain why Republic credits are considered as having no value in Watto's time - they wouldn't be possible to convert to local currency and can't be bartered away, and only a small portion of the Tatooine population would have any use for them, that use occurring mostly off-world.

 

Luke is a teenager. He is living what seems like the Tatooine version of an American teenage life. Before the 1940s there really weren't teenagers. You were a child until you were old enough / big enough to work at which point you were an adult. That says a lot about the economics of Tatoonie that Luke and his friends have disposable incomes to soup up speeders and race Skyhoopers.

I always got the feeling the Lars family was getting by but not rich or overly comfortable. Owning land doesn't make a person rich if the land isn't worth anything. The barren deserts gives it a sort of a Grapes of Wrath dust bowl feeling. Of course we know they are harvesting water that's stored underground, so what we see doesn't tell us anything about how well they are doing. But seeing it makes them feel very poor, like they are just getting by farming the dust itself.

Luke is able to go off to higher education at the Naval Academy. It's at least available to him, whether he pays for it or not. In some time periods and places on Earth higher education wouldn't be available to everyone.

Also Luke has a Landspeeder. The family also owns a second land speeder and an Skyhopper which is like a small airplane / air speeder. We know from conversations that business is doing well enough Uncle Owen is hiring more droids to assist in the work. Luke is definitely a teenager. Certain levels of prosperity and economic stability are needed for that. Then again you need tools to farm.

We also see that a lot of things at the Farm haven't change from when Cleig Lars lived there to A New Hope.

 

Luke sells his speeder for some accepted currency that Han will accept from him and Jabba will accept from him. What currency that is, we're not told, but Obi Wan does say that they'll pay more once they reach Alderaan, and we have to assume that Alderaan is on the 'proper' Imperial economy.

Regarding Luke's adolescence, do we really see him with much recreational time of the sort we'd associate with post-WW2 suburbia? He has a life outside the farm, sure, and, as a 19 year old, he has a desire to be with his friends, but his whole world really is the farm first, and everything else second. Thats pretty normal for farm life, throughout the ages.

Regarding an education, I'd argue that Luke's laser-focus on the Academy is proof of their economic plight. He never mentions Coruscant University or Correllia Institute of Technology. In any militarized society (as the Empire surely is), its common for many to see their only path to advancement as through the military. Particularly for rural populations. The classic example, of course, is the Roman Empire, in which the poor Balkan farmers supplied a much higher per-capita manpower contribution to the legions than the rest of the Empire, because their economic prospects were that poor. It seems like thats the situation for the youth of Tatooine, too, with Biggs being the obvious example, prior to Luke.

As for the landspeeders, we're shown that they're in pretty bad condition, and that Luke doesn't get a good price for his. According to reference materials, both speeders are very obsolete second-hand purchases. I invite anyone with the time on their hands to go swing by a failing farm anywhere in the United States. I'll bet good money that one thing they're not short on is old, second hand equipment.

 

Even Rey has a speeder and what does she own? Everyone has access to tech in the SW universe.

 

Just a few points.

I don’t think the Lars homestead is exactly “poor” in the “dirt-poor” sense, but to say they’re “middle class” is, I think, a bit of an overstatement. They’re rural working class, like many small family farms and ranches are and have been (not counting, of course, the large corporate farms and ranches that dot the American landscape today) for decades. They get by, and have a few small luxuries, but Luke’s landspeeder is akin to a beat-up old Chevy truck from the 60s or 70s, while the Lars Family speeder is newer and in good shape but could still likely be a few years old.

Also, I wouldn’t say that Luke going to the Academy would be “economically devastating” to Owen and Beru, but it would make operating the farm difficult without Luke, thus Owen’s bargaining that when he can afford to hire some new hands, that would free up Luke to go.

Additionally, I’m not entirely sure that Owen has no other hired farmhands when he discusses it with Luke — he says that this year they’ll make enough on the harvest that he’ll be able to hire some MORE hands, so presumably he has some already employed. It might also be a reference to droids, even though they just bought two. Perhaps two was all they could afford for the year. Plus keep in mind they’re buying used droids, so they probably buy most things (like speeders and other equipment) used when possible.

I think it’s safe to say that they’re struggling but not exactly hurting. ‘Tis the fate of farmers; some seasons you do well, others you don’t. I’m guessing the last season didn’t fare so well but this year’s doing better.

Until, of course, those Stormtroopers showed up.


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Yeah. Owen looks like he is a fifties-ish farmer who is sun baked and grizzled from all the sun. He looks like a hard laborer. Unshaven and rugged. They have never screamed middle class to me. More just hard working class farmers.

By the way, is that thing on the farm with the roof right behind the garage a water storage tank or the roof to the garage that opens up so their vehicles can exit?

 

I think it's the roof over Luke's workshop that opens so speeders can park inside.

Looking at drawn maps of the homestead and photos of the actual locations and set - it doesn't really match up. There is an open air space that the Skyhopper parks in that should be right next to the roof. I still think that's what it is, but it only works through movie magic.

 

Yes I think unlike the apathetic Republic, the Empire seems to have established some sense of order/universally accepted currency even on Tatooine. So I would say that Imperial Credits are considered "real" versus Republic currency.

Out of interest, what is moisture farming? What are they actually farming in the sand? Are there crops that are being harvested here?

Also do "Costs" to be taken out of revenue before making a profit, include defences against Tusken Raiders?

 

A moisture vaporator was a device used on moisture farms to capture water from a planet's air. Maybe it's then stored under ground?

 

Defenses against Tuskin Raiders, "protection" kickbacks to the Hutts... yeah, all that kind of stress and corruption, I would think.

 

It would make sense that moisture, or water, being a precious commodity on an arid planet, would be stored underground in the cisterns into which it’s collected, especially for security reasons. Plus it would be cooler underground as well.


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