With vast galactic empires, it doesn't seem all that likely that every world would be like Earth, which can and does produce enough food in its own right for its entire population. Some planets, after enough urbanization, end up becoming little more than immense planet-spanning complexes which, without the necessary Applied Phlebotinum or artificial gardens, would simply not provide enough food to keep their inhabitants from dying of thirst and hunger.
The solution is to have a planet dedicated to the production of food and other naturally occurring commodities, a purely agricultural world. Or, as the Trope Namer Warhammer 40,000 kindly shortened it, Agri World. An Agri World can be a Single-Biome Planet, but in some cases, it seems more likely that the author just described the place as a food production planet and Planetville is in effect.
One problem with many portrayals of this trope is the one-sided flow of matter from an Agri World to other planets. On Earth, the population centers are still located on the same planet on the farms, and matter in food is ultimately returned to the planet and circulated around by the atmosphere and hydrosphere. When farms and population centers are on different planets, matter (whether it's raw sewage, fertilizer, or something else) would need to be transported back to the farms to avoid them becoming barren. May overlap with Pastoral Science Fiction.
Sub-Trope of One-Product Planet. Compare City Planet and Industrial World.
Examples:
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Anime and Manga
- Gundam: In the lore of the Universal Century, certain space colonies are devoted to farming. In the backstory leading up to Mobile Suit Gundam, an accident in one causing famine is part of what led to the One Year War.
Comic Books
- Fantastic Four: As part of their extreme methods, the Council of Reeds have conquered multiple worlds and converted them entirely into farmlands to solve all hunger wherever else they reach.
- Legion of Super-Heroes: Winath, the home planet of Lightning Lad and his siblings, is one of these, described in one comic as "a lush agricultural world". In the post-Zero Hour storyline where various United Planets members are seceding to the new Affiliated Planets, the loss of Winath is seen as a particular blow since it's "the breadbasket of the UP".
Comic Strips
- Dan Dare: The first story involved manned expeditions to Venus in hopes of turning it into one of these to feed an overcrowded Earth.
Film
- Rebel Moon: Veldt is known mostly for farming.
- Teenagers from Outer Space: The invaders want to turn Earth into one for breeding their livestock of giant lobsters.
Literature
- Deathstalker: Virimonde, the home planet of Owen Deathstalker (the name roughly means "green world" in French) is described as one.
- Hyperion: Renaissance Minor is an agricultural world that provides food to the City Planet Renaissance Vector, which is in the same system. The presence of the agricultural world in the same system allows Renaissance Vector to survive the Fall of the Farcasters relatively unscathed.
- Isaac Asimov:
- The Foundation Trilogy:
- During the time between "The Psychohistorians" and "The General (Foundation)", the Imperial Capital of Trantor is a City Planet that requires the combined output of twenty agricultural worlds to feed its population of forty billion people. Ironically, between the events of "The General (Foundation)" and "The Mule", Trantor is sacked. After the Galactic Empire's fall cuts off its supply lines and it ceases to be the center of the galaxy, it starts to turn into a purely agrarian society, except for the Imperial Library where the Second Foundation is ruling the First Foundation from behind the scenes.
- "The General (Foundation)": Sergeant Mori Luk comes from the Pleiades sector, which has multiple agricultural planets. The only escape from a life of farming is to join the military.
- The Stars, Like Dust: One character laments that the worlds of the "Nebular Kingdoms" (which in the backstory were conquered by the Tyrannian Empire several generations ago) are doomed to become these. Normally, newly-colonized worlds progress naturally from farming simply to feed themselves, to farming (and mining) for export to more advanced planets in exchange for industrial products, to developing budding industrial civilizations of their own, to eventually becoming advanced industrialized planets that import food and raw materials from less developed planets while investing in their farming and mining economies (thus aiding in the future development of those planets). But the Tyranni, as conquerors, have stymied this natural progression for their own reasons, and even after the Tyranni inevitably become soft and lazy and are overthrown, "we will still all be agricultural worlds with no industrial or scientific heritage to speak of".
- The Foundation Trilogy:
- Known Space: The City Planet homeworld of the Puppeteers has four farm worlds dedicated to growing food for its enormous population.
- The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress: Luna, a penal colony, is dangerously close to food riots because they aren't replacing the matter they're forced to export to Earth, in the form of crops. This knowledge incites the Moon to rebel, kicking off the plot.
- Paradox Trilogy: Heaven's Queen has Atlas 35, a planet which Devi states has been "terraformed to within an inch of its life" in order to be a farm planet where every inch of land is suitable for crop cultivation.
- Star Wars Legends has thousands of these worlds, mostly scattered on the Outer and Mid Rim to supply the City Words at the Galactic Core like Coruscant. This is a source of ongoing tension between the regions, as the under represented and less wealthy farming worlds often get neglected by the politically connected, even though the wealthy Core Worlds depend on the farmers to eat.
- The Thrawn Trilogy: The planet Ukio is primarily an exporter of foodstuffs, and Thrawn takes it over at the start of the third book to feed his ever-growing army of clones. Many, many other such worlds exist in the Star Wars galaxy.
- The world of Telos (and the Jedi Agricultural Corps) is the breadbasket for the Jedi. Force Sensitives who had enough talent to be picked up by the Order but were not fit for Jedi for one reason or another (failing their trials, lack of Force power, disciplinary issues) are permanently assigned into Service Corps and given a one-way ticket to Telos and worlds like them to "seed the planet with farmers and laborers." While official Jedi documents describe Agricorps as valued contributors to the Order, the actual treatment and attitudes of "warrior class" Jedi towards their Service Corps "brothers" is Condescending Compassion at best and contempt at worst.
- The Han Solo Adventures: Orron III in the Corporate Sector is described as a world with stable seasons and rich and fertile soil, all well-suited to good crop production across most of the planet's latitudes. The Corporate Sector Authority has therefore turned the planet into a breadbasket for the rest of the sector. (There's also a data center there — since there's ample room on an entire planet to put such an installation amidst all the vast industrialized, robotized farms — which simplifies logistics and security for both operations.)
- To the Stars: Earth's colonies are each specialized for a very specific task, and many are dedicated to farming. The idea is that this way none of the colonies have the diverse resources needed to launch a revolt. In Wheelworld, the protagonist is exiled to one such agricultural planet.
- Roger Zelazny mentions a world like this in passing in Isle of the Dead when he talks about the narrator's human nemesis Mike Shandon. He had been a "farm boy from the breadbasket world Wava". Apparently, he had Small Town Boredom and escaped to more urbanized planets as soon as he could, where he became a Con Man.
Live-Action TV
- Babylon 5: The Centauri Republic colony world of Ragesh 3 is identified in discussions as an agricultural colony.
- Battlestar Galactica (2003): Aerilon was this among the Twelve Colonies of Kobol before the Fall and the Second Cylon War, being considered a poor and backwater place akin to the Deep South. Gaius Baltar was originally born and raised there to a family of farmers and his embarrassment over this led to him moving to the more prosperous colony of Caprica as soon as he turned eighteen, whereupon he proceeded to drastically reinvent himself to shake off any associations with his background (to the point of shedding his native accent for a Caprican one, which he notes it was hell on his vocal cords) and work his way up to becoming one of the most respected scientists of his generation.
- Farscape: An early episode deconstructs this trope. Sykar was forcibly remade into a farm world by the Peacekeepers; the native plant life was almost completely destroyed to make way for vast fields of Tannot root, and the planet's natives were reduced to all being farm laborers, planting, tending, and harvesting the crops. Thanks to the high demand for Tannot root, the farms themselves are steadily being worn out through overharvesting and reduced to barren wastes; the one seen in the episode is said to be the last fertile region of the planet. For good measure, the only thing stopping the Sykarans from noticing any of this is the fact that their food is made entirely of mind-control drugs, and they all believe that every day is the last day before a weekend.
- Stargate SG-1: In "2001", the team visits a planet of farmland that supplies the Aschen homeworld, who turned a gas giant in the system into a second sun and mounted the planet's Stargate on a swivel so grain could be dumped through it more easily. It also turns out they depopulated the planet — which had developed independently to a roughly 1920s-era level of industrialization before the Aschen showed up — by giving the original inhabitants medicine that caused sterility.
- The Orville: Despite Matter Replicator technology existing, it's apparently impractical for large-scale use. Lamarr was from a hardscrabble farming colony where people were too focused on surviving and growing crops to want to deal with a mouthy kid with a high engineering aptitude. As a result, he deliberately hid his intelligence, and the habit continued for years until Commander Grayson discovered it and refused to let Lamarr continue underperforming.
Tabletop Games
- Traveller Classic: Planets with specific characteristics could have large portions of their economies devoted to agriculture.
- Warhammer 40,000, the Trope Namer, has quite a few
, which serve as the primary sources of food for its millions of worlds. These aren't just limited to conventional fields and pastures: some grow algae or fungi as crops, and others rear livestock such as gigantic sea creatures or swarms of flying insects. Their biggest customers are the hive worlds, which are massive planet-spanning cities that would make the entire population of Coruscant weep. Their importance in the Imperium's supply chain means they're also potential targets of attack. Sondheim, one Agri-World, was subjected to a planet-spanning battle between Tyranids and Chaos daemons that ended up consuming the planet. There's a tradition in the Imperium of depicting these as bucolic arcadias, although the actual things are pole-to-pole monocultures of high-yield crops tended by mindless cyborgs or indentured workers — a passage in The Lords of Silence describes them as carefully terraformed and heavily managed agricultural wastelands, with atmospheres tinted orange and turned toxic by the sheer amounts of industrial fertilisers and pesticides used here, scourged by winds running across their flattened landscapes, and razed periodically by huge harvesting combines that send the crops to be processed into the huge amounts of standardized rations fed to Imperial citizens. A single growing season can entirely exhaust the soil, requiring planetary amounts of nitrates and phosphates to be sprayed across the plains. The Imperium can keep these worlds pushing along for millennia like this, even as the food quality constantly worsens, although eventually the planet is sucked so thoroughly dry that it becomes nothing more than a sterile waste. The popular image of arcadian, idyllic farmscapes is mostly propaganda to trick people into coming to work here.
Video Games
- Elite: Agricultural worlds buy machines and luxuries and produce food and textiles. Notably the player starts in orbit of an agricultural dictatorship called Lave. The default starting point in Frontier: Elite II is a moon in the Ross 154 system whose primary industry is fishing. According to the manual, the player was a worker in a fish processing plant before inheriting a spaceship from their grandfather.
- Escape Velocity Nova:
- The Polaris have one of these in the form of Tre'ar Helonis, although it's actually a Ring World Planet built by Those Who Came Before. The flavor text states that although the Polaris have only settled 3% of Tre'ar Helonis's surface area, that's enough to grow enough food to feed the entire Polaris population in the galaxy.
- The Auroran Empire has several. The three straightest ones are Stlap (a highly fertile world whose large and stable food surplus serves as the foundation of the Moash House's affluence), Sorvad (the dedicated food source for the Aurora system itself) and Aria (an entirely water-covered world that is home to the largest aquaculture project in the galaxy. Nibos Prime is a more unusual case, as its primary product is a famous and popular kind of beer.
- Halo: Harvest, as the name implies, is a chiefly agricultural world and covered with extensive areas of farmland. This is not uncommon in the setting — some planets have more hours of daylight than is typical for Earth and happen to have huge tracts of very rich volcanic soil, leading to very large crop yields. Agriculture on such planets is both cheap and productive, and it costs less for other planets to import food from the farm worlds than to grow it locally. This is subverted later as the war rages on, as many of the Outer Colonies where much of the farming goes on are lost, and the Cole Protocol restricts interstellar travel, leading many inner planets to reluctantly take to growing their own food instead of importing it.
- Mass Effect:
- Most of humanity's colonies are pushed into specializing in agriculture, more through accident and necessity than by design. Colonies have a semi-independent status in the System Alliance, so they are expected to be self-sufficient and food is the most important aspect to do that. The government also is more focused on spamming new colonies, so actual development is rather slow.
- Pragia is a failed farm. The batarians had intended to turn the planet into a farm world to feed their empire, but their genetically engineered food crops took to the planet too well, covered it in jungle-like growth and are projected to completely exhaust the soil across the entire planet within centuries.
- Aya, from Mass Effect: Andromeda, is one-third this. The other two-thirds are "volcanic wastes" and "really cramped city". Most of the farming is done nearer the volcanoes, with all the difficulty that comes from it, both in terms of space and lava. The angara don't have a lot of luxury in this regard, given the other worlds they've got available are "hideously overgrown jungle" and "giant ball of ice".
- Master of Orion: It is possible to set one of these up in all games, create farms, and have everyone work as farmers. usually good climate, poor mineral planets are the ones that do this. Other space 4x games have similar.
- Myst: While not planets in sensu strictu, many Ages — tiny, self-contained worlds — served a single economic or social function, often quite narrow. For example, the Age of Teledahn was farmed for a type of fungal spore used in D'ni cuisine.
- Scrap Mechanic is set on a dedicated agricultural planet, staffed primarily by robots to reduce costs and the need for human presence. One can guess where that eventually went.
- StarCraft II: Agria, as the name suggests, is devoted chiefly to agriculture.
- Star Wars: Galactic Battlegrounds: In the Darth Vader campaign, several missions take place on the agri-world of Reytha.
- Star Wars: The Old Republic: Uphrades is said directly to be an Agriworld and nicknamed "Coruscant's Granary", and its devastation at the hands of Darth Angral in the Jedi Knight's storyline is a major plot beat.
- Stellaris:
- The "Banks" update changed food from a planet-locked to a "global" resource, enabling players to create specialized planets with all farms.
- The "Utopia" DLC allows one to take the To Serve Man approach with planets populated by other species.
- The "Le Guin" update allows planets to have specializations. Any planet where the majority job is "farmer" gains the "Agri World" specialization, gaining an additional bonus to food production.
Webcomics
- Star Trip depicts the planet Losm, which is mostly farmland as a result of colonization by the Roj species, to the detriment of the local Losites.
Web Original
- Mahu: In "Second Chance" the Galactic Commonwealth houses a number of specialized worlds, a few of which are incredibly fertile paradises that produce enough food to feed billions without issue.
Western Animation
- Buzz Lightyear of Star Command: Jo-ad, Booster's home planet, is dedicated entirely to agriculture, resembling the American Midwest and specializing in growing gigantic produce, with the majority of the inhabitants being farmers. It provides the food supplies for Capital Planet. Booster first met Buzz when Zurg tried to steal Jo-ad's entire crop so that he could starve them into submission.
- Shadow Raiders: The Cluster is home to a group of Single Biome Planets that raid one-another for vital resources that they can't produce themselves. One of these worlds is Planet Bone, a fecund swamp planet whose chief resource is abundant food that every race in the system can eat to satisfy their Fantastic Diet Requirements. The people of Planet Rock, for instance, are stated to raid Bone for its lichen. When Planet Bone briefly becomes estranged from the Alliance in Season Two, it's explained that the other worlds will succumb to famine within a week without access to Bone's food supplies, forcing the Alliance to accept the craven Emperor Femur back into the fold.
Real Life
- On a terrestrial scale, any part of the world that's known as a "breadbasket" or (in East/Southeast Asia) a "rice bowl". The local economy in such places is dominated by agriculture, and most open, arable land is devoted to fields, pastures, and paddies. Present-day examples include the American Midwest (from Ohio and Lower Michigan to Nebraska and Kansas) and Canadian prairie, the California Central Valley, the Hungarian Plain, Ukraine, the Punjab, Sichuan, and the Mekong Delta, while historical examples include Sicily and North Africa for Ancient Rome, Egypt for...pretty much every empire that controlled it (particularly the Roman Empire, the Byzantine Empire and the various Muslim empires that succeeded them), and Ireland for the United Kingdom (which had disastrous consequences for the Irish people during the Great Famine). In coastal communities, fisheries often have the same effect on the local economy; within the US, for example, New England, the Gulf Coast, and Alaska are all famous for production of fish, crab, shrimp, lobster, and other seafood.