How do most wood elves feed themselves?
Most Scarterrans are either "civilized" farmers eking out a living on plots of farmland and rarely traveling far from their home village or "barbarian" nomads ranging far and wide to hunt and forage.
The wood elves and their allies in Codenya break the mold by splitting the difference with a roughly even mix of agriculture and foraging.
Wood elves have made ancient oaths to the god Korus and a great many forest creatures to minimize their impact on nature so they are reluctant to clear too many trees for cropland or housing.
Typically, about two thirds of the year, the wood elves are living in mobile tent cities, typically not staying in the same place more than one or two weeks before moving on. The remaining third of year, the wood elves and their allies move into their "winter villages" and live in sturdy but fairly cramped permanent houses through the cold and snowy times of the year.
Typically roving nomadic clans number between 100 and 300 members. Most winter villages hold between three and six clans.
Wood elves have a disproportionately high number of "food mages" and they are patient. They have cultivated unique Codenyan varieties of many domesticated plants over the centuries. Codenyan food plants are not bred to maximize yield, they are bred to minimize maintenance.
Most Codenyan food plants are very pest resistant and very weed resistant. wood elves and their allies usually spend about about three or four weeks carefully planting their crops, then they mostly leave them be for six to seven months while they roam their forested homeland hunting and foraging, only occasionally stopping by to check on their crops. Beyond their cereal crops, wood elves and their allies will try to encourage the growth of wild fruit and nuts wherever they go to make future foraging easier.
In late autumn, the Codenyans will harvest and process their crops and live off during the winter months. Codenyans generally don't keep much livestock. Taiga elves are the exception, keeping domesticated herds of reindeer, but also they don't farm nearly as much as their fellow countrymen spending very little time in winter villages. Come winter, they will typically barter meat and dairy products for cereals from other elf clans.
With everything so decentralized with each clan managing their own affairs, one might wonder why Codenya's has an active noble class. It is because there are approximately 10,000 clan units in Codenya and their migratory paths crisscross over the vast nation with so many 10,000 clan units wandering around all doing their own thing, clans are inevitably going to figuratively or literally step on each other's toes and someone has to mediate dispute within clans.
Wood elves move around so they don't overtax any one area's resources, so one has to make sure that too many clans don't unwittingly overtax any single area. Someone has to periodically check on their crops throughout the year, so the nobles dictate which clans check on which fields and when. They also are expect to make sure that come harvest time food stores are distributed fairly.
If there is an external threat, the nobles have to go clan by can to recruit warriors. During peace time, the nobles are also expected to supervise clans make sure that each clan is drilling for various dangers and that a respectable percentage of the adult population is combat ready at all times.
Some human nobles neighboring Codenya have joked that the wood elf nobles are "royal cat herders" given that wood elves in general are a willful, independent lot. Adding this, only about two thirds of the nation is made of elves, sometimes conflicts arise between Codenya's cosmpolitain demographics.
Relative to humans, wood elves tend have more fluid gender roles. Men and women alike are roughly equally likely to be seen hunting, foraging, maintaining crops, or manufacturing tools and clothes. Much like with most human farm communities, during planting and harvest, just about every able bodied man, woman and child is out in the fields.
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