Can you please explain how a medieval lord of moderate status would climb up the value added chain and get rich? Besides increasing your potential yield (buying more land, irrigation, crop rotation) and diversifying your stock (planting seeds form more exotic/rare crops) what else could be done? How rich could I get?
There’s a lot of potential factors – how productive is the soil to begin with? How do the price of staple crops compare to the price of livestock? So it’s hard to answer.
But in terms of climbing up the value-added chain, the main thing is trying to capture the processing and marketing process. So for grain, for example, more and better mills and more and better silos and granaries allow you to process and store more efficiently so that less of your product is wasted, lost, or goes bad. An efficient system of wagon trains and convoy routes will make sure that your grain can be sold more widely and gets to market first to get the best price. A network of bakeries means that rather than just selling the processed material you’re selling the finished product, which usually means a better markup.
Other than that, the only thing you’ve left out on your list is human capital – more farmers means you can clear more land and farm the land you have more efficiently, more experienced and skilled farmers means fewer mistakes that cost production, literate workers means that you can send and receive written messages.
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