Free The War With Earth by Dave Grossman, Leo Frankowski

said, "But ours will be a very special, well-planned forest. You see, most temperate hardwoods produce fruits, nuts, or edible seeds. What's more, they produce more edible calories per hectare per year than the same land would produce if it was sown with wheat or corn. Some fruits fall in the springtime, like cherries. Others ripen in the summer and others, like apples and acorns, drop in the fall. By carefully selecting the types and numbers of trees, in about seven years we figure to be able to have just the right amount of food falling all the time to feed and raise five pigs per hectare per year, and many more than that as the forest gets mature. We'll harvest them in the fall, leaving a prize boar and enough older sows around to get the herd going for the next year. Pigs reproduce quickly, and are ready for the butcher in half a year, if you feed them right. So you see! It's all automatic and self-sustaining, except for having to feed the sows a bit during the winter, and winters are pretty mild here on New Yugoslavia."
    "It sounds interesting," I said. "But the apple orchards I remember seeing on Earth wouldn't make good lumber."
    "That's because what you saw was something made out of normal fruit trees spliced on top of the roots of a dwarf variety. The dwarf roots keep the trees small, so the fruit is easier to pick. But we're not going to do any picking. We're planting full-sized trees, which can grow to forty meters, easy, and we'll just let the pigs eat the fruit when it falls."
    "Planting that many trees sounds like it would be pretty labor intensive," I said.
    "It is. But we've got a free supply of labor."
    "Serbian Prisoners of War?"
    "No, nothing that barbaric. Drones. Military surplus drones. You see, there are more kinds of drones than they taught us about in basic training. One sort was intended to replace human infantry in places like city fighting. That's what they modeled them on, human beings. They've got two hands, two arms, and two legs, and all their sensory apparatus is in their heads. They're as big as a really huge man, and from a distance, you might confuse one with a human being in armor. One of their main advantages was supposed to be that they could use weapons and vehicles already designed for human use. But they're too small to carry a muon-exchange fusion plant, like the tanks use, so they're limited to capacitor power, which only gives them about two hours at full output. Furthermore, they are mechanically very complicated, and what with all the linkages and so on, there isn't much room for computers in there, so these boys are dumb. They can do just fine if they are in constant communication with a tank, but you know that in combat, communications are the first things that go bad. As a military weapon, humanoid drones are pretty much useless, except for guard duty, and there are much cheaper, less complicated drones around for that. Oh, a few are used to guard embassies, and so on, mostly for show. But somehow, a small automatic factory was built to produce them when the Japs had New Kashubia, and it has been turning out one of them every ten hours for the last eleven years, and putting them in storage. Nobody seemed to know that they even existed!"
    He stretched, took another drink of beer, and continued.
    "But, properly controlled, they can do anything a man can do, and about as fast. They can work twenty-four hours a day, and every day of the year. They don't slough off, take coffee breaks, or have to stay home with sick relatives. When you figure it out, one drone can do the work of six men, easy, and they work for free. We've found that they make real good field hands and household servants, too, if you have a tank around to charge their capacitors and tell them what to do. We bought three hundred of them at scrap metal prices, for planting and tending our trees, and for harvesting the pigs, when the time comes."
    "Quincy, you have just given me about a dozen great ideas for my ranch.