The Yield — Ben Panulo Junior

MINISTRY OF SUSTAINABLE NUTRITION · DISTRICT FOUR · CONSORTIUM CLEARANCE: FARM 771

THE YIELD

A Trilogy · Book One Available Now

A civilisation that measured everything, except what mattered.

Three generations ago, alien stewards arrived offering to end war, famine, and disease — in exchange for what every human body throws away anyway. Humanity took the deal, and built an entire civilisation on top of it: a caste system worn as a glowing ring, a national religion, a dating app, a stock market, an Olympics. THE YIELD follows the people, human and alien, who start noticing what it actually costs.

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The Ordinary Man Who Notices

"Most people think plumbing is about water. It isn't. Plumbing is about hope."

Arthur Pell fixes toilets for a living, which makes him the only man in his district with a legal key to every household in it. He likes his job, loves his wife, and worries mainly about his daughter's ceremony — six weeks away, the day she gets her own ring and officially joins the system he's spent forty-one years not thinking about.

Then, one ordinary Thursday, he looks up.

The Auditor Who Keeps Books

"Why would someone write a story with no practical yield?"

To the Ilun who administer it, Earth isn't a planet. It's Farm 771 — the 771st plot catalogued under a harvest programme that goes back further than anyone at the Consortium likes to discuss. Auditor Ashen-Ko has run her sector well for years.

Then she starts keeping books she isn't supposed to keep.

The Trilogy

Three Books. One Measurement.

Ground level → the auditors who watch us → the ones who watch them

Each book widens the lens — from one household, to one alien district, to the reckoning both civilisations reach at exactly the same time.

Book One

The Shit Farm

Arthur Pell fixes toilets for a living, which makes him the only man in the district with a legal key to every household in it. Six weeks from his daughter's coming-of-age ceremony, he looks up — and can't stop noticing what he sees.

$2.99

Available Now

Book Two

Farm 771

To the Ilun who administer it, Earth isn't a planet — it's the 771st plot in a catalogue older than anyone at the Consortium likes to discuss. Auditor Ashen-Ko has run her sector well for years. Then she starts asking the question her own people gave up asking generations ago.

$5.99

In Progress

Book Three

Someone Else's Livestock

Humanity wins. The aliens leave. The statues come down. Then the sky goes dark over both civilisations at once. The finale asks what's actually left, for anyone, once the measuring finally stops.

$5.99

In Progress

Book One is complete and available for purchase. Books Two and Three are currently being written — join the mailing list below to hear the moment each one lands.

Personnel Files

Who You'll Meet

Six files, human and otherwise. Click to expand.

Arthur Pell

Narrator, Book One

Age41RoleLicensed Collection Technician, Grade IIITenure19 years

"Every house believes it is the only one holding its breath. It isn't. They're all holding their breath. That's just what a house sounds like, from the inside, on a normal Tuesday."

Auditor Ashen-Ko

Narrator, Book Two

SpeciesIlunRankDistrict AuditorTenure6 years

"I keep asking myself why someone would write a story with no practical yield. No lesson, no product, nothing that could be measured afterward. Do you know?"

Mara Pell

Ministry of Sustainable Nutrition

RoleDistrict OutreachTenure15 years

"I've never once, not one time, been shown a real figure for what happens after a Wellness transfer. I always assumed someone above me had seen one. I don't actually know that's true."

Roland Kettle

District Ministry Supervisor

RelationArthur's oldest friendBeliefSincere, unweakened

"I know exactly what this system costs. I've made my peace with the cost a long time ago, because I know precisely what the alternative cost my grandmother."

Constance Bray

Empty Bowl Movement

Former role14 years, Ministry Data StandardsMethodEconomically disastrous, not violent

"We're not an army. We're an inconvenience."

Elsie Pell

Age 11 · Fenwick Hall Scholarship Candidate

Ring tierSilver, as of First Yield

"You don't have to be ready. You just do it and then you're the kind of person who's done it."

Field Guide

How to Read This World

Every citizen wears a Ring — a wearable band issued at the First Yield Ceremony that glows continuously by tier and pulses for consistency. It is the device the entire society is built around.

Guest Log Terminal

A small kiosk fitted in restrooms outside the home — friends' houses, hotels, restaurants — so a visiting citizen's yield is credited to their own account rather than their host's. Closes the one obvious gap in the system.

Wellness Community

The euphemism for the fate of chronic non-producers. Deliberately, permanently never explained on the page — the gap in the story where the uncomfortable truth is supposed to sit.

Bristol Stool Index

The daily-reported national economic indicator. Functions on the evening news exactly like a stock index.

The Empty Bowl Movement

Non-violent resistance. Symbol: a clean toilet. Slogan: "Nothing In. Nothing Out." They've never stopped a harvest. That was never quite the point.

Farm 771

The Consortium's internal designation for Earth — the 771st world catalogued under the harvest programme. Not the first. Not likely to be the last.

Life Feeds Life

The doctrine shared, independently, by both the human Church of the Regular and the Ilun's Continuity Faith. Neither species has ever compared notes on it.

Coming — Full Cast Production

Audiobooks

Arthur's chapters narrated straight, dry, unhurried — the way a tired man tells you something true at the end of a long day. Ashen-Ko's chapters rendered with the same half-second translation lag written into the prose itself.

The Shit Farm — Book One

Planned

Farm 771 — Book Two

Planned

Someone Else's Livestock — Book Three

Planned

Pricing

Read the Whole Yield

Book One stands alone. The trilogy rewards sticking around.

Ebook · Book One

$2.99

The Shit Farm. Available now.

Ebook · Books Two & Three

$5.99

Each, on release.

Paperback · Any Volume

$12.99

Print, once available.

Trilogy Bundle

$12.99

All three, once complete.

Retailer links go live alongside each release. Join the list below and you'll get them the moment they're posted.

Founder, Shinben Chronicles Publishing

Ben Panulo Junior

Born in Malawi. Writer, permaculture farmer, ultramarathon runner. THE YIELD started, by his own account, in the middle of cleaning out a Boer goat pen at six in the morning — the actual origin of a book about a civilisation that measures everything by what its bodies produce.

Where Dark Continent and Prima Nox reach for myth and the occult, THE YIELD is the other register entirely: satire played dead straight, in the tradition of Swift and Pratchett — no character ever thinks the premise is ridiculous, so the reader does all the laughing, and all the recognising.

He also runs Maziko Athu Permaculture Farms — fifty acres of red Malawian soil across four districts. More than half of every book sale goes toward training smallholder farmers in permaculture and value-addition.

Blantyre, MalawiPermaculture FarmerUltramarathonsSatire

Dark Continent — 14 Books Prima Nox Maziko Athu Farm