As an afterthought, I find the received wisdom that Voriof=Voria=preschoolers-only a bit hard to take on board.
What is it that downgrades the shepherd vis a vis the ploughman? Admittedly we didn't explore the agriculture of Sartar in detail, but would have expected Barntar and Voriof to be of roughly equally worth overall, with the precise location - and hence the balance between arable and pastoral farming - determining which is the more important of the two. In the hilly, nigh mountainous areas in central Sartar, then sheep would seem to be the likely mainstay of agriculture, and Barntar the lesser.
Trying to solve under these constraints leads to the following mischeivous scenario :
We know that the potato is known (as a dietary taboo to the Sun Dome Templars); and the potato is a significantly more efficient crop in terms of useful yield per acre than wheat (as many a Russian scientist ekeing out a meagre income will aver). In the RW, the shepherd was cast as a figure of romance in the Arcadian fantasies of the 18th century.
Put it all together and you have the Sartarites as downtrodden Irish peasants, feeding their families on their potato crop, with scant chance of doing anything else, and the Lunars are the occupying English gentry.
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