Nieuw Haarlem, cloud city (provisional)
Comparative Benefits
- Easier to move livestock in a lower tech city
- Gardening knowledge more common
- Fountain
- Knowledge of whaling
The majority of food production is from container based gardens, plant pots and relatively free draining nooks and crannies. The limiting factors are the few species that are available. Pathogen buildup is managed through the use of containers to grow plants and composting.
Depending on the bounty from the fountain there may be a couple of methods of harvesting resources. Nets might be set from the platform itself, alternately nets may be attached to other buoyant structures and be used to dredge. If tjis is a cost effective use of time and resources a finer net could be used to harvest biomass for compost, animal and human food.
Sperm oil plus benzene might make a functional diesel fuel, if an animal analogous to the sperm whale exists.
Main crop
Potatoes on ropes, potatoes grown in sacks hung from the floating platforms, each 2.5 inch hemp type rope would produce about 40-50 lbs of potatoes every two months. Provided they are shaded with damp cloth (evaporation to mimic night time temperatures) for 6 hours or so a day. Not sure on the details of the lighting so let's say 3 ropes for each 2 yards of perimeter. Call it 450 yards. 675 ropes equals about 27000lbs per crop up to 6 crops a year. (Optimistic but plausible numbers, slight improvement if sweet potatoes used, requires a fair amount of rope and sacks/baskets) the limiting factor is soil health, with only soil rotation 1000lbs would be required per plant. While some of this can be used for gardens, composting, chemicals, heating or fresh harvesting is required to make it feasible.
Gardens
Optimistically something like 10m2 to provide each person's fresh vegetables, maybe 15m2 if space is available for experimentation.
Continuous Light tolerant plants
*indicates no improvement in yield with continuous lighting
Sunflower*
Onions and alliums
Chickpeas
Radishes
Brassica
Tea
Switches
- Grafting fruit onto "native" trees
- disease, could go either way here, the local microbes may dominate and reduce the pathogens that effect Earth based food crops or the stable climate may result in an overwhelming level of plant pathogens.
I've just posted this to make sure I'm on the right track.