Andrew Stephenson writes
The land is former estuarial mud, like that produced by the UK's
River Thames. For story reasons too complex to detail here, the
land suddenly came under cultivation about thirty years ago using
essentially horse-aided manual techniques, by people with a sound
knowledge of modern agriculture but limited access to machinery
and artificial fertilisers. Mixed crops are raised, rotated and
all that. They have the kind of tools a good manual workshop or
smithy could make.

The climate is basically hot desert -- think of the US Mojave or
northern Sahara deserts: dry air, lots of strong sunshine, little
rain. Frost might occur but low temperatures are more likely to
be due to night-time cooling, as the altitude is about 100 ft.

Happily, good water is absolutely not a problem. Pests are few.

I imagine that by now the land is becoming used up, despite their
efforts to feed it with whatever, ahem, fertiliser comes to hand.


Let's look for a maximum. With no pests or diseases, and adequately
fertilised, I imagine some 12T DM/Ha of harvestable high energy feed
would be available. Maybe more, but less if legumes were grown (as would
be likely).

For the sake of argument (ie I can't be bothered to look it up) let's
allocate 1k DM food per family of four per day so about 3 families/Ha.
They would be vegetarians, of course. At this density farm animals would
not be required, there being adequate labour to do it all by hand.

That would be about 1200/sq km or on 8.3 sq km some 10,000 people.

Now let's start deducting.

If we are to go to a more-or-less organic-type situation, with diseases,
but few pests (aphids, maybe) then you might like to halve this.

If you want some animals, which are inefficient converters, then perhaps
halve it again. So maybe 2500 people or say 800 families.

Of course if something becomes limiting, phosphorus for example, or
disease then you can cut some more. The choice is yours as to how
quickly you cut it.

--
Oz
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