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[LegoLord]

You make a good point about them growing fast, but to make up for that they'd need a hell of a lot of upkeep. After all, if the same value of food is growing in one week instead of six, you'll (on average) need to maintain it six times as often.

So maybe underground stuff growing slowly isn't right. Maybe it should just have smaller stacks (to represent less nutritional value) or require much, much more upkeep, or something like that.

I vote less nutritional value.  Keeps up the idea of plump helmets being the easy-to-get crop.  That is what they are for, after all.

[Demetrious]

I think what we are missing here, ladies and gentlemen, is an examination of the natural ecosystem that would have produced underground plants of a wide variety. It is these crops, we assume, that the Dwarves appropriated for their own use and developed cultivation techniques to keep them growing after they were removed from their natural habitat. It is, of course, possible that the Dwarves did this exact same thing, just with surface plants, but considering that a staple of this Dwarven high fantasy is the existence of entire civilizations and ecosystems underground, I think it's a lot more fun to posit entire natural ecosystems.

The first requirement of an ecosystem is a primary energy source; in this case we are looking for one that can replace the sun. This leaves us with radiation or magma.

Radiation is quite viable, especially if you posit an Earth that has a substantially higher number of natural minerals with low levels of radiation emission (as opposed to negligible levels.) In that case, "farming" would involve tapping a cave river and then lining a selected cavern with as much of the highest-rad rock you could find. Presumably dwarves are naturally resistant to radiation in this scenario.

The better option, in my opinion, is magma. We've already seen in the real world, with undersea hot water vents, that entire ecosystems can develop from just heat as an energy source. As for minerals, I know that volcanic ash makes for very fertile fields, and given the presence of the other life-essential materiel- water- it's conceivable that there would be pumice around that could be eroded by underground brooks, making a sort of underground soil. Once you have that, you have plants, and then you have an ecosystem.

How dwarves would create infinitely sustainable agriculture loops away from magma, though, I don't know.

[Osmosis Jones]

I think what we are missing here, ladies and gentlemen,

Damnit, I wanted to use the "what we are missing here" line, now you've gone and stolen by impetus.

I think what we are overlooking here folks, is the initial material in the mud. It is obvious that the "mud" deposited by the cave rivers is nothing more than a fine sludge of precipitated sugar (primarily glucose and sucrose).
Naturally, this is deposited by the supersaturated sugar solution (mistakenly referred to as "water" by the inhabitants of the dorfverse) upon contact with the ground, which of course contain sugar crystals and other particulate matter that act as nucleation sites for the precipitation mechanism.

This large quantity of sugar is hypothesised to have been formed early in the dorf-verse's history, more information on which is available in Urist McPratchetts excellent paper on this, The Fifth E.

As such, it is obvious that subterranean plant matter is able to survive on the inital sugar layer layed down for quite some time.

Thankyou,
Urist McJones, Geonutritionologist.



OOC, the constant sugar high would also explain the dwarves notorious lack of attention span.

[mendonca]

First off, great OP by the way. Loved it.

What this leads to in my thoughts is a new building - the compost heap.

This would be a new place to deposit organic waste (horse, dwarf chunks etc. as well as giant roach remains). For each unit of waste that goes in - one unit of compost comes out after a period of time. This would naturally hum with miasma 24/7.

After slotting this in, a few releases worth of balancing and you may have a workable, thermodynamically viable, means of providing sustenance to your plants.

Farms with no sustenance could perhaps be very barren, only occasionally producing a stack of plants as planted. Farmers could be set to not plant on barren farms. This would introduce the need to then find a manageable source of organic waste.

Hm ... not a fully thought through development but coudl be an interesting angle to take.

[Kazindir]

...we could have a product - a kind of a fertiliser - that could be made overland specifically for the purpose of being used for dwarven farming.

Potash?

[G-Flex]

That's a good potassium source, but I think he was thinking more along the lines of a source of energy.

[LegoLord]

You are all over thinking this. 

Fungus- grows on dead stuff
Mud-wet soil full of detritus of dead stuff.
Dwarf Fortress- fantasy game.  Things can be slightly exaggerated.  Wllful suspension of disbelief is necessary to enjoy fiction.

It's simple.  After all, underground rivers do have an outdoor source (we can't see it yet, but it will be implemented. It is on the dev list).

[Royal Surveyor]

No one has mentioned lithotrophs.  They eat minerals, or more technically, oxidize inorganic matter for their energy.  While the majority of these are bacteria and archaea, some plants and fungus fall into this category. 

Basically, if you want to build a fantastic, dark-dwelling plant, it could eat some form of unoxidized (reduced) metal and produce the oxidized form (rust from iron, silver oxides, etc.).  Of course, this would be annoying, since you'd be burning through your bars stockpile for food.  But... Smelting is just a metal reducing process, which is why (in real life) one tends to add carbonaceous material to the ore and add lots of heat.  This basically breaks the metal-oxygen bond, and the oxygen naturally tends to go toward the more electronegative carbon (aluminum is another story). 

This isn't a chemistry lesson though...

Basically: 
1) Lithotrophic plant eats metal for energy, uses CO2 from atmosphere.
2) Lithotrophic plant ruins metal and leaves, effectively, an ore behind.
3) Dwarves smelt spent 'fertilizer' back into metal.
4) Go to step 1.

In real life, the system would be pretty leaky, but that wouldn't be any fun to play, so it could be made to be a 1:1 input:output thing here.

I think that this would provide a nifty, compact ecosystem, believable both thermodynamically and biochemically.

Some comments on leaves on quarry bushes:  I like to think of them as tasty but vestigial bits.

Though, being a fantasy game, I'm pretty content with thinking that my cave wheat just grows forever on the carbon and other stuff in the soil.

[Siquo]

Quarry bushes have intricate meshed leaves which change the quantumdynamic properties of the elements in it, allowing them to efficiently catch neutrinos, which is where they get their energy from.

Like, duh, why else would they need leaves, and why else is it the most nutritious sub-terranean plant? 

[LegoLord]

No one has mentioned lithotrophs.  They eat minerals, or more technically, oxidize inorganic matter for their energy.  While the majority of these are bacteria and archaea, some plants and fungus fall into this category. 

Basically, if you want to build a fantastic, dark-dwelling plant, it could eat some form of unoxidized (reduced) metal and produce the oxidized form (rust from iron, silver oxides, etc.).  Of course, this would be annoying, since you'd be burning through your bars stockpile for food.  But... Smelting is just a metal reducing process, which is why (in real life) one tends to add carbonaceous material to the ore and add lots of heat.  This basically breaks the metal-oxygen bond, and the oxygen naturally tends to go toward the more electronegative carbon (aluminum is another story). 

This isn't a chemistry lesson though...

Basically: 
1) Lithotrophic plant eats metal for energy, uses CO2 from atmosphere.
2) Lithotrophic plant ruins metal and leaves, effectively, an ore behind.
3) Dwarves smelt spent 'fertilizer' back into metal.
4) Go to step 1.

In real life, the system would be pretty leaky, but that wouldn't be any fun to play, so it could be made to be a 1:1 input:output thing here.

I think that this would provide a nifty, compact ecosystem, believable both thermodynamically and biochemically.

Some comments on leaves on quarry bushes:  I like to think of them as tasty but vestigial bits.

Though, being a fantasy game, I'm pretty content with thinking that my cave wheat just grows forever on the carbon and other stuff in the soil.

But this does not do what the OP wants.  Just so you all know, there are small subterranean environments here on earth.  They rely on underground rivers.  They work like the Nile, just without sunlight and they sometimes use fungus.  However, I believe most of these were destroyed by human tampering.

@ Siquo:  What?

[Siquo]

I just thought of a thermodynamically sound yet far-fetched solution to the absence of energy.

[LegoLord]

I just thought of a thermodynamically sound yet far-fetched solution to the absence of energy.

Erm, how is something made up "sound?"

[Agdune]

Merge the refuse piles and farming plots. Any patch of muddied ground that has stuff rot on it gets a count towards some kind of 'fertility' value. Fun! Success! Goblins become even more useful!

edit: I know this isn't suggestion forums, but it had to be pointed out. Compost fun!

[Nikov]

Many of these proposals are very complex, so I would just like to indulge myself. This is not quite thermodynamically viable, but then, photosynthesis is rarely more than 1% efficient in nature on the surface. For underground crops to be viable with only 10% of the population devoted to production, we have to fudge a little.

I think it would be reasonable to require one season out of the year of your underground farm to be fertilized for the other three to grow, prompting a 'crop rotation' mechanism that we presently don't see. Land needed to lie fallow on the surface before industrialized agriculture, and bringing that mechanism into play would help address the realism problems.

Two resources are heaping up in my fortress without a use for them, and one resource would make me nearly surface-dependant. They are bones, chunks, and trees. Bones are made out of minerals; calcium, magnesium, sodium, potassium; ect. Bone is presently an economically valuable material for carving, decorating and weapons manufacture, however, bone meal is also listed in the stockpiles. I have never found bone meal, but I do see a use for it as a mineral-rich base for a fertilizer.

A second resource is chunks. We all get chunks, have no use for them, and their disposal is largely a nuisance to be solved with magma or really deep pits. I propose instead that chunks be a vital element of farming as the source of compost. Chunks require no processing, only the time needed to rot. This requires underground storage of chunks and careful design to allow for miasma. For example, a vertical shaft could be dug next to your butcher's shop, then all chunks thrown down the shaft as the nearest garbage dump. At the bottom they fester into rotten chunks. A new zone designation, 'Compost site' (for the compost stockpile) or 'Compost dump' (for a dumping shaft that doesn't flag items forbidden) could aide this as the automatic handling of chunks (and anything else that rots, which would be a handy way to recycle rotten plump helmet roasts). Rotten chunks would then be gathered in a later step.

Potash is already used as a fertilizer, so naturally its inclusion in underground farms is mandatory. The wood/ash/potash chain is one I've yet to master, mostly because it can be utterly bypassed. One never runs out of farmable land, and rarely runs out of peasantry, thus yields do not need to be increased per tile. Potash provides potassium or phosphate, I don't recall which; but they're very important to plant growth on the surface. However, we're talking about the underground. Photosynthesis is not being used, as it is only 1-2% efficient on the surface in natural conditions. Underground it would be meaningless. So while potash may be the only fertilizer needed for surface farming (and requiring fertilizer or two fallow seasons every year for the surface would be nice too, I think) it becomes another agent of the final product.

And that final product is created in the poor, neglected Farmer's Workshop. 'Make Fertilizer' would prompt a dwarf to gather potash, a rotting stack of chunks, and a unit of bone meal into the workshop. There little Urist mixes the whole foul concoction up with a butter churn until its properly rank, and stores it in a Fertilizer Barrel. These get stockpiled up and can be viewed as a direct measurement of your ability to resist siege. After a few seasons, one of the fields are designated for fertilizing and Urist heads back out to fertilize it. One barrel full of fertilizer should be enough for a 3x3 plot or so. Once the fertilizer is sown, the plot remains unusable until after the season has fully passed since this goo has to seep into the existing substrate of mud. Should a field not be fertilized for three seasons, the field will be listed as BARREN with the Q key.

This proposal solves several problems. First, rotting, spammy chunks from our cat butchering industries can go to good use. Creatures not flagged as butcherable cannot have their chunks used, as this may constitute cannibalism and could endear us to elves. Secondly, bone spam (if your dining hall looks like my dining hall, and that's just from my two fisherdwarves, its universally a problem) is removed through productive labor rather than the export of semi-worthless bone trinkets or endless heaps of *<<crap>>*. Balancing your bone crafts and bone-milling would become another fun challenge. Third, the productivity of an underground farm is slashed by 25% while demanding a supporting industry. The agricultural revolution was the movement of the majority of a population from agriculture to industry; presently we're already past that point, which seems inconsistant with the feudal-fantasy setting. Fourth and last: the potential for fun little famines caused by players neglecting to oversee their food supply is enormous. With care this is as managable as the booze/food ratio.

Interestingly, the cons are also silver-lined. It is still possible to create an entirely self-contained fortress through the use of a cave river. The water provides mud, fish provides bones, tower caps provide potash, and slaughterhouse offal provides chunks (Gutting a fish provides chunks galore IRL). However, a fortress built completely around a cave river is not only incredibly dwarfy, but also susceptable to various nasties from down there.

Also hauling rotting materials around will cause a miasma problem, and needs to be an unhappy-thought job in and of itself (Urist was unhappy to haul festering buckets of gore around for minimum wage). The fertilizer-creating facility needs to be enclosed yet farm accessible, requiring thoughtful design. Also the composting dwarf needs to be looked after somehow, because nobody likes it when janitor's go postal.

Lastly, it may be possible to cheat the system. If a freshly constructed plot does not require fertilizing, then players can just deconstruct and refurrow farm plots when the fertility is used up. As a solution I propose that removing a farm plot replaces the 'muddy' tag with 'mossy', which is presently almost unused. Players now have to re-flood after removing a plot, which is quite a bit of work. Alternately, moss can be used to make carpeted peasant nap-time barracks, since sleeping on moss isn't as bad as a cavern floor.

And yes, fertilizer should be importable and embarkable.

And sure, fertilizer barrels explode, what with all the nitrates in there. "Load fertilizer" can be a new command on catapults.

[numerobis]

It would be great if refuse piles were, in effect, farms -- just add spawn (or, even, don't add spawn, but then you get random stuff rather than the fungi you wanted, and in smaller stacks).  That would make miasma a necessary evil, rather than purely a problem.