it would be helpful to have a field crop designated as hay to be available to barns for winter cattle feed. It would also be good to be able to plant grass pasture around barn that would be eaten down in time thus needing to let it regrow over a period of time.
When my cow population reaches ten and two new calves are born are two cows slaughtered automatically and is this noted somewhere?
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Your two cows will be slaughtered soon after they are born. To help with the lack of food in winter YOU can choose to slaughter them earlier. But you have to do it each year manually. There is no auto mode where you can change the month they are born/slaughtered.
Providing us an easier method to provide food in winter (aka hay) would seem to go against the flow of the game. The AI wants to stress our food supply every winter. Do we have enough food stored away to last through those cold winters?
And why there are new baby cows only after new years eve?
Breeding tends to be done all at once in herd management. Gestation is a little over 9 months, so a year is not unreasonable. Wild cows would breed at anytime during the year, though.
Place your Granaries right next to (touching) your Barns.
As long as there is grain available your cows will stay fed throughout the winter.
Keep your Windmills at least fifteen spaces away from your Granaries and they shouldn’t be able to run through all your grain turning it to Flour before your next crop comes in, but should be able to keep your Bakeries supplied.
Yeah. That would have been a helpful tidbit to know up front. Although maybe it is in the manual and I missed it. I thought placing my Windmill right next to the granaries would be a good thing, as stocking times would be low. Now, I blink, and suddenly I have a 1,000 bags of flour and 0 grain. I am now in the habit of shutting down my Windmill every now and then, so that my brewery and barns can stock up.
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My granaries and root cellars are across the town and my cows stay fed.
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A full 12x12 of Wheat should provide a little over 3100 wheat per harvest, if fertility is good and soil is balanced, depending on the map.
At that rate, if you put 17 to 20 spaces minimum in between your nearest Granary and your Windmill, you won’t have to mess with it beyond adding or retracting the second worker now and again.
The size of your harvests on the map you’re playing will tell you how far it needs to be, and don’t be afraid to move the Windmill if you need more or less space, but not the Granaries as the cows must be fed and the herders are overly challenged if the grain they need is anywhere else.
If you have builders available, it doesn’t take long.
I think the question should not be whether it is possible to feed cows during winter in this game right now, of course it is.
But would hay be a good resource to add to the game? Absolutely. It makes little sense to waste carrots and grain on feeding cattle when it’s much easier, cheaper and less labor intensive to just grow grasses and dry them into hay to make cattle fodder. Humans have been doing that for as long as animal husbandry has been a thing.
So the best way to make hay a thing would be to make it a very easily growable crop, with high resistances to all environmental factors, that has a very high yield. It’s important that it is easy to grow and amass vast quantities of it, because feeding livestock is the only thing you can do with it, in contrast with other crops.
I would prefer growing and feeding hay which is more natural for all manner of livestock verses table food which is always in short supply. I use clover as a grazing area but not sure that the natural cow fertilizer is being taken into account. That field should be high in fertility if the natural thing is working. I have not lost any cows do to lack of food but it seems silly to have the message every single winter when farmers all over the world use hay and have for hundreds and hundreds of years.
There’s a balance between streamlining systems and making them as accurate as possible. The system which exists today with feeding grain is a perfectly acceptable “game” solution to “hay”. Like others have pointed out, if you plan a grain harvest on at least one field and put the granaries right next to the barns, the system will basically automate itself - barns stock what they need and that will last all winter. The miller and brewery get the leftovers and the cycle repeats again next season.
Clover is actually a grazing heed for animals - maybe we could bale the clover up for hay??? That would be brilliant and also provide better use for the clover rather than just fertility
Your cattle will be able to graze on your clover in version 8.0. They can now but only on upgraded portion of your fields.
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Not real sure why they think it’s a good idea for cows to be able graze on crop-planted fields.
It’s a quick way to destroy a crop and render it unfit for human consumption.
Organic fertilizer is processed to compost or slurry, quickly tilled into a field after spreading, and well before any crop is planted.
Raw animal waste is a contaminating vector for disease.
If it were possible I’d use clover as fodder, it does nothing for soil fertility and there’s not enough manure for that. I also keep the herd size at 6. An excess of grains could also be used for winter feed but the mechanics chew it up in the mill without increasing the flour supply, and no bread unless I buy flour from a merchant.
Human waste is full of toxic trace elements, which is why I don’t buy food from China.
Move your mill further away from the silo storage. This slows your mill worker down. The grain-mill-bread chain of goods works diametrically opposite to normal supply chains. Usually you want to increase efficiency, here you want to decrease efficiency.
Rotating 4 7x7 fields (wheat grown 1x every 3 yrs per field) enables me to get enough wheat stored to supply bread to 500 with minimal spoilage, beer to my happy villagers, and still have some left over for the 30 head of cattle. I may mix some buckwheat in as well occasionally from additional fields which is solely for bread consumption.
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