Pasture to Farm Transition, Moo

Thank you for answering my questions!

The herders/cattle of course a super productive, no doubt - but they would be even if you left them to graze somewhere else or on the fields directly. So I wouldn’t count the fields they’re grazing on as “fully employed”, as they don’t get you any resources that you wouldn’t get if your cows were grazing somewhere else, be that an empty area or by feeding on your crops (while you would still get their fertilization effect in the latter case).

I guess if staggered rotations and apiaries don’t keep your farmers near their fields (and setting them to labourers and back to farmers mid-season is too micro-intensive), having them contiously re-till old fields, essentially, does the trick.

I never needed full farmers for the bigger fields when we’re just talking planting and harvesting. Not even when some of them have wandered off in between. The only time they don’t get the harvest done completely is when they bug out and leave a tile or two unharvested for no absolutely reason, leaving it to rot. But that doesn’t change with more farmers assigned.
25 farmers should be enough for 3 fields of 286 tiles. Somebody correct me if I misremember.

I haven’t run a big test like this, but I don’t think clover is the most efficient choice. Imho, leek+carrot nets you the highest yield, followed by leek+buckwheat. Both are -6% fertility though. Peas and leek is only slightly less, however, and only -3% fertility. I wonder how big the gain from cows munching on those is - because even two herds will only cover 10x20 tiles out of 12x24, it should be lower than your numbers. I haven’t used them in this way yet, so I should probably test it. You got +3.33% on average per year of grazing, which would be enough to contiously run peas+leek without any compost at all. Not sure about fodder quality though.

Even without the cows grazing on you active fields in exchange for some of their yield, you would only need 3 loads of compost over 10 years to counter the yearly -3% from peas+leeks. And with fields three times the size of your 10x10 fields, you could afford that. I think that is the most efficient setup, though of course planting peas+leek every year on all three fields probably means a constant loss of 10% or so of your yield to diseases (still worth it) and no flax, grain etc.
Throwing in years with buckwheat+leek costs you -6% fertility. I don’t know how well flax+flax or flax+beans really works, I haven’t really measured how much you lose to frost spells with those (especially the latter). Add one of those to the 3-year-rotation and you lose -12% (with double flax) or -10% (with beans) over those 3 years, which compost got covered. No clover needed. Less disease loss too with a double flax breaking up the mildew crops. And thanks to having three fields, you’ll get a continous supply of all of those crops. Might not be enough winter fodder for the cattle though only 286*11 = 3146 units of grain per year for both your millers/bakers and cows. That’s average yield before any fertility bonus, though. Leek+carrots would offer about 600 units more.

I’m really looking forward to your results vs the ones from Beetrix, though I don’t really know their setup.

Are you planning on also testing the yield from 10x10 fields, but with 9 instead of 5+1+2?

To really compare those numbers, you two probably need to run the same crop rotations, except for the clover.

I’m debating with myself setting up a perfectly square comparison with 3 12x24 fields and no clover, just peas/beans and bigger gains from the applied compost. And maybe testing those cattle grazing on the fields, if I get it to work properly.
My current town doesn’t do such square fields, to look more organic… so I don’t know if I could use those to compare. (It also doesn’t need 3 max fields, that’s way too much food.)

As a note, you cannot graze cows on active fields. While I could have sworn that worked when I first started the game, it doesn’t now. I think it should be a feature, though.

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Originally, it only worked on expansions of fields for me. After some patching, it should work now - as long as you’re growing grain or root veggies. Clover used to work, but was patched out. Are you sure it doesn’t work at all? Could’ve sworn it did for me, though I’ve yet to properly watch it.

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I will check again and get back to you. Clover should definitely be grazeable, imo, but I will check root vegetables and grain.

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So can you run through the rotation for me one more time

| 1 | 2 | 3 |
| 9 | 0 | 4 |
| 8 | 7 | 6 |

1 - 6 fields,
7,8 Pastures
9 Fallow

and then rotate every 4 years?

2-7 fields
8,9 pasture (but that would make 8 pasture for 8 years, is that correct? or what am I missing?)
1 fallow.

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Those seem to be Celebrindan’s current numbers, yeah. Which means a field falls fallow at 63% fertility for 4 years, spends 8 years as a pasture with one herd assigned, which should bring it back up to around 90% fertility. Lastly, it’s being used intensively for 20 years before being allowed to fall fallow again.
Is that correct, @Celebrindan?

Which means, after regular addition of compost, the 3-year-rotation of such a field should be only slightly negative at -4% total. With, say, leek+peas you get -3% per year, so -9% instead over three years. This means, for the rotation to work, you’d need one load of compost every 6 years. For five active fields, that’s five loads of compost every 6 years. Something like wheat would be worse and probably still require clover in between to last 20 years. A barely negative rotation like flax + beans at -1% wouldn’t need any compost and never even drop to 63% again, so you can go more intensive than that.
What are your rotations like, Celebrindan?

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Well, except they’re going counter-clockwise. So:

| 5 | 4 | 3 |
| 6 | 0 | 2 |
| 7 | 8 | 1 |

0 = barns
1 - 5 = fields
6 = fallow
7,8 = pastures

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How closely are you watching your meat spoilage? Smokehouses tend to only process ~200 meat a year, and I’ve noticed that the smokehouses are my bottleneck.

Ooof, hats off to your patience with the terrain tool! I nearly lost my sanity just trying to get a 10x10 area flat enough for a field, and it was only a gentle slope. :man_facepalming:

So essentially, from a fertility standpoint it’s a bust (since the numbers won’t get high enough) but from a dairy/meat standpoint it’s a boom and worth doing.

I’m going to have to go kick my smokehouses in gear. Lazy bums.

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If you also have fishers, you might want to set the ratio of your smokers near the barns to 100% meat, while having a dedicated smoker for the fish. A nearby firewood splitter also increases efficiency. You could even manually assign the closest living person to the job for maximum efficiency, though that’s quite the hassle.

You can place the rat catcher anywhere and simply set the work radius over your granaries. You don’t need to make space for a rat catcher in the centre tile(s).

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What is the advantage of getting the fallow field to 100% fodder quality?
Have you seen any significantly lower milk production with 86% fodder?
It doesn’t increase the fertility gain of the field they’re grazing on, or does it?

I think an optimal setup tries to minimize the time a field has to lay fallow and the time it gets fertilized before being used again. You can always make your crop rotations of the other fields more negative, if they go through your cycle faster.

I would suggest to go with 2 years of leaving a field fallow, which previously bumped the fodder up from 0% to 80% and should be sufficient.

And then the next question is how many years of fertilizing are optimal.

I noticed in your first experiment that you gained +1% the first year, then +2%, then +5% for some reason, then +2% the next two years up until 76%, then +3% (might be a rounding thing) and lastly jumped from 79% to 85% in a single year by +6%. I first assumed it the gain would increase the more fertile the field is already (which is what you see with clover/beans/compost at low fertility fields, though 66% isn’t super low). But it fluctuates a lot, apparently. Maybe the milking time interferes with it and causes these?

This makes determining the perfect time harder and might explain why it changed in your second experiment.

Since 0.7.5f they’ve introduced a little environmental factor in the tool tip, which has been at 100% from the start for you. I think that only denotes the effect the map type has, though, not of the current fertility of the field. Anyhow, the tool tip is new, the effect is not. Either way, it’s always at 100% for your idyllic map, so this is not the problem.

If you can’t get it above 90% with cow dung, or the gains slow down to a crawl, it’s time to plant crops again. You could always add a load of compost for the last push to 100%. Better not waste to many years before using the field again for farming.

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I was looking to see where the baselines for production would play out, rather than general numbers from variable starting points.

I’ve found that in gaming, generally, the lower the level you start an action at, the faster it falls to zero effect.

I just wanted to give the experiment every chance of success.

Fertilization was happening at a ‘snowball’ rate yes, gaining momentum at an slightly increasing rate the higher it got.

Now that it’s nerfed I don’t know if any of this is still true.

This has become moot.

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Nerfed? Aren’t both of your tests done in 0.7.5f? Or have you switched to 0.7.6 beta?

Hope you’re not too discouraged by the change between your test runs.

Imagine my surprise when I realized it was the other way around with fertility in this game! :smiley:

But from your data it seemed to jump all over the place with grazing. Generally an upwards trend, but sometimes you got +5% and the next year only +2%. Not sure why. Unless you had two herds grazing there that year. The first +1% might also be from using only 11 cows, not 14. Still, I don’t really see the reasons for this pattern yet.

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Perhaps your experiment didn’t turn out exactly the way you wanted, but I would argue that you still researched a very interesting approach to farming and found out an awful lot of valuable information. It’s definitely going to affect the way I’m farming now. My cows have been grazing on new pasture land before I till it and I’m tightening up my barn management based on the insight you had.

Keep up the good work. If not on this experiment, then on others. It’s been super cool watching your process.

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I’m with Beetrix, this is defiantly not nerfed, and not a waste of time. Even if it doesn’t work exactly like originally planned, I think it can be addapted to the way we were having to do things and making that easier. We might still have to focus on what we plant a little, and fertility, but with this rotation some of it is eased. I am planning 3 of these in my current village.

Excellent work

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Checked this thread to see if this works.
Wanted to make a 24/7/365 clover farm for my cows.
They seem to be a little lost lately with all the trees growing on their pasture.
Suggestion:
Make clover grow naturally on a pasture.

Yes, I haven’t done a test over a period of years. I know when clover is planted it provides no fodder value, but I don’t know if a clover-only field might eventually gain value. As far as I know it doesn’t work. Sadness.

Clover used to work, but was consciously patched out. I guess they thought it made raising fertility too easy?
It’s kinda too easy on fertile maps already, to be honest, and pretty hard starting on barren arid highands, with or without clover munching cows. So maybe there’s another reason and it will eventually return?

They still work on grains and root veggies though. So one could make a pasture full of golden wheat for your cows to frolock in.
Or beans, if you care about that pasture’s fertility/output.

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