I’m currently experimenting a bit with under-staffing barns. Currently, I have my two large barns running on just 4 workers each. I wonder if I can somehow increase the milk vs. meet production ratio by that? The idea is that with few workers few cows are born per year. But will the milk production also decrease proportionally? After all, there are still 20 cows in the barn producing milk.
Does anybody have experience with this?
Barns max workforce needs reducing anyway, the workers eat more than it produces! which is just laughable 
A villager consumes 24 food per year. A fully staffed barn thus consumes 288 food per year, which is only a fraction of what it produces. Clearly a substantial surplus.
No experience with this but it’s an interesting idea. The way milking works is it takes x time for a worker to milk a cow, and then there’s y amount of cooldown time before the same cow can be milked again. So with less workers it will take longer to get through the cows and they’ll go on cooldown later, so you will miss some amount of milk depending on worker count. Also no milk or eggs are collected on months 8, 9, 10.
One other thing to consider is you’ll need more animal feed for the equivalent amount of food. Since barns of 20 cows will be making less food, but still using the same amount of feed. Probably not a big deal for most settlements, but it could matter.
Lower worker counts will also be much more heavily affected by workers going to shelter stock, or replacing their clothes etc. So low workers counts may have occasional off years where output drops significantly.
I did a 1 year test on one of my settlements. Results are from a year of lower workers, recorded at the end of month 2, right before births.
2 workers - 261 milk, 341 meat
4 workers - 800 milk, 682 meat
6 workers - 1018 milk, 1023 meat
8 workers - 1208 milk, 1364 meat
Normal 12 worker output is 1300-1450 milk and 2046 meat
Would need a lot more data to draw any strong conclusions, but there look to be setups that can either balance or produce more milk than meat.
Very interesting testing, thanks! I already tried doing so myself, but with my current settlement I have only two large barns where one is quite close to my town and the other one is quite far away. So depending on which barn I used for testing, my numbers were quite different and not really representative.
But according to your numbers, increasing the milk/meat ratio would work best with 4 workers, which would indeed confirm my observation. Another interesting point is that general food production output seems not to reduce linearly with the number of workers, with food per worker being worst at fully staffed 12 workers and best at 4 workers. And the effect fully comes from the milk production since meat production indeed is perfectly linear. Of course you’re right that one also needs to account for the farmers necessary to generate the grain, true.
I would be interested in other people’s experience. Do you usually fully staff your barns? Or, do you balance milk/meat ratio in any other way?