Various Grass Queries (Seasons)

eggvan
Posts: 2
Joined: Thu Aug 01, 2019 8:03 pm

Various Grass Queries (Seasons)

Post by eggvan »

Hi folks,
Before you say read the manual, or other things, i've been a happy crop farmer for a while. I'm slowly getting my head around using Grass for my animals.

Cows require grass in winter, despite me not being able to farm it. As I understand it, as long as they get TMR, i'm ok and am not starving them.
However, in real life in the UK farmers tend to make grass/hay/silage bales in late summer. In seasons, I could theoretically mow in Spring, then Summer, then Autumn. What's the most realistic thing to do? Grass bales rot. So how do I preserve grass in the summer months to feed my cows in later months?

Secondly, what do I do with my clamped silage when it has fermented? Do I just shovel it out as and when required and use like I would a silage bale? What happens to the rest of the chaff/silage, won't it rot?

Thanks folks. A lot of farmers round here forage harvest etc so it's a process i'd love to create realistically. So shout up for your suggestions, even if they're labour intensive, I love realism.
DirectCedar
Posts: 1025
Joined: Thu Apr 20, 2017 12:47 am

Re: Various Grass Queries (Seasons)

Post by DirectCedar »

eggvan wrote: Thu Aug 01, 2019 8:09 pm Hi folks,
Before you say read the manual, or other things, i've been a happy crop farmer for a while. I'm slowly getting my head around using Grass for my animals.

Cows require grass in winter, despite me not being able to farm it. As I understand it, as long as they get TMR, i'm ok and am not starving them.
However, in real life in the UK farmers tend to make grass/hay/silage bales in late summer. In seasons, I could theoretically mow in Spring, then Summer, then Autumn. What's the most realistic thing to do? Grass bales rot. So how do I preserve grass in the summer months to feed my cows in later months?

Secondly, what do I do with my clamped silage when it has fermented? Do I just shovel it out as and when required and use like I would a silage bale? What happens to the rest of the chaff/silage, won't it rot?

Thanks folks. A lot of farmers round here forage harvest etc so it's a process i'd love to create realistically. So shout up for your suggestions, even if they're labour intensive, I love realism.
Some general things that generally answer some of your questions (in not that particular an order):

Seasons recognizes that you can't provide fresh grass in the winter with all of Seasons mechanics implemented. It therefore correspondingly ramps milk production up during the winter to compensate for this.

TMR is a fine food source but it won't get cows to 100% if it is the only thing you are feeding, as it won't fill the grass meter. TMR is one weird situation in FS17 and personally I don't think it is implemented that well. It seemed to fill the TMR meter and the hay/silage meter in an almost unpredictable ratio that I can't say I have quite figured out. However your cows can definitely survive and produce milk and offspring on just TMR and will probably get to max productivity of 80% or so.

Grass bales do rot as you note, which is realistic as wet grass doesn't keep in real life either in an unprotected bale or in a heap. "Zero grazing" regimes that bring grass to the cows do it frequently all through the growing season as there really is no way to store fresh grass without making it into silage (which is excellent feed in real life as you probably know, and is how in reality you "feed grass" in the winter). In real life this only works in climates where grass is green and growing year round. Everywhere else in the world you have to put up dry or fermented feed for winter.

There are a couple ways to "cheat" this in the game if you want. One is the modified forage and chips silo on the modhub which will (unrealistically) store fresh grass over winter without spoilage. Another is to fill (or overfill, if you use a whole bale when it is almost full) the grass trough late in the day on the last day of autumn. This will buy you threeish days of the grass benefit into winter.

There is also a PC mod called "Convert Hay to Category Grass" which changes cows' requirement so that grass and hay are interchangeable and fill the same requirement (silage then becomes the primary "base" food by itself). Using this you can feed grass or hay in the summer, and just hay in the winter, to get that final 20% benefit of the grass meter.

You can open a silage clamp (or pit, silo, bunker, or pile depending where you are in the world :biggrin2: ) and start feeding it as soon as it shows 100% fermented in the F1 menu. It takes one seasonal transition to ferment. When you open it you can load it out with a loader of any type, or with conveyors. It does not spoil when opened and will stay in good condition in the clamp indefinitely.

Hope this info is of some use to you, and have fun with your livestock venture.
eggvan
Posts: 2
Joined: Thu Aug 01, 2019 8:03 pm

Re: Various Grass Queries (Seasons)

Post by eggvan »

Thank you DC, that was a really comprehensive answer and answered all the queries I had. Thanks for taking the time!
DirectCedar
Posts: 1025
Joined: Thu Apr 20, 2017 12:47 am

Re: Various Grass Queries (Seasons)

Post by DirectCedar »

eggvan wrote: Wed Aug 07, 2019 9:31 pm Thank you DC, that was a really comprehensive answer and answered all the queries I had. Thanks for taking the time!
You're welcome. Glad I could help.
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