Cliff notes for animal farmers

[MarkSH]

I've not done horses (unless they eat thousands of litres of oats, they are just massively profitable, 4 grand per horse per day, so testing not really called for), for cliff notes on what you get farming can be summarised as about a 6% return on original investment of you grow your stock up to a level you can keep up with.

These figures are based on Easy economy, selling excess stock and selling to the bio plant, and approximate:

Chickens 20 per chicken per day. 0l water. 0.4l food
Sheep 100 per sheep per day. 44l water, 20l food
Pigs 150 per pig per day. 20l water, 80l food.
Cows 230 per cow per day. 100l water, 380l food.

At the current rates, at easy economy, you're about as well off buying pigfood as providing each item yourself, as the opportunity cost of the ingredients equal what you get from pigfood. At normal and hard economies, your opportunity cost is much lower, so supplying your own is a better choice.

Sheep and cows you can get about a 10% higher rate making your own feed over buying (and mixing TMI from the purchases), and chickens use so little (0.4 litres of wheat per chicken per day) that it just isn't any difference: it's 0.8 vs 1.6 out of 20-ish.

The other thing is the amount of feed you put in. Chickens use so little you barely have to take time out. Sheep are almost equally easy. Pigs require 80l of food per day per pig but cows need 380l. So a big cow farm has you taking most of your time just carting food to them.

Chickens are hardest to sell the products, spending a lot of time collecting boxes if you have 400 of them (12 boxes a day).

For all of them it is sufficient to go round once a day to clean up, and for pigs/cows you will likely need a hay barn or silo nearby so you can stockpile food and reduce the amount of time you spend just arranging to feed your animals. That is if you're going for a lot of animals.

The per-animal productivity should let you know what you will get back in profit for your efforts. A single chicken will technically make no money, but any other animal in a small pen will make enough to pay the cost of the farm pen. Buy enough to make "decent" cash based on the above figures and grow your stock up to the level you find you're spending "enough" time just tending the animals and, if your time you want allocated to this changes, you can either let the stock grow or sell off stock to change the time spent on the animals to fit your schedule.

My opinion is buy 30 stock and let it build up from there. You could make money today by spending more cash on stock, but new animals are free and don't need transport, and even 30 chickens can make enough each day to fund all the buildings you have without diverting you from other things just to deliver eggs.

(EDIT: Pigs sell for a set amount and the birth rate doesn't as far as I have read change based on economy difficulty, making pigs better and better for farming as you up the economic difficulty. Headcanon for me for eggs is that 1 litre is a half dozen eggs: a box that size is about a litre (1000cu cm), making the big box 75 dozen eggs, 3x5x10 boxes. Could be right. Eggs are machine gunning out of the chickens...!)

[Corstaad]

Excellent Post! My Dairy Barn runs at 200 cows now. I just feed Hay for 80%. If I make the TMR transition I'm going to spend 341k to see a daily increase of 5k a day. Thats going to take me 68 days to recover the investment. Just to start mixing TMR I'm going to increase my daily feeding by six trips running circles with a TMR mixer. This wasn't thought out well by Giants.

[MarkSH]

Well remember that the above figures are net profit, so when you produce at 80% you don't drop 20% of the figures above, you drop the gross profit by 25% (you take 10 days instead of 8 to produce what made the profit), but you still pay 100% of the costs (because the 380l of cow food is still eaten each day), so you effectively go down to about 160 per cow per day rather than 230.

It also means that you are doing the cleaning up, feeding and watering for 10 days to get the output 100% would get in 8, so it depends on how much free time you have left if you want to keep running 100% efficiently