Need Livestock Advice

[vyraka]

Can anyone offer some advice on animals?

The short version is that I am starting the winter (around Day 180?) with 2500 hay and running out food before winter ends and hay can be regrown. I do have an area with tilled soil to regrow grass/hay in the growing months, but I am running out of hay seed. The traders don't sell enough of it.

Admittedly, I have too many of everything. I have over half a dozen of every animal, and in the case of sheep, around a dozen. I generally don't keep males unless the population starts to dwindle due to age.

I have thought about getting rid of the pigs because I'm up to my ears in fertilizer. Chickens aren't really an issue since they eat flax grain. I know I can feed grain to my other animals, but prefer to only do it in emergency as they go through them fairly quickly and I need seeds for replanting in spring.

Right now, I have my cowshed set up for butter, and my goat shed set up for cheese. I like this set up, but as I said, I'm going through too much hay so I'm thinking I need to settle on either goats or cows for my next game.

Do cows and goats give milk equally in frequency?

Right now, I play on a seed with +1 peat, +1 grassland and +1 wildlife. I'm thinking I might need to remove the peat and exchange it for another tick of grassland.

Thanks in advance!

[sbhink805]

how many animals do you have of each?

[vyraka]

15 Sheep, 8 Goats, 3 Pigs, 11 Cows, 8 Chickens

[sbhink805]

That's a lot. i would eliminate pigs and chickens to start and probably only need half or less of the others. But it depends on how many clanfolk your feeding.

[vyraka]

Yeah, initially I didn't keep track when I had males and all the females got pregnant. Then several of them had twins. And in the case of the pigs, they had a set of 4!

And I do have a lot of people - around 16. Again - mothers got pregnant, and I had at least two sets of twins. It's been great for production, but it's got to a point where they are twiddling their thumbs in the winter because there isn't much to do.

Initially, I had a "children's room" where the children would sleep. But it didn't take long for the mother's to get pregnant again, so I started putting the children with their parents - AND the parents still found time to get some knooky in!

In the end, when the children started coming of age, I'd marry them off and send them on their way.

I will probably start making the parents sleep in separate beds when they have at least two children.

[dissent]

Cows and goats give the same amount of milk (20) per milking but cows are milked twice a day, goats only once. So cows produce twice as much milk overall.

I don't bother with dairy in the game as cheese and butter are the two least nutritious foods of all. My clan get more nutrition from one tile of mushrooms than from a cow's daily output of milk, turned into cheese. Considering how much labour is involved in making cheese and butter, these foods aren't worth it for me. Although cheese is moderately good as a trade item.

If you want animals just for food, pigs are far and away the best. I feed my clan almost exclusively with eels, fish and meat. For a clan of 16-20, three 100% lakes and 4 adult pigs (one boar, three sows) is more than enough. I don't slaughter the adult pigs, keeping them as breeding stock. Instead, I slaughter the piglets the moment they become Juveniles. That way, I only ever have to feed four pigs as the babies don't eat anything, they are fed by the sows. Pigs breed the fastest, produce the most young, mature quickly and provide way more meat than sheep or goats do.

Feeding four adult pigs is a doddle. They eat wild grass in the warmer seasons and only require five grain each per day in winter for 20 grain total daily.

[sakasiru]

Growing grass on tilled soil isn't very effective, since you need hay seed for which in turn you need to destroy a lot of hay.

My solution is this: Since you have a lot of animals, you can produce a lot of fertilizer. Clear a big area from everything but normal grass. Fertilize the blank spots. Wait a day or so and weed out all trees and bushes that start to grow (or let them grow, more berry bushes are hardly a bad thing). Your grass will grow in a few days and you can easily harvest it. Fertilize the cleared spots again, rinse and repeat.

[vyraka]

Interesting solution. I'll try that out.

[Dali]

using fertilizer on empty not tilled green ground helped me in a similar situation as yours :)
and also - i do not need to use the fertilizer in spring - i use it when there is a downtime (often in winter) and in spring the grass grows there, no hayseeds needed

[Philtre]

Personally I only ever have sheep and goats. I like to make cheese for role-play purposes, but if you aren't interested in that, I'd suggest just the sheep, since wool clothing is a substantial upgrade to every other type of warm clothing. You will get enough meat by culling your herd that keeping pigs for meat isn't necessary unless you pick a map with low fishing potential. In general, I like to pick maps with several large lakes, so after the first year, my people mainly eat eels with a side of meat from spring through fall, interrupted by a solid week or so of eating their way through a mass harvest of berries when they ripen, enter into winter with a freezer full of eels that run out around mid-winter, and finish the winter on meat and if necessary some bread. I keep a few bowls of brose around in case anyone gets sick, and a couple of thousand dried mushrooms in case of emergency. If the freezer gets overloaded with meat, I make smoked meat and sell it.

For animal feed, if I'm short on hay I'll only feed them grain (hay seed and flax grain). The grain has the same nutritional value in a trough as the whole plant, so unless you're short on labor you might as well get the straw to repair animal beds, etc., and just feed them the grain. I grow hay and oats on tilled soil because of the yield boost; if I'm short on labor I'll turn off auto-water. (Edit in case this isn't clear from context: growing any plant on tilled soil gives a 50% yield boost, which in the case of grain completely makes up for the seed used for planting - 5 seed to plant, but yields 15 rather than 10 when harvested.)

[sbhink805]

I get more than enough meat by killing nearby foxes and wolves and the cats bringing rabbit meat and I have 18 clan members now. I think i have about 7 cats.