Has anyone balanced farm animal production with colony food requirements?

[RyansPlace]

I have 80 chickens and a couple bulls in one field, 20 cows and a couple roosters in the other. I use the bulk of the milk and eggs they produce to make kibble mixed with rice from the same fields to feed them with, but there is always a large deficit that requires either hunting or slaughtering a farm animal to make up the difference. Is it possible to set up a farm so you get enough farm animal products to make kibble and also feed a colony of 12?

[martindirt]

After 80 chicks and 20 cows, you still have to ask this?
OK.
No. Farm animals are good if can let them graze till winter. Feeding them year round... Waste of food. When I'm somehow gain some only farm animals (read: no hauler, no wool production), like chicks, or some useless animals like yorkies, I'm keep them till they self sufficient (graze), and butcher them into my fine meals. - Before someone trying to teach me: Ik yorkies never graze, so I'm butcher them immediately.
If you want them to use as food producers:
Allow them to graze (don't mind if some of the get hunted by predators - or hunt down predators from your map to protect them), grow hay, out zone them from hay store, and feed them only at winter. Feed animal products to your colonists.

[RyansPlace]

martindirt, thanks for the tips. How do you keep your farm animals alive during raids?

[martindirt]

Make a safezone behind your walls, and when raid happens restrict the animals inside. (This won't protect them from droppod raids, when that happens, I'm make a temporary zone away from battle.)

[Raymond]

I generally mass produce haygrass to feed the animal in winter and let them graze in the wild in other season. You shouldn't really make kibble honestly, if you are producing fine/lavish meal, then you shouldn't be worrying about nutrition efficiency. Also kill off all but 1-3 roosters and bulls for breeding only. Male animals that does't produce anything should be kill for meat after they mature. Make sure to have multiple people doing handling jobs in multiple shifts to gather every milk and eggs possible. I have only like 10-14 cows (I kill them off when their pop get too large) with a bull and they can feed about 16 with lavish meal.

[Morkonan]

IMO, farming animals for meat is not really sustainable in Rimworld. Maybe chickens/egglayers... maybe. But, it requires a bunch of micromanagement and is fairly fragile. (ie: Turns the colony into nothing but a process for farming chickens until "that one thing happens" that breaks it.)

I have domesticated animals for the fun of it and the enjoyment I get from building up a half-workable process and for "fur" or the occasional leather-injection. That's it. Milk and eggs are nice, but are just bonus byproducts in the process of farming fur for clothing. (Muffalo/Llama/similar are the only animals I actually try to acquire aside from Retrievers.)

Note: In some situations, Boomalopes are worth it for their chemfuel and their suicidal attacks if trained properly. But, being "boomie things" there are certain risks... Never, ever, allow colonists to "Rescue" a downed, tamed, boom-thing... Don't. Do. It. :)

[RyansPlace]

I tried simply growing hey, but kept encountering animal starvation. So kibble became a temporary solution until I found something better.

Also, it probably doesn't help that my entire livestock population has dementia from a recent toxic fallout event. I get alerts every other minute about a hen or cow walking around dazed and confused.

[Astasia]

Kibble is an awful food source, it's really only for situation where an animal will not eat hay and you want to extend your meat supply, in theory. In practice the game is stupid and doesn't understand the difference between a simple meal with meat and without, so you can make carnivores pure vege simple meals to feed them when needed, no meat required. Except wargs of course.

Grazing is ideal but not always possible on every map, if it's not then grow and harvest hay, it's the most efficient crop, you don't need to prepare it. Converting hay into protein is always going to be a fairly large net loss in nutrition, as it should be, but the protein you get out of it is more valuable and with the effort spent you can set your colony up with year round self-sufficient lavish meals. It's not something you should generally work for early game when you are struggling, but later on as your colony gets more established it's one of things you can do because why not.

[Gamefever]

Kibble is an amazing food source.
You just have to make it with the proper ingredients like people.

Paste is even better!
A nice green paste....Costs way less resources for the amount of nutrient gain and you can feed live stock paste made from people!

[martindirt]

Originally posted by Gamefever:

Kibble is an amazing food source.
You just have to make it with the proper ingredients like people.

Paste is even better!
A nice green paste....Costs way less resources for the amount of nutrient gain and you can feed live stock paste made from people!

Its a pain in the ss to make enough paste for livestock. Use NPD, draft, forbid the pile, undraft... Repeat. And do this again and again when your paste stock is running low.

Kibble from human meat needs a dedicated psycho butcher to prevent mass mood loss. + early game don't provides enough raider meat (and I think op is a new player, I'm doubt he's playing on hard difficulty). And waste of time. Herbi pets eats hay, predators eats corpses, or just let them out to hunt for themselves.

[xicewindex]

Cows, muffalo chicken lama.......... grazing animals feed themself in the wilds and for winter you get haygras.
Dogs, cougars, bears, boars...... build a seperat freezer for raider corpses and they feed themself with those when there is no life food on the map.
Just make sure the corpsesfreezer is forbidden for all humans and let the animals do the hauling.

Small note on chickens...... those little buggers eat ALOT and I usually don't bother with them.

[climbingeastofwinter]

Hay grass is pretty solid, but yea, you're going to run into shortages pretty quickly if you don't keep the herd numbers down. It's pretty easy to get up to 20-30 muffalo, for instance, and then you'll find your entire colony is just trying to clean up after them, feed them, milk them, shear them, haul their goods, etc all day and night long. Try to limit the number of animals you're keeping or the overhead of taking care of them will consume every minute of your colonists' time.

[Astasia]

Originally posted by Gamefever:

Kibble is an amazing food source.
You just have to make it with the proper ingredients like people.

To what end? What is the benefit of turning human meat into food for herbi/omnivores? You don't need to extend your hay supply, you can grow as much hay as you want. Actually making kibble takes a significant amount of time for one or more colonists, it's work you don't need to do. If you wanted to take that human meat and spend colonist effort to turn it into something more valuable/useful instead of just selling it, chemfuel is the answer.

As far as carnivores, there are very few in the game worth having, especially in the current version of the game (wildness), and generally not in the quantities that much of this matters. Just let them nibble on corpses or give them access to your simple meal supply.

Originally posted by Gamefever:

Paste is even better!
A nice green paste....Costs way less resources for the amount of nutrient gain and you can feed live stock paste made from people!

You can't effectively use nutrient paste as animal food without mods as martin explained. Nobody should be subjecting themselves to that kind of micro hassle, and with any significant quantities of animals you wouldn't physically be able to manage it.