When do animals start grazing?

[creepergaming]

I have a pen of alpacas and have had problems with food for them, so I planted haygrass in their pen so that they could graze. I know they graze on it and have seen them do it, but have not seen them doing it newly planted. at what growth level or condition will make them graze on it?

[Astasia]

They will eat live plants when they are above like 50% grown. At that point they will get like 0.15 nutrition from a haygrass plant, but if you grow it somewhere else and harvest it at 100% grow, you get 0.9+ nutrition of hay from it for generally less work. Depending on your biome, planting any crops in a pen is actually worse than letting wild grass grow for them to graze on, wild grass is extremely efficient food.

[. -.-. .-.. .. .--. ... .]

Originally posted by Astasia:

They will eat live plants when they are above like 50% grown. At that point they will get like 0.15 nutrition from a haygrass plant, but if you grow it somewhere else and harvest it at 100% grow, you get 0.9+ nutrition of hay from it for generally less work. Depending on your biome, planting any crops in a pen is actually worse than letting wild grass grow for them to graze on, wild grass is extremely efficient food.

You can check your Pen Marker and it tells you how much "wild food" will probably grow in the Pen and how much food your Pen Animals will approximately need. So you can calculate how much hay you gonna need.
I tend to always have a good surplus of hay, because it doesnt hurt and i tend to use hay for flooring in a lot of spaces, because it does not get dirty, so your pawns dont run around cleaning that.

But a Question: If you plant trees there can also grow grass and bushes on their tiles, so would it be an idea to plant Trees in a Pen?

[Astasia]

Originally posted by . -.-. .-.. .. .--. ... .:

But a Question: If you plant trees there can also grow grass and bushes on their tiles, so would it be an idea to plant Trees in a Pen?

I mean it will still reduce nutrition growth by taking up some tiles, a tree farm is like 25% tree tiles and 75% not. Usually you'd want to set the pen to auto-cut trees to maximize grass growth, and I've never been in a situation where I was so pressed for space I'd put a tree farm in the pen. That said, an alternative would be to not set the pen to auto-cut and make it a big growing zone with sowing disabled, then you could harvest the natural tree growth for wood and save time sowing them. It just depends on how large a pen you want to make.

[Dreagon]

If you want to grow a food source for animals in their pen I believe growing dandelions is the best option.

[Red Bat]

The only way haygrass ends up being kind of efficient to grow in a pen is if you grow the haygrass first and then build the pen around it once it's fully grown. Even then you are probably better off just deleting the grow zone and growing haygrass elsewhere once you build the pen. If you need more food for pen animals, you are usually better off just expanding the pen unless you are in an area with very long winters, in which case you need a greenhouse of haygrass and a barn with a stockpile to bring it to.