Starting a farm on animals?

[rottielover]

I got interested in FS17 again after seeing news about 19 coming soon and have been playing a new farm for a while. The thought occurred to me, I don’t think I’ve seen any YouTuber start a farm on animals.

Has anyone done that or the math on it?

Thinking about it further:

If you start on goldcrest on easy or normal, sell silo crops, plant grass in all fields, sell all starting equipment.

Needed purchases:
Water trailer
Animal trailer? (Maybe)
Smallish tractor with loader arms, pallet fork, bucket
Smallest loading wagon
Small mower

That would seem to be all you need in order to work sheep right?

The tractor would need to be just big enough to run the mower on the front and the collection wagon on the back. There should be enough grass on the map to feed the sheep with this setup without having to plant your 3 starting fields but I think you should plant them with grass anyway (more on that in a bit).

I have to do the math on all this (can’t really do that at work lol).

Anyway from there I would think you work to buy a bailer, wrapper, and sell silage to make more money and expand from there.

So in essence your staring with the “grass farm method” that I see a lot of the youtubers go for, just that instead of going directly for silage bales you go for early sheep then to silage bales.

Would like to hear some thoughts on this but I think I’m going to give this a shot this week and see how it goes.

[Sandhill]

No reason that it would not work fine on normal. Easy would for sure be too easy. Money overcomes most challenges, and you have plenty of it on normal. The biggest challenge might be getting enough sheep for them to actually matter at first.
If you start out planting 12, 14 and 15 in grass before you sell off all of your equipment you can buy and then pay off your triple Pottinger mower, round baler, wrapper and picker upper wagon with your first grass harvest if you wrap it all and sell it all as silage.

[rottielover]

I guess I need to sit down and write down the prices and do some math.

Seems like if you skip the triple mower for the single and skip the bailer and wrapper and go for the pickup wagon that would seemingly get you a fair number of sheep, especially if you take your loan out and don’t mind going into debt for a while.

One issue would be the cost of the animal trailer vs the around $200 per animal for “delivery”.

[mattgo]

Goldcrest has like no open/grassy areas. Everywhere that isn't road or a building is mountains. On beeter maps there'd likely be enough. Pigs don't eat grass - they need a mixture of crops.

[Sandhill]

Thinking about it, Goldcrest might not be the best choice to start on animals, the place just cries uot for silage. Seems like if you're going to do grass on 12, 13 and 15, you might as well be all in, get at least a Valtra B, triple mower etc as it wouldn't make a lot of sense economically to do those fields (that can produce a couple hundred thousand per harvest as silage and are right at the sale point) using a little mower, tractor, and pickup wagon just for grass to feed a few sheep instead. If you make money in the silage business then you can afford plenty of sheep, but then of course you haven't started on animals. Just seems like not doing silage would just be playing with a hand tied behind your back.

Sosnovka though...
There you get endless free grass without needing to plant ANY, EVER. I'm just finishing my first fall in Seasons hard Poland geo and starting with almost nothing and just picking up grass in a wagon I have two and a half million liters of grass put in silage bunkers. I could have fed a lot of sheep

To really start on sheep and not do grass farming I like your original plan, but with a change of location to a map where you don't have to farm grass. And you're surely going to want to buy enough sheep right off that buying the trailer isan easy decision. If you buy just a hundred at first that'll about pay for the trailer.

[Mopic5]

If you plant grass and fertilize field 12 you should have enough feed to fill a couple of storage bunkers in one harvest - able to sustain a large goat herd for a month. (I'd spring for the cost of a small "placeable" storage bunker up by your goat yard.) You can also expand field 12 by selecting "Create Fields" on your plowing options. Or cut down some nuisance trees on the main farm to extend the easy harvesting of your grass range. (With a chainsaw and your pick-up you can pocket 3 to 4 grand clearing a few trees at a time.) Remember that fertilized field grass out produces "wild grass" by a fairly hefty margin. (I'm guessing 60% to 80% more productivity.)
This will leave your other two fields open for other animal feed and straw - ie. corn, barely, etc. If you're up for some mission work for you neighboring farmers, you should have plenty of funds without selling equipment or taking out loans.

[mattgo]

There aren't goats in FS17.

[rottielover]

I think he meant sheep.

All good points. I'm finally home after a disaster of a day, I'm going to get online here in a bit and see how the math looks

[rottielover]

oh and I don't think I'd try this on seasons, I can't see being able to sustain animals right away on seasons.

[Calisthra]

Originally posted by rottielover:

oh and I don't think I'd try this on seasons, I can't see being able to sustain animals right away on seasons.

On the Goldcrest map you're likely correct. On Sosnova it's possible so long as your herd isn't so big as to gobble up all the free grass too soon.

[rottielover]

Started a goldcrest seasons and I did pretty much as advertised. Planted grass in the starting fields sold everything (including buildings) took out max loan and went with all small equipment. I’m currently sitting on 20 sheep and 3 tractors with assorted equipment. It’s the first year late summer so I’m harvesting the fields.

Field 15 plus “free grass” has netted me 106,000 units of hay into my hay loft. I fed the sheep with free map grass so far.

I don’t know the calculations so I have no idea how much hay I need to keep my sheep alive till next harvest?

Currently have 60k in cash left without having sold any products yet.

I have leased a bailer and wrapper to make the last two fields silage to try and make money while waiting for the wool.

[gordon861]

Also buy a windrower, taller forks so you can carry more than one bale, and a weight for the back of the tractor to stop it from tipping.

[Calisthra]

My only hesitation with sheep is the wool pricing. On normal setting, it will often slip below 5k/th and stay there for long periods of time. The high price [for me] has been 9550, my target sale price is 9k. Most times it will only come up to 7.5k then drop back down. I end up stacking nearly a full semi-load of the pallets before the price is good enough to sell.

[Sandhill]

Originally posted by rottielover:

I don’t know the calculations so I have no idea how much hay I need to keep my sheep alive till next harvest?

Try
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-W5GqwMvDIA
A very nice spreadsheet to plan cows, pigs or sheep in Seasons including ha of various crops necessary for a given number of animals. The crop yield per ha might vary with map and needs to be edited if you are not playing on hard. As your flock grows you just need to enter a new number of animals to generate an updated set of needs...


I have leased a bailer and wrapper to make the last two fields silage to try and make money while waiting for the wool.

So in the end not really starting a farm on animals...another Goldcrest farm financed through grass?

[rottielover]

Very cool thank you for that!!!

I pretty quickly gave up on the idea of “animals first”. Seems like this game lets you start out thinking something was a good idea and about 8 hours of play time later you realize you screwed up in minute one :)

[Sandhill]

I think it's not that you screwed up, but in Seasons you're started out on the first day of spring, but it's best to buy sheep on the fourth day of autum, so you REALLY have some time to kill waiting.

You've inspired me to consider a sheep first with zero crop game in hard mode Seasons on Sosnovka, but I'd spend spring, summer and the first three days of fall manual logging, making money and clearing trees from huge fields of grass.
Assuming 30k a day part time logging and playing 9 day seasons, that would gross me 630k. Figure 85k for the logging equipment including a proper tractor to do it in (a modhub Case1455XL), another 80k for grass and hay equipment...my favorite mower (MF 885 with header), a small loading wagon , and a tedder, and buy a water trailer and I still have about 680k to buy sheep afteer selling all of the original equipment on day one. A perfect start, but...
Spending 21 days straight manual logging sounds SO tedious that although I've set up the game as a savegame I haven't been able to bring myself to start. And even at that, it would be starting on logging, not on animals. It'll be great after I drag myself through the initial grind, lol.

Good luck with the Gold Crest project, I'm sure all be off to new adventures once 19 comes out