Should I build food farms?

[Paddy]

Hey I've been watching few videos to get tips on this game and I've been told and read that you don't want to build too many farms as it keeps your people as peasants and helps the landowners. Is this true. I have meat and grain in a deficit however it says to import I would end up losing money? Should I do so anyway and just focus on industries to enrich my population. What about food factories. Are these a good industrial alternative to provide food without keeping your people as peasants?

[endymionologist]

If food prices get too high people will just leave work for subsistence farming, which makes it very hard to tell if you'e got too much food production. Food industries effectively turn food into more food, so you can use them in pace of farms to some extent, but they cost more to build and don't work well with only grain and meat as inputs; you do need industrial food specifically for army troop enhancement, so designing your food production around the food industry inputs is a good idea regardless.
I always try to max out fishing before I worry about farms, but I trust the investment pool build queue to keep me out of trouble a lot more than everyone else here does.

[teron]

Any job > Peasants.

Since buildings pay a building wage, which then is modified by profession.

Peasants have a wage weight of 0.2 and only consume 10% of their needs in state consumption (e.g. the remaining 90% they made themselves). From memory they only exists if you have Subsistence buildings.
Labours (which anyone can become) have a wage weight of 1. They also have an easier time promoting into Farmers/Machinists/Clerks.

So if the building paid a base wage of 10, a labour would make 10, a peasant would make 2. Machinists/Clerks would be 15 due to their 1.5 wage weight.

Really early game building quicker to build buildings like logging camps can be a good idea to quickly shift pops into more productive jobs. Mines would be the next fastest, with factories tending to take the longest. Both of which help make your construction goods cheaper for your building industry.

Farms/plantations/ranches are also fairly quick to build, though keep in mind that if your replacing a Subsistence Rice Paddies those buildings employ 2x the peasants of the other Subsistence buildings. Fishing buildings are also quick to build while having shopkeeper/capitalists as owners, but you do need ships as inputs.

You also want to avoid activating labour saving techs if you have a ton of pops. Since having excess labours is more useful then having them be unemployed or peasants.

[Paddy]

OK so I'm still trying to figure out the loop of this game. Prior to this I was trying to produce every resource in the game trying not to rely on trade for anything and get it to a surplus to sell. The problem was with this my construction couldn't build fast enough to make sure demand was being met especially as my population grew fast.

Now I have been told the only thing you mainly worry about is producing things that aid in your construction and industrialize. By focusing on industrializing such a iron mines rather than livestock farms I can make more money off mines which can offset the cost of importing meat? Is that correct? Just build the big industries to make money and import the other stuff?

[Paddy]

I suppose what I'm asking is should I plug my fish, meant and grain deficit or just keep building iron mines and other profitable industries and import those other things?

[TasteDasRainbow]

grain and meat are great to both use agricultural investment funds and to maintain standard of living, as well as decent taxes post-traditionalism. As long as you're not building majority agricultural buildings you don't need to worry too much as the proportion will be in your favor.

I'm generally more in favor of using that early agricultural investment fund to maintain a steady increase of jobs and income using it, allowing more construction used earlier. As long as you keep a majority proportion of your production toward construction goods, unis, industry, etc., it will likely benefit more than hurt.

[teron]

Originally posted by Paddy:

I suppose what I'm asking is should I plug my fish, meant and grain deficit or just keep building iron mines and other profitable industries and import those other things?

Really you should be doing both. Since food is a major expense for pops, but you also want to develop industry, especially anything that helps you to produce construction. Since more construction capacity = more buildings and snowballing.

Note though for Fish/Meat/Grain/Fruit/Groceries that they all fill the basic food need and pops will substitute on for the other to an extent.

As an example, increasing supply of fish --> lower price of fish --> pops shift demand away from Grain/Meat/Fruit

The whole do not build farms thing is likely more around the edge case of you have states that have 0 unemployed pops. Then building non farms would pull pops out of subsistence farms and reduce the number of aristocrats over time. This was more something that happened more at launch but 1.2 had a rebalance in arable land
“Worldwide rebalancing of Arable Land, with land generally reduced in Europe/Asia and generally increased in the Americas”

This was also before the Homesteading law existed, which destroys landowner clout due to replacing some of the aristocrat owners with farmers.