im tired of fixing this logistical nightmare

[kai]

WTF do i do about the crop demand? most of my losses are from buying bread. i have 5 massive farms producing wheat and i am producing meat, bread, alcohol and clothes and soon to be plastic. i really can't be bothered to place down each farm and every single line and possibly trains to connect everything together because its just so ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ tedious! i don't want to do that every time i need more workers in a specific area :(

WHAT is your experience on crops and your methods?

[BobthenotsoGreat]

Place a working setup of one farm then dupe it as many times as you wish. Use a distribution hub to service each farm so they take 18 or 19 fields plus road cargo station to train line. Add train line. That should streamline it quite a bit.

[ChalwaBechatex]

My current build for each farm(seasons enabled):
4 medium fields, 12 big fields,
1 farm: 4 tracktors, 8 western harvesters
1st big distributions office: fields -> 4 silos
2nd big distribution office: 4 silos -> food factory or destilery

I've got 5 farms at this moment ( 4 food and alco, 1 meat) and they don't need any micromanagement at all, supplies grains for all year. It's not the most efficient build but it's working.

[Dave]

I don’t like transporting crops and I don’t like trying to balance crops between different industries.

So I build farms as like an extension of the factories that need them. I just pretend each factory needs a huge amount of space, and I build a farm around it. It’s pretty easy to know how many crops a farm produces, and so I know how much food/etc the associated factory will make each year. No matter how tempting it may be, I don’t transfer crops between industries.

Cows and Fabric factories have enough silo connections to fit the entire harvest of a huge farm. But for food and alcohol I need extra silos. I like to build a road cargo station connected to the extra silos, and to the warehouses where the food/alcohol is stored. A couple of trucks go back and forth between the factory and the cargo station trading the food/alcohol for crops. Using some math you can tweak how many crops they load so that all the silos will fill/empty at roughly the same rate.

[zytukin]

In my semi-sandbox games, using mods, I'd have 10-20 huge farm buildings (mods, they have 2 rail connections), each with 20 huge fields, and each serviced by a 32 vehicle distribution office.

Each farm would have 2 trains picking up the grain and delivering it to a massive warehouse (mod, 8 rail connections, 25,000 ton capacity).

Than more trains would take the grain to various industries that needed it.

[Ernst Cornell]

if you don't like placing lots of farms then use only large fields, they're efficient but need lots of space.

my current farm layout for seasonal farming (1970) is:

1 agrofarm
4 tractors
8 harvesters

2 medium distribution distribution
16 trucks

7 silos (usually bundled in 3-packs) to fit 4500 tons of grain.

now on the processing and distribution side. i use trucks instead of trains because road logistics are simpler and trains are expensive. when using lots of trucks, road cargo platforms are essential not only to industrial complexes, but also in shopping centers since you can set wait until unloaded orders, those orders simplify logistics a lot since you can keep a bread and meat truck always parked at the shop or its cargo station instead of having trucks running half empty through DO orders.

[bajecznie nawdychany]

To be honest, Workers, I think that food industry should be that big. In every country like that, especially if You are not importing food, there must be a lot of fields. It is perfectly reasonable. For example in 1938 agricultural land constituted 66% of the Polish territory. Currently 54% of Polish territory are fields in use.
In my republic I am having like 8 agro-farms with 15-17 (mostly big) fields attached to every one. Trains are delivering crops to HUGE (sic!) 43200T hub from where it is distributed across republic.

[polcorp]

In addition to what has been explained above, you can also supplement your grain production with solar farms:

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2464642699&searchtext=solar+

It's a factory, so doesn't require fields. The production is sometimes stopped, for lack of sun, but it is an interesting contribution, in addition to your bigs agrofarms.

You can also find a lot of fun with this mod from Novu, which allows you to build agrofarms with fields on the mountainous areas that are unused in your Republic:

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2276020007&searchtext=farm

These are 2 avenues for reflection, and 2 Workshop items, which can help you no longer consider agriculture as a nightmare ... but on the contrary, as a real source of satisfaction :-D

[BanzaiCharge]

You have 3 choices:
import food
Import crops to make food
Raise your crops and produce your own food.

3rd is the cheapest on the long run, but needs the most management.

You need more farms, especially if you have seasons enabled. The largest farm (5ha) gives you 300 tons of crops in a year. This means that 12 big parcels get you 3600 tons, which roughly covers 10 tons daily.

What I did was gathering all the crops using industries into one place (except the chemical plant and thetextile factory), and build modded grain silos there with high capacity. I gather the harvested crops at the farms (also connected to high capacity silos) and I transport the grain via trains to the factories.

I advise you to have a warehouse for food at every one of your cities and only export food if these are full, this way you will have buffer when you run out of grain and aren't producing food.

[Julien Renard]

It seems obvious to me that your problem is efficiency. You are stuck in the belief that you have to farm yourself. Free your mind of all the limitations and look at the problem from another angle. Unless you want to farm for romantic/emotional/nostalgic reasons, don't farm, it's too inefficient, especially with seasons. You'll never be able to produce AND transport/distribute enough crops to cover the entire demand.
Import crops, that is really efficient.
- You only buy what you need.
- They're available all year round, without limitations.
- No massive investments like described in other posts. The minimalist needs are: one train cargo station, one warehouse, one or two trains, tracks (of course), and power/fuel for trains. You could even push efficiency a step further by autobuying crops directly into the warehouse (autobuy is also a basic mechanic of the game). But then you'll loose some money through delivery costs, and you'ld still need some way to export surplusses. The train will quickly pay off when you avoid delivery costs.
- The same train can import crops and export your surplusses in food, alcohol and clothes on the same trip.
- You have crops available right at the start with the arrival of the first train, you don't have to wait for sowing and growing.
- You gain a lot of space on your territory, space that you can use way more profitable than with fields.
There will be hostile reactions to my post, ie that the prices will rise. Be aware that prices ALWAYS rise, be it for crops or for food. And still, the added value of food will compensate the changing price in two ways. Producing your own food, you don't have to import it, and when crops price rises, food price will do the same, making export of food more profitable.
Another reaction will be that the only way to play this game is by doing everything by yourself. Where is that written? Trade is a basic mechanic in the game, so why not use it?
You asked us how we solve the given problem; this is my solution, purely based on efficiency, but everybody plays the game the way he wants. I don't pretend to possess the only truth or wisdom.

[Novu]

Make clothing from synthetic fabrics to reduce crop needs.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2266584902

Grass fed cattle ranching.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2195119490

[PostaBence]

The problem with farms is that they take up so much space, so I tend to make an enourmous farming complex of about 6-8 farms far from the city and make only one train line for bringing the crops to the industrial area. I try to avoid using trucks for crops because such an a large quantity of them have to be transported. If crop production and distribution is centralized, it is not that tedious to send them to factories, especiallly if you use the larger ones with mods.

[tripodalt]

it will be good to math the real cost of farming and the return on cash of an exploitation
how much the export of crop can covert the fuel and how much time is requiered for refund th whole infrastructure and vehicules
since not a single worker is requiered for a full export of crop it an easy start to test

[BobthenotsoGreat]

Ursprünglich geschrieben von tripodalt:

it will be good to math the real cost of farming and the return on cash of an exploitation
how much the export of crop can covert the fuel and how much time is requiered for refund th whole infrastructure and vehicules
since not a single worker is requiered for a full export of crop it an easy start to test

This is really dependant on if you go vanilla or not. I don't have the numbers but I did do this on a "full" farm and found that it takes around 3 years when you include vehicles, fuel, buildings and roads. This assumes that it is isolated from your republic although it rarely would be.

The full (by full I mean 18 large - 6 US harvesters - 6 Eastern tractors) farm still requires 6 silo's (hence vanilla or not) and 2 to 3 road depots, 1 distribution hub (12 trucks) and a fuel station with road connection to export. The cost of the vehicles and roads alone takes close to 2 years to pay back with buildings and fuel taking it to the third. Crop export is really not worth it.

I could run the numbers but a) vanilla and b) isolate or part of the republic really changes things. You can use the distribution trucks to fill the silos to clear the fields then re-purpose them to run them to border so your vehicles are used efficiently but still the overall cost is prohibitive. However, you buy the vehicles once and inflation makes it more profitable over time, especially if you can use your own fuel.

EDIT - I did consider running goods straight off the fields but could not avoid a traffic jam at the border so lost a lot of crops although there might be a way to do it but without a lot of micro, I don't see it and the point is no micro.

[kai]

Ursprünglich geschrieben von Julien Renard:

It seems obvious to me that your problem is efficiency. You are stuck in the belief that you have to farm yourself. Free your mind of all the limitations and look at the problem from another angle. Unless you want to farm for romantic/emotional/nostalgic reasons, don't farm, it's too inefficient, especially with seasons. You'll never be able to produce AND transport/distribute enough crops to cover the entire demand.
Import crops, that is really efficient.
- You only buy what you need.
- They're available all year round, without limitations.
- No massive investments like described in other posts. The minimalist needs are: one train cargo station, one warehouse, one or two trains, tracks (of course), and power/fuel for trains. You could even push efficiency a step further by autobuying crops directly into the warehouse (autobuy is also a basic mechanic of the game). But then you'll loose some money through delivery costs, and you'ld still need some way to export surplusses. The train will quickly pay off when you avoid delivery costs.
- The same train can import crops and export your surplusses in food, alcohol and clothes on the same trip.
- You have crops available right at the start with the arrival of the first train, you don't have to wait for sowing and growing.
- You gain a lot of space on your territory, space that you can use way more profitable than with fields.
There will be hostile reactions to my post, ie that the prices will rise. Be aware that prices ALWAYS rise, be it for crops or for food. And still, the added value of food will compensate the changing price in two ways. Producing your own food, you don't have to import it, and when crops price rises, food price will do the same, making export of food more profitable.
Another reaction will be that the only way to play this game is by doing everything by yourself. Where is that written? Trade is a basic mechanic in the game, so why not use it?
You asked us how we solve the given problem; this is my solution, purely based on efficiency, but everybody plays the game the way he wants. I don't pretend to possess the only truth or wisdom.

i am quite the troll it seems. i wanted to stay away from importing crops due to the fluctuation of supply and demand. plus it looked kinda expensive, but of course bread is more expensive.

[thegrandmystic]

If you're selling part of the food, alcohol, plastics, etc. back as exports, I don't think I've seen even in some of my longer-term games a point where the price of crops got higher to the point that it became prohibitively expensive to import compared to what was being exported. That being said, I do in some maps and some places run farms, and in some cases run enough farms to meet all my needs internally, but in some circumstances it's supplemental crops more than anything. To be fair as well, I also have mods for larger farm buildings with more vehicles, rural gas station pumps out by the roads in the fields, really large grain silos to support large farming cooperatives, and so on. There's good advice above and I'll throw some out too:

- trains I have found really are the way to go for moving massive amounts of crops to whatever factories need them; for large farm operations with multiple farms feeding multiple fields I'll have a single cargo station connected to one or more silos with enough road room to those to make one-way roads for the trucks to queue up, dump everything off, and get on their merry way
- definitely build separate distribution offices for trucks to transport crops to the silos and fill the farms to the max with sowers and harvesters (I usually have around 1.5 to 2 harvesters for every sower but this will depend on how many and what kind of fields you have)
- for expansive operations, consider a mix of medium and large fields rather than all large fields (I tend to only use the small fields where there are space constraints)
- for especially large and expansive farms, gravel roads are a must at minimum if you're going to sow, harvest, and collect all the crops before winter hits - rainstorms on those mud roads are absolute speed killers for getting all those fields prepped, especially in the early game when you have slower farm vehicles available