Underwhelmed by pig farming

[Boston]

A good rule of thumb in "real life" is that it takes 10x the amount of land to make one pound of meat than it does to make one pound of plant matter.

Animal husbandry is not a very effective use of land, it is just that ...... well, a lot of the land on the planet isn't very good for agriculture. SO you might as well use it for SOMETHING.

So the right way to fix grazing animal is adding new common soil type - mega-gravel or something like that. If you had soil with about 40% fertility, not even potatoes would do well in it.

Not necessarily gravel, just decrease the base fertility of soil by a lot. Most soils aren't that fertile in reality, not without heavy work.

If you pay attention to the pawns when they grow crops in-game, all they are actually doing is ripping grass and bushes from the ground and cutting down trees. They aren't tilling the soil, adding fertilizer, or anything of the sort.

If you tried to do that (read: plant crops in untilled, unfertilized soil), you would get some scraggly plants that would barely be worth eating.

If you want fertile soil, you have to break up clods, chop up roots, aerate the soil, so on and so forth. All of the above can be done with a stick, and tools like that (axes, hammers, welding torches) are already abstracted in the game, so all you would be doing is adding mechanics.

The vegetable garden mod does this rather well.

In reality, growing crops is a lot of work, especially premodern, preindustrialized agriculture, without the use of machines, pesticides or synthetic fertilizers. Hunter-Gatherers took about 15 hours of work a week to meet their nutritional requirements, while early farmers needed 40+.

[Hans Lemurson]

Maybe fertilizer should be a resource, then?

[b0rsuk]

If you pay attention, you notice something strange: removing grass and weeds is very fast, it's the planting that takes majority of the time. But for basic planting it would be the opposite. Just make a hole in the ground (or a small ditch), put the seed in, water it. Grass roots often form a thick layer holding a lot of soil, and if you don't want ups and downs you need to shake it out, then put the grass in a leaf mold. And that's with grass. Many plants, like horseradish, have a whole fortress down there. Tree roots spread dozens of meters from the center, and can require chopping with an axe.

[Hans Lemurson]

Hmm...it seems cooking fertilized chicken eggs is inefficient.  They consume no food and if you wait until they are hatched, a chick will provide 14(!) meat, nearly tripling your food yield.

If chickens weren't herbivores in this game, it would be shockingly easy to use them to produce surplus meat from a closed system.  Chicken eggs are OP.

[Trigon]

^^

I've actually done this before in an extreme desert biome. I just mass slaughtered chicks as they were born to get the massive meat yields and so I wouldn't have to feed them as they grew. I was surprised at how effective it was.

[Hans Lemurson]

There's a bit of a pipeline, but once it gets going it effectively means that each hen is producing 14 meat/day for the price of ~4 Hay.

One oddity is that it seems that if two fertilized eggs are stacked, their progress level averages for the whole stack, so if the eggs keep being hauled to a stockpile you'll get no chicks at all and then 10 all at once.  On average I think it works out to the same rate, but it can slow down your initial growth, since the first chick that got laid won't be any more mature than the others.

Another oddity that goes into exploit territory is that temperature-spoiled fertile eggs will still stack with live eggs, and can thus be revived.  If you lost a bunch of purchased eggs due to improper handling, you only need one good egg to make up for it.

[travin]

I've had pretty good luck with animal husbandry and regularly setup ranches in suitable biomes. However, I usually don't grow them for food, rather for trade. Alpacas and muffalos for wool or milk and pretty much ignore them. Cows and turkeys aren't really worth their trouble. Alpacas seem to be the most efficient in terms of consumption v production. As for breeding, I've recently started with pigs and the first female popped out a litter of seven, seems like a good deal to me.

I haven't done strict measurements but I know that a large herd of alpacas, opposed to a similar number of chickens and their brutally efficient offspring expansion, the chickens will strip the land bare quite quickly. Hell they breed faster than hares, which are also a pretty good bargain of efficiency.  But a chick will eat just as fast and much as an adult, which isn't right. Next thing I know it in short order I've got 60 chickens and a stripped landscape. No thanks, too much stress, I've got other things to do.

I much prefer having a pasture with self sustaining animals/feed stocks I can ignore and be surprised with suddenly and frequently having 1,500+ units of wool and/or masterwork clothing to sell (advanced bionics are expensive). They breed fairly readily and I occasionally lose one to a cobra or panther. That's more my speed.

What about dromedaries? Never bred them but I suspect they're like cows.

[milon]

Another oddity that goes into exploit territory is that temperature-spoiled fertile eggs will still stack with live eggs, and can thus be revived.  If you lost a bunch of purchased eggs due to improper handling, you only need one good egg to make up for it.

I think there's a saying about one good egg unspoiling the bunch, right?

Yeah, stacked items aren't handled separately - once things get stacked they're averaged together (I think) and tracked as a unit. Which is efficient, but has some side effects.