"Do not reap" option for fields

[5thHorseman]

We have "Do not sow" but I'd like "Do not reap" for a huge field so my animals can fend for themselves without relying on grass (that seems to grow about 1 square per season but that's another topic).

[DariusWolfe]

I think that the harvested plants have better nutrition/tile than plants in the ground; it's been a while since I've seen the discussion on it. Also, if I recall right, plants in the ground will eventually die, and of course cold temps will kill them as well.

Obviously you can do what you want, if the nutrition loss is worth not taking the effort to harvest, then you do you.

[Grimelord82]

Rice fields tend to yield 4-6 nutrition on harvest, and it seems like animals still want to eat them at about 66% grown (.18 nutrition or so). Given all the extra work in making kibble or pemmican (taking up table time to do so), keeping rice planted with a bunch of no skill growers every couple days is trivial for small herds.

Having run a boreal colony for multiple years, a muffalo self sustains on ~1/4 a Sunlamp's worth of rice without much trouble and eventually staggers the grow zone so only 3 spots need planting per day. They're always hungry, but they never have malnutrition.

Since both kibble and pemmican take meat, and humans will eat kibble because they're dumb, I started making pemmican exclusively for caravans after a while. Hay isn't worth it, but I'm still trying to figure out how to make it so. Bumping its in ground nutrition would be one way to help.

[Zombull]

I support this. Not just for the animal grazing angle, but also if you have lots of fields and need to get your growers to temporarily focus on harvesting the food and ignore the cotton for instance.

[BlackSmokeDMax]

This would certainly beat the alternatives which are either:

1) deleting the grow zones until you are ready for the pawns to get to those particular fields (then you need to recreate them, which could be a real pain if you had already painstakingly gone through and made sure a zone was just rich soil for instance.

or

2) setting up zones to keep pawns away there temporarily