Farms larger than 120-tile can be farmed successfully by a single farmer

Started by irrelevant, August 22, 2017, 06:46:39 PM

Previous topic - Next topic

0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.

irrelevant

As some of you know I have studied farming in Banished pretty seriously. One thing I have learned is that, given nearby housing and storage, and a crop that performs well like beans or wheat, a single farmer can successfully manage a farm significantly larger than the conventional 120-tiles.

The image shows an experiment I just did to illustrate the point.

The one thing that is a little bit different is the town is 0% educated. Uneducated farmers get 5 food/tile instead of the 7 food/tile that educated farmers get. A 120-tile uneducated farm will normally get 600 food with a 100% yield (educated gets 840).

In the image you can see I have created 12 farms @ 11x15 (165-tile). It should be pretty obvious which ones they are. I planted a mix of beans and wheat. Every one of the farms but one got a maximum harvest (165*5=825; how they all got 840 is a mystery to me).

Anyway, this can be very useful in the early game, when you have plenty of space but are constrained by the number of workers you can spare for farming.

irrelevant

I should have mentioned that had these farmers been educated the yield would have been 1155 per farm, with a single farmer, compared with the conventional 840.

Abandoned


brads3

i tried to do a chart for myself once that listed buildings by building materials and then sizes.also wanted to do production buildings by outputs like the many fishing docks. gave up after a few days. the mintue we upload a new mod would change the list.plus i have found the mod order does affect outputs more than expected.

Tom Sawyer

Interesting @irrelevant. Now you can try to figure out the optimal field size for different crops in different nordic climates with and without micromanaged harvest season. ;D

irrelevant

Now doing a ten-year test with 15X15 farms using each of the eight vanilla crops to determine the maximum practical farm size for each. That'll take a couple of days. ;)

Farming is very complex and interesting, I'm seeing. Rain and sun have a huge impact. There is no way to compensate for these factors.

Tom Sawyer


irrelevant

Quote from: Tom Sawyer on August 24, 2017, 02:14:37 AM
How do rain and sun affect crops? I did not know that.
Crops pretty much stop growing when it is raining. When the rain stops and the sun comes back out, there is a growth spurt that lasts for a bit, increasing the yield by maybe 10-15% fairly quickly, depending on the temperature (needs to be within the crop's growth range). Then growth slows until the cycle repeats. Not sure what happens if it doesn't rain.

It may also be that temps closer to the center of that crop's growth range will produce faster growth.

This is based on observing my eight new 15X15 fields, each growing one of the eight vanilla crops, for five years (so far). I do not consider this an exhaustive study, but the observations have been consistent so far.

brads3

interesting info.sure that could help modders.any more tidbits like that?

Abandoned

That is very interesting.  I had 2 towns that it seemed to me that it rained longer and more often than others, I hope I made a note of those towns to see if I had problems with producing enough food.  Thanks for info.  :)

irrelevant

Finished the ten-year test. The results are interesting. As this is an uneducated town, I'll give the results in terms of tiles rather than quantities of food.

                 avg          max         min
bean         197          225          87
squash     173          210          85
corn          173          225          70
cabbage   159          215          74
wheat      156          207          43
pepper     154          203          83
pumpkin   141          201          66
potato      117         161          44

You can see that generally the results show that for most crops a single farmer can reliably work a farm much larger than the 120 tiles that convention leads us to use. Keep in mind that the layout is very important, you can see that housing and storage are adjacent to every field. Also, one factor that I had not considered before, there is a market immediately at hand. This is also important, as I discovered that my farmers had an annoying tendency to gather resources for their homes frequently during planting and harvest. The proximity of the market meant that they performed this time-wasting chore as efficiently as could be done.

Another thing I had never fully considered before is the function of farmers as laborers in winter. Now I had thought I was avoiding conflicts here by never sending laborers out to gather resources during late winter. What I had failed to remember is that laborers also collect and store the output of smiths, tailors, choppers, herdsmen, foresters, hunters, and gatherers. More than once I noticed that Early Spring had turned to Spring, and one of my fields was sitting there empty with planting not even begun. This was due to the fact that the farmer had picked up three sticks of firewood from a woodcutter on the other side of the map, and was taking it to storage. If I had hair I would have been tearing it out. This is the main reason for using two farmers on all fields; if one is being stupid, there is another to serve as backup.

I do not recommend using large farms with a single farmer, as I have done here, in a mature town. But in a town in its early years, where labor is the main constraint and there is plenty of space, I would not hesitate to make one or two very large farms, staffed with a single farmer, particularly if I had one of the more reliable crops. The possible payoff is very large indeed.

RedKetchup

so yes it can be good and super productive for 1 farmer for food but also it is very random
if happends at autumn the farmer need to go gather food for his house / or firewood and also he need to go back to eat.... he lost half of the annual food for the crop.
and if the game did made his job bad to give the crop to the nearest house ... the guy will lose more time to go back and forth

but overall , if you are calculating the median number of food overall.... it will still more producing per worker than the default number of workers assigned.
> > > Support Mods Creation developments with Donations by Paypal  < < <
Click here to Donate by PayPal .

irrelevant

Here's a quick start I did for fun. I built a 13X12 wheat farm and a 15X14 bean farm first thing. One farmer on each. Both farms produced over 1000 food. Now to build a gatherer's hut to get berries for a complete diet.

@RedKetchup Yes, it's random, but this is less of a factor at the start. Everything is right there, so if they go to get warm or to eat, they'll be right back to work in very short order.

irrelevant

Next year both the farms maxxed out (1400 beans!). Unfortunately you can't see the wheat yield cause the farmer picked up a deer kill before he started planting harvesting. But he got a full harvest, which on a 13X12 is 1092.  :)

Now I'm going to have to build another barn.  ;D

edit: I forgot to add, I manually started the harvest on both farms at 75%.

irrelevant

Last one. Year 3. Another huge harvest. Three years' worth of food in storage. Time for a smith, a tailor, a market, and a TP. If I was going to continue with this town, I'd knock down the farms and build the market where the wheat field is. Smith across the street near the stockpile.