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[evictedSaint]

Regardless of your math, how can you be sure it's not just your legendary farmers taking their goddamn time harvesting and planting new seeds? How do you take that extra time into account after your "1 year to mature"?

I've 20 extra tiles of farm as a buffer, and more than enough farmers to keep it in constant rotation.  I've since doubled my farming area, and that seems to hold steady.  100 tiles of farm for 50 dwarves.

[sjohne]

I may be wrong but I remember reading that even a legendary farmer will have only a CHANCE at producing 5 crops per plant and therefor the average production per plant is somewhere around 4.x and not straight five?

I don't get why people still farm... dewbeetles and fishing is the way to go ;-P.

[Stormbuilder]

Dewbeetles?

[kamikazi1231]

Might as well factor in food loss to vermin as well. I avoid that by pasturing 100 mole weasels on my food stockpiles haha

[Niveras]

I just buy out the food from caravans and cook it. Because each item maxes at only 5, this isn't very efficient wealth-wise, but a single caravan can still provide hundreds of units of food, and you'll usually get more than one unless you've pissed them off or the races are dead. Dew beetles for drinks. That said, I can certainly see situations in which producing your food is preferable to buying it.

Though it seems strange to me that a single honeydew could produce 30 or 45 drinks. On the other hand, some inflation may be warranted given farming output. Still, it may need an adjustment. From what I can tell from the raws, dew beetles can be milked 40 times a year (10000 ticks between milkings, 403200 ticks per fortress year). 600 drinks / 16 per dwarf : 37 dwarves per year (conservatively, we'll say 30 dwarves). Even if they breed slowly, that's a hell of a lot. The milking period could probably halved in frequency and still allow for a good output.

This is assuming I'm interpreting the information correctly. Wiki says the MILKABLE:*:FREQUENCY token is in ticks, but I'm not sure if there might be some other variables involved in the frequency. It felt like longer than this in my fort, but then they produce so much drink that I didn't really pay close attention.

This is also assuming that dewbeetles aren't already slated for being nerfed.

[Niveras]

Of course, such commentary is not helpful as the OP was not looking for a way to feed his dwarves, but wondering why his math wasn't working out. I expect the culprit is that, as mentioned, a legendary farmer isn't necessarily guaranteed to produce 5 plants per plot.

.

Also, as far as invader meat is concerned, I presume it is not possible to somehow vaporize just the meat when it is produced, without also causing the extinction of the species as soon as they generate, or harming dwarves when they butcher the corpse?

[jimboo]

This come up quite often as a topic.  I don’t claim to have all the answers but I don’t see why others have such a problem, either, even with the not-so-hard Farming.  I play in a mature fortress, self-sufficient, with 140 dwarves because 1) that’s more than enough to furnish three squads of all-male soldiers (trained and assigned steel-clad raptors and grizzlies, always more than enough) and 2) 140 is playable on my laptop.  I have a Food Industry not so much because I want one but how else besides dumping to get rid of all the food?  And at pots being 20K or so each, the 3 legendary cooks produce enough trade goods to buy out entire caravans.  Some play without food production at all – Meph, fer instance – but that requires a military strong enough to escort the caravans and I play self-sufficient to allow for Stupid Dwarf Mega-Projects without interruption.  My present set-up in this 7-year-old fort: 15 tiles of plump helmets, 15 tiles of quarry bush, 7 tiles of strawberries, 7 of sunberries, 7 of bloated tubers, 7 of dimple cups.  The berries switch out with others for variety and sometimes are left fallow.  The quarry bush is mostly making wicker and papyrus.  The dyes are used in a stupid project rare silk farm and even so, there’s a lot of extra food to get rid of.  The fields are fertilized because, what else is there to do with slag?  Fish farms are incredibly productive – even with hands only, there are shellfish and crawfish – but this fort doesn’t need them.  I never buy booze because pots are so much larger than barrels and that affects FPS in several ways.  I start with muskox, boars, drakes and mastiffs for surface defense and as they breed, there’s always meat and bones and such even after the military has some skills and no longer needs to train by hunting.  This embark has ferrous ore and a millstone gives more than enough flux so, there’s no need for tree farms.  The only “trick” seems to be skilling up the Farmers and keeping dabblers out of the fields come planting time; start small with plump helmets and one berry type, scaling up as they gain skill.  Putting fertilizer and seeds right next to the fields and kitchens next to the stockpiles for plants minimizes hauling jobs so 25 or so of the 140 dorfs are always idling when not constructing some Stupid Project.