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[Arkansan]

Turkey eggs are keeping my fort fed for now, but I am really struggling to keep any booze on hand. I have a 3x3 farm plot that grows plump helmets year round, a surface 2x3 plot that grows prickle berries year round and a smaller plot underground for pig tails. I have 5 farmers, one of them fairly highly skilled and a couple of the others are decent. Somehow I still manage to not really grow anything, each farm tile seems to grow one plant at a time even though there will be a stack of seeds there as well. I have just started fertilizing the plump helmet plot. Anything else I can do? I have 94 dwarfs after this latest wave and 34 booze on hand.

[MonkeyHead]

Farming should leave no seeds - a plant from a plot will produce a stack of mushrooms, berries etc. The seeds being there makes it sound like they are being eaten as they are being harvested. Turkey eggs need to be cooked in combination with something to be eaten, so on their own will not sustain you. Early in a fort you might want to consider foraging/plant gathering as a means of obtaining brewable material, especially if you have dorfs that as of yet are of no other real use. Or trade for booze or brewable stuff, of course. Dont waste your time fertilizing - there really is no need. Be sure to forbid cooking in the kitchen section of the stocks menu too - cooking away your brewable plants is a crime!

[sal880612m]

1- Stack size of the plants you grow is based on how skilled the planter is. If you remove some of your less skilled planters you will likely see an increase.
2- Less skilled farmers benefit more from using fertilizer. Increases stack size and gives additional experience.
3- I generally have close to 30 active farm tiles so expanding your number and variety of farms might be a good idea.

[vjek]

MOAR farms.

For ~100 dwarves, two or three 3x3's (in my experience) should be enough.

[Panando]

The only thing I can speculate is you are also using cooking (which you must be to be eating turkey eggs), and you haven't turned off cooking plump helmets and booze etc in the status->kitchen menu (you can't turn off cooking until you actually have the item in your stocks, so you'll need to revisit the kitchen page several times), this will result in the plants being cooked, destroying the seeds, or result in the booze being cooked, destroying the booze. You can't turn off the eating of plump helmets etc, but dwarves will normally go for the nearest food they can find, so putting your plant stockpile out of the way, further than the prepared food stockpile, will cut down on plant eating.

Once you've dealt with the cooking situation, basically here is how farming works:
1) You don't need many farm plots. A few 3x3's is plenty.
2) Make sure to set planting orders for every season (a)(b)(c)(d).
3) You should only use a couple of farmers. More highly skilled farmers generate much larger stack sizes. But turn off all other labours on these farmers (perhaps allow them food hauling), also under the orders menu, set it to "only farmers harvest" so that the farmers gain the planter experience from harvesting.
4) The general consensus is that fertilizing is not worth it. It's resource intensive, and your better off with more skilled farmers and more/larger fields.

For brewing:
1) Make sure you have lots of spare barrels, or large pots (green glass or stone work well, not all pottery pots can hold booze particularly unglazed ones made from low-grade clay), embarking with a stack of logs (or bit. coal and sand bags, or stones) and making lots of barrels (or glass pots, or stone pots) is a fair idea.
2) Brewing doesn't have a quality level, so you can use as many brewers as you like, but use multiple breweries if going for low-skilled brewers.
3) Remember that dye plants (dimple cup, hide root) etc cannot be brewed. You might want to disable these plants from your plant stockpile.

Other:
1) Herbalism is a good investment for a starting dwarf on most biomes, the points give a very good return in terms of plant stack size (a proficient herbalist will sometimes bring in stacks of 4 or even 5), I'm an experienced player and I like Herbalism because it's good for quickly bootstrapping surface plant farming, and for laziness. It's even better if you're new and totally mismanage things, if you need some plants, just harvest some. It doesn't work nearly as well without points in herbalism, but is better than being sober.
2) Caravans will bring you a lot of plants if you don't have any (if you turn your plants into something else, like booze, the caravan still thinks you have a plant shortage), dwarves bring plump helmets, elves and humans bring surface plants. You should learn the ins and outs of farming, but between herbalism and caravans you can produce a great deal of booze without farming. It's often a good idea to buy out the caravan's plants, because the stack sizes are larger than you get out of farming (sans fertilizing), this means bigger pots of booze. You also get seeds without having to spend seeds.

[Urist Imiknorris]

If you have crappy farmers, compensate with bigger plots. I usually set up a pair of 5x10 plots (one for underground crops, one for aboveground) and that only fails me if I've already run out of something before I start planting.

[GavJ]

2- Less skilled farmers benefit more from using fertilizer. Increases stack size and gives additional experience.

nitpick: they benefit by the same, linear amount. It's just less of a proportional increase than it is for lower skilled dwarves. But proportions don't really matter as much as absolute yields do.

For example, according to my crude tests, average stacks of:
Dabbling:  1
Dabbling + fertilizer: 2.7
Legendary: 3
Legendary + fertilizer: 4.8

i.e. still +1.7 or 1.8 from fertilizer for both. And really, absolute outcome numbers are what you ultimately care about with farming.

[greycat]

I have 5 farmers, one of them fairly highly skilled and a couple of the others are decent.

This is the problem.  You should have 2 planters, both highly skilled.  Let the other 3 join the military or something.

[sal880612m]

2- Less skilled farmers benefit more from using fertilizer. Increases stack size and gives additional experience.

nitpick: they benefit by the same, linear amount. It's just less of a proportional increase than it is for lower skilled dwarves. But proportions don't really matter as much as absolute yields do.

For example, according to my crude tests, average stacks of:
Dabbling:  1
Dabbling + fertilizer: 2.7
Legendary: 3
Legendary + fertilizer: 4.8

i.e. still +1.7 or 1.8 from fertilizer for both. And really, absolute outcome numbers are what you ultimately care about with farming.

The additional experience however is less relevant to a Legendary farmer than it is to a Dabbling farmer. And instead of nearly 200% increase in crop production you end up with 166%. So using fertilizer is more beneficial when you have less skilled farmers, especially considering it eats resources.

[wierd]

He can efficiently make use of that many if he uses burrow restrictions, and physically separates the farming areas accordingly.

Personally though, I agree with just assigning an herbalist or two, and setting them loose with a (d)esignate (p)lant gathering painted rectangle over part of the surface, if surface conditions allow for it.  That can bootstrap available plant resources quite robustly, allowing for bulk production of alcohol to help ease supply issues.  If he has already breached the cavern layers and gotten cavern mosses and such growing, he can also do plant gathering on his indoor pasturing/tree growing rooms on occasion to get "freebies" from time to time. A good way to get some crops that are out of season on a whim at irregular intervals, should you need them.

I like to actively do both surface and underground farming operations, to have the most stable production possible for both variety of alcohol and food products, (happiness boosts are not something to scoff at, seriously), and for the reliability of plant based textile fodder being available to keep the looms humming. (cloth is one of those 'freebie'* type materials that you can use as an "omni tradegood" along with ceramics and green glass. The 3 industries actually align fairly well, as you can produce both ceramic and textile crafts, which can both accept greenglass gem decorations. Cloth gets a rather sizeable value modifier from both quality of the base textile, the quality of the dye-job done on the textile, the quality of the embellishment in green glass, and the quality of the embellishment (and dye job) done with other textiles.  Cloth items can be insanely valuable trade goods, and surface crops permit continuous, nonstop assembly line like production since ropereeds dont have a season restriction. This also helps to ensure that you never have to worry about dwarves suddenly going naked then flipping out, because clothing is always on hand.  The downside is that large numbers of items greatly clog up the item registry vector, which has been experimentally tied to degradation of game FPS over time. Caveat Emptor.)

*freebie, in that there is no truly scarce raw material required.

Also, having a surplus of ropereeds laying around to power a powerhouse textile industry assures there will be a high quality feedstock for booze production should a sudden run on supplies occur, and unexpected restock be necessary. Slowing down textile production is favorable over having dwarves go batshit on you.

[greycat]

Personally though, I agree with just assigning an herbalist or two, and setting them loose with a (d)esignate (p)lant gathering painted rectangle over part of the surface, if surface conditions allow for it.  That can bootstrap available plant resources quite robustly, allowing for bulk production of alcohol to help ease supply issues.  If he has already breached the cavern layers and gotten cavern mosses and such growing, he can also do plant gathering on his indoor pasturing/tree growing rooms on occasion to get "freebies" from time to time. A good way to get some crops that are out of season on a whim at irregular intervals, should you need them.

I fully agree with this also.  Especially the underground herbalism part -- underground herbalism works much better than surface herbalism.  There's an additional rejection rate on ALL surface plant gathering (3/4 rejection, I think?) before the game even rolls against your skill.

[GavJ]

2- Less skilled farmers benefit more from using fertilizer. Increases stack size and gives additional experience.

nitpick: they benefit by the same, linear amount. It's just less of a proportional increase than it is for lower skilled dwarves. But proportions don't really matter as much as absolute yields do.

For example, according to my crude tests, average stacks of:
Dabbling:  1
Dabbling + fertilizer: 2.7
Legendary: 3
Legendary + fertilizer: 4.8

i.e. still +1.7 or 1.8 from fertilizer for both. And really, absolute outcome numbers are what you ultimately care about with farming.

The additional experience however is less relevant to a Legendary farmer than it is to a Dabbling farmer. And instead of nearly 200% increase in crop production you end up with 166%. So using fertilizer is more beneficial when you have less skilled farmers, especially considering it eats resources.

I shall rephrase:
Adding fertilizer, for a given sized farm, regardless of anything about your planters, gives you 1.75 more plants per tile. Period.
Since the reason you are farming in the first place is to create plants, fertilizer is therefore equally effective for your fortress no matter who your growers are. 1.75 more plants is 1.75 more plants. Same number of meals, same amount of food, same benefit.

The goal of your farming is not to make your farmers feel macho by having the largest proportion of stacks amongst all the farmers, or whatever, so % gains over whatever the farmer already had is irrelevant. Absolute gains are what matter.

[sal880612m]

I shall rephrase:
Adding fertilizer, for a given sized farm, regardless of anything about your planters, gives you 1.75 more plants per tile. Period.
Since the reason you are farming in the first place is to create plants, fertilizer is therefore equally effective for your fortress no matter who your growers are. 1.75 more plants is 1.75 more plants. Same number of meals, same amount of food, same benefit.

The goal of your farming is not to make your farmers feel macho by having the largest proportion of stacks amongst all the farmers, or whatever, so % gains over whatever the farmer already had is irrelevant. Absolute gains are what matter.

linear boost != overall benefit
I am not arguing that there isn't a linear increase in the crop yield for using fertilizer. I am saying that unskilled farmers gain more from doing so because the experience gained has more significance. Which in turn raises their skill levels quicker which leads to higher crop yields. So using fertilizer has more overall benefit when done by unskilled farmers. Add on top of that that wiki leads me to believe there is a stack cap of [5] for plants, but no mention that this will never occur naturally and you must fertilize to get it, you can end up wasting resources for no actual gain.

[Panando]

One place where fertilizing definitely does make sense, is when you acquire some plant with difficulty (say sun berry, or rope reed, on a map where only a few specimens grow) and want to quickly boost your seeds stock. Fertilizer will then give a nearly 200% increase in seed yield per season (for unskilled dwarves), an increase which is otherwise unobtainable because the seeds are a scarce resource. When seeds are an effectively unlimited resource fertilizer makes much less sense because you can always just plant more seeds.

[GavJ]

I am saying that unskilled farmers gain more from doing so because the experience gained has more significance. Which in turn raises their skill levels quicker which leads to higher crop yields.

According to the wiki, no:

the size of the stack harvested is not affected by the harvester's skill level.

Unless you have tested it and found otherwise.


And there is not a stack cap of 5, since you get 7 or 8 fairly often with fertilizer and legendaries. I don't believe there's any cap, per se, beyond the "100% success" cap of all of your combined skill + fertilizer rolls, which should be, I believe, 6 "quality" (same algorithm as earning dice rolls for the stacks) + 4 fertilizer = 10. But not hard coded, just natural.

Nor do you need fertilizer to get to 5, you should be able to achieve 6 without it, equivalent of a masterwork craft item.