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[Lancezh]

I had 3 big farm plots (with fertilizer) with plump helmets and due to the harder farming they need 4 seasons to grow and were not nearly enough to keep my fortress of 30 dwarfs fed. I embarked with 50 meat and struggled throughout the whole thing with food... can someone give me pointers how they survive the early starvation with harder farming due to the excessive growing times ?

[smakemupagus]

Fish, hunt, or trade for food during the first year.

... plant gathering can also be pretty effective once you have more guys -- sometimes I feel like there's not time for it at the very beginning with 7, but by the time there's 30 you can gather lots!

[There Is No Vic]

Smaller plots. Use dfhack's autofarm.

[Arcvasti]

I had 3 big farm plots (with fertilizer) with plump helmets and due to the harder farming they need 4 seasons to grow and were not nearly enough to keep my fortress of 30 dwarfs fed. I embarked with 50 meat and struggled throughout the whole thing with food... can someone give me pointers how they survive the early starvation with harder farming due to the excessive growing times ?

Plump helmet men. You can make absurd amounts of plump helmet man wine from even a child. They're kinda dangerous to keep around, but they let you completely sidestep harder farming. Surface crops only take two seasons to grow, even if they can only be planted in spring, so that could help too. Ideally, if you want to grow plump helmets, you'd have four farm plots and get one started in each season. After you deal with the first year[Easy enough with a low population], you'd always have a harvest coming in no matter what time of year it is.

[Kars]

I deal with it by turning it off.

[Lancezh]

Smaller plots. Use dfhack's autofarm.

I don't understand, whats the point of smaller plots ?

[Meph]

If the plants take 4x longer to grow, just make 4x times the farmplots and plant 4x the amount of plants. You will get the same amount of plants in the end.

I usually dont farm at all. Food comes from things you kill. And caravans.

[Ishar]

I tend to bring 6-10 hens and 2 roosters with me, and separeate them into two rooms, with plenty of nest boxes. I forbid one of the rooms completely after the birds are in, and they multiply with FPS-crushing speed. The other 3-5 hens produce enough eggs to feed my starting seven even with reduced egg laying.
The hatchlings are eithe for slaughter or for the expansion of the egg industry.

Also, use bees if you have them in your biome. Cheap, easy food source.

[LMeire]

I use surplus ash from burning corpses to make fertilizer and increase the yields for my food-crops. Chop up your enemies into enough pieces and you can end up with a lot of ashes. (The reaction treats each body part as if it were a full corpse, so for the purposes of making fertilizer it's more efficient to hack everything apart.)

[Lancezh]

I use surplus ash from burning corpses to make fertilizer and increase the yields for my food-crops. Chop up your enemies into enough pieces and you can end up with a lot of ashes. (The reaction treats each body part as if it were a full corpse, so for the purposes of making fertilizer it's more efficient to hack everything apart.)

Thats completely new to me, could you elaborate or give me a link how that works ?

[Meph]

He builds a crematory to burn bodyparts to ash, uses the ash to make fertilizer. It's a vanilla DF features and not mod related, it would work in the base game as well. The only new part is that ability to burn corpses/bodyparts, while vanilla DF only allows to do that with wood.

[There Is No Vic]

Smaller plots. Use dfhack's autofarm.

I don't understand, whats the point of smaller plots ?

I misspoke. I've been using 40.24 recently.