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[Reese]

hmm...

magmawiki has it at 8-9 food a year and 18 booze a year (looking at the 40d articles, that is; the 31.xx articles do not list consumption rates, which may be different.)

Actually, the "Starting Builds" page (http://df.magmawiki.com/index.php/DF2010:Starting_build) lists ~=(((2 food + 4 drinks)/dwarf)/season) & ~=(((14 food + 28 drinks)/7 dorfs)/season) in the sections (both of them) tagged "Items".

Oh, see, I went to the food and booze pages figuring those would have consumption numbers.

[Vastin]

If you want legendary growers, you either want to have a lot more farm plots than you technically need, or you need to have very few growers so they are doing more work. You can also set work orders so that only farmers pick crops, which helps them get a little more experience if I'm not mistaken.

I generally only have two growers for a fortress of 100+, and they manage about 42 plots with plenty of spare time on their hands.

Also, I don't know how many of these calculations take potash fertilization into accounts. By personal experience I'd say that it adds ~2 to the average crop stack size? With high level (not yet legendary) growers and fertilization my stack sizes are a minimum of 4, and 7-8 is reasonably common.

[Trekkin]

The other thing to consider is fertilizing, and specifically fertilizing efficiency. You can save on potash by shaping your farms such that the total number of tiles modulo 4 = 3; for instance, a 5x3 plot, or a 9x7 tile plot. Fertilizing, in my experience, tends to double the yield of plants per tile, so with a base stack size of four that's sixteen plants per unit potash per harvest, so yearly 208 plump helmets for 4 potash if I've got the frequency right, with a spare 3x4x13= 152 from exploiting the rounding down of farm size.

Something to consider if you value elf anger and farm space over logs.

[KojaK]

Two important things I think to note are:

I'm looking at the food and booze needs of a full fortress in vanilla, ie: 200 dwarfs. If roughly 10-15 farm plots of quarry bushes can support 200, I have no trouble seeing a 3x3 farm supporting a fortress. 3x3 is 9 tiles, so in one year that would produce 54 stacks of plants (9 tiles growing 6 each over the year), which if every stack has four plants, is 216 quarry bushes, which when processed yeilds 5 leaves each, comes out to 1080 leaves. That's more than enough to support a fortress of 50, or even 100, which needs just 400 food per year, or 800 respectively(according to the wiki, eating twice a season. If you divide how much food is produced, 1080, by how much a dwarf eats per year, 8, theoretically you could support 135 dwarfs on that small 3x3 plot growing QB's). So if you get your booze from traders or have another farm plot for booze production, you're all set. Which leads me to my next thing to note,which is:

I'm not even taking into account food from other sources, like fishing or butchering animals. If you have a small butchering operation going, I you'd need even less farm tiles.

Also, when growing quarry bushes, they can't be brewed into alcohol, so I'm looking at the bare minimum of food requirements. The dwarfs can drink water from wells or whatever, but I have no idea just how much slower they work, or if that has any effect on stack numbers or whatever. So with a 3x3 supporting 135 dwarfs, you would need to grow plump helmets during the winter and probably have another farm plot growing something else for brewing too. So 135 dwarfs over 4 seasons needing 4 drinks each, comes out to 2160 units of booze. Divide that by 5 for each plant and you'd need 432 plants. Divide that by 4 for the average stack of a legendary grower, and you'd need 108 stacks. Divide that by how many plump helmets can be grown in one year, 13, and you have 8.3 tiles. So tend a 3x3 farm growing plump helmets year-round, with a 3x3 farm growing quarry bushes year round, and you have the food and booze needs met for a fortress 135 strong.

So that's how I figure it out.

Also, none of these calculations take into account fertilizing, but it would be reasonably simple to do. Just change the stack size to whatever is common. If we take fertilization to simply double the stack size to 8, then that 3x3 would produce double the quarry bushes and double the plump helmets, leading to double the dwarfs living off of it. So with fertilization, two 3x3 for booze and food can support 270 dwarfs.

[Lemunde]

The other thing to consider is fertilizing, and specifically fertilizing efficiency. You can save on potash by shaping your farms such that the total number of tiles modulo 4 = 3; for instance, a 5x3 plot, or a 9x7 tile plot. Fertilizing, in my experience, tends to double the yield of plants per tile, so with a base stack size of four that's sixteen plants per unit potash per harvest, so yearly 208 plump helmets for 4 potash if I've got the frequency right, with a spare 3x4x13= 152 from exploiting the rounding down of farm size.

Something to consider if you value elf anger and farm space over logs.

I can't even fathom wasting precious potash on fertilizing.  I think we can all agree farms do well enough without it.  And I needs my clear glass statues, tables, chairs, doors, walls, etc...

[Vastin]

Fertilization isn't about just increasing farm productivity, it also dramatically improves the down-stream efficiency of any industry relying on those stacks.

Instead of barrels with ~20 drink, you're looking at ~40 each. Food stack sizes go from 20-40, up to 90+ when you're using fertilized quarry bushes and syrup barrels. Average food stack value at the market jumps into the stratosphere as well for the same production time. The same amount of fort storage space now holds twice as much product.

I believe this also has no real additional labor time downstream. If I'm not mistaken, it takes a farm workshop worker the same time to turn 2 pig tails into thread as it does a stack of 8, and so on, and so on.

There is little question that if you're just looking to make crazy dwarfbux, the ultimate industry is your kitchen. It offers huge value multiplication for the number of dwarves involved, and your total raw materials input is maybe 10 logs per year per 100k output value with skilled workers. Kind of crazy considering its the only industry other than magma glass that is pretty much indefinitely renewable.

[JAFANZ]

Wait, Barrel capacity is variable? I thought it was a fixed 5 Drinks/10 Food/200 Seeds/etcetera?

[smigenboger]

I believe arrows now stack, but I'm surprised plants don't stack as of yet. I shouldn't be too hard to set a command to make strawberries(2) and strawberries(6) into a stack of 8

[opsneakie]

so, I'm the only one who sets up a 10x10 farm plot early on and runs it with plump helmets forever? I kinda always assumed my fort would someday get to the point where that was a necessary amount of farming, but now I have over 10000 surplus booze, so maybe I should just reduce my farmers and put them to work doing something else.

[KojaK]

I don't know if you can re-stack plants, I've never seen it happen. But yes, if you have a stack of 16 plump helmets, a brewer will fill one barrel with 80 booze.

Also, I wasn't looking at efficiency. Obviously producing larger stacks greatly increases efficiency. Cooks take the same amount of time cooking 4 stacks of 25 leaves as they do 4 plump helmets.

I was just seeing what the bare minimum is to keep a fortress alive.

[breadbocks]

Now THAT seems a little more in tune with what I've been seeing.  Another thing to consider is skill progression.  I'm pretty sure any dwarf can reach at least novice in farming by the end of the first year, probably higher.  That means the math is only reliable for a very short amount of time.  In fact in every skill I've seen, an unskilled dwarf will reach dabbling almost instantly after their first task has been completed.  That means as soon as they finish planting that first seed they're no longer unskilled.

Well, yeah. That's the way it works. Dabbling just means the dorf has tried it.

[JAFANZ]

Thank you Gentleman (& Ladies if any are present), this is a very useful & interesting thread which I've had to bookmark 'cos it's going to have a significant effect on future Fortesses & planning (I already knew I needed to get farms up faster, now I really need to get them going sooner).

[IronyOwl]

Indeed, an interesting topic. Probably won't stop me from drowning myself in food, but it's a noble attempt.

[JAFANZ]

Oh, I intend to go the other way. Grow, Cook, Brew a Metric Buttload each year, dump the Highest non-Masterwork Quality on Caravans, use try using the rest as bait.

Also I'll maximise Booze storage densities (again, offloading small "stacks").

All so that I can have stockpiles all over my fortress with only a few barrels & stacks of food, without having to restock them too often.

[slothen]

the bit on fertilizer was pretty enlightening