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[JAFANZ]

the bit on fertilizer was pretty enlightening

Indeed, that & the Barrel capacity has completely changed how I view farming.

[melomel]

Two words for everyone who has more food/booze than their fort will ever need and doesn't know what to do with their legendary farmers:

Textile.  Industry.

It's amazingly profitable.

[Trekkin]

Textiles are indeed an excellent use of excess farming capacity; if ever I want to run DF for a really long time at low FPS i set up a textile sweatshop. 100 dwarves farming, weaving, dyeing, and clothesmaking; it attracts thieves like a big fungus-dyed fungus fiber magnet.

As a secondary benefit, you have a high probability of getting artifact cloth items. "But Trekkin!" you cry, "we want artifact weapons and armor!" Two counterpoints:

1. Flammable artifacts stay burning forever.
2. Kobolds try to steal them. [TRAPAVOID] kobolds.

You end up with a large number of satisfied dwarves happily chugging dwarven beer [50] by the light of kobolds burning to death in agony from trying to steal a sock. I can't help thinking of this as the dwarven version of a luau.

I have to build underground stereotypical Hawaii now.

[krenshala]

heh, i'm picturing a room similar to the gold-monkey-statue room from the beginning of the first Indiana Jones movie, only instead of a pedestal with a golden idol, its an clothes line (armor rack?) with a set of flaming clothing hanging from it just waiting to burn the paws of anything that attempts to steal it. 

[Dorf3000]

Ah, something else I didn't know.  Definitely going to have to use potash in my next fort, I always have so much trouble getting enough barrels for booze.  Although potash comes from wood, so in the beginning I'd have less barrels...

On a kind of related note, has anyone had the bug where their militia commander decides to take ownership of food over and over again and leave it lying around?  I must have at least 200 food items owned by him now, all over my fortress.  They don't seem to rot either.

[Abaddon]

I've gotta call BS on this.  My farm plot is 7x8, I have 2 legendary growers and 35 population, if I left my farming on (I only farm plump helmets), my fortress would be drowning in the purple bastards, in fact if I feel my stocks are getting low, I manually monitor my farms, because I end up growing too much food.

Right now I have 240 seeds, 1100 booze, 750 prepared meals, 150 plants, 45 meat.

I never let my planters fill up the farm plot with seeds either, or like I said, I'd be drowning in plump helmets, I usually turn the farm to inactive when they've planted a row (7 tiles).

[Proteus]

...
On a kind of related note, has anyone had the bug where their militia commander decides to take ownership of food over and over again and leave it lying around?  I must have at least 200 food items owned by him now, all over my fortress.  They don't seem to rot either.

I had it in a former incarnation of DF 2010...
a melancholic crossbowdwarf who constantly tried to get provisions for her backpack,
but upon taking the foodstuff up and taking ownership of it remembered that she was too sad, to take up food...
ended with my dwarven fortress starving despite having a huge storeroom filled with prepared meals

[Zaik]

Seems to happen to me any time a military unit changes an upper body armor piece, They have to take the backpack off(and therefore empty it) before they can take anything else off on the upper body. Then when they put it all back on they just run to the food stockpile to get more food.

I'd imagine if your fort was starving they'd still eat it, but yeah it just sits there in the armor stockpile and looks stupid.

[Osdeath]

I've gotta call BS on this.  My farm plot is 7x8, I have 2 legendary growers and 35 population, if I left my farming on (I only farm plump helmets), my fortress would be drowning in the purple bastards, in fact if I feel my stocks are getting low, I manually monitor my farms, because I end up growing too much food.

Right now I have 240 seeds, 1100 booze, 750 prepared meals, 150 plants, 45 meat.

I never let my planters fill up the farm plot with seeds either, or like I said, I'd be drowning in plump helmets, I usually turn the farm to inactive when they've planted a row (7 tiles).

I'm still running a 150 dwarf fortress one one 5x5, I've been rendering everything I can down into drinks and lavish meals for the past two years, and I don't even use fertiliser >.>

[Valkyrie]

Right now I have 240 seeds, 1100 booze, 750 prepared meals, 150 plants, 45 meat.

Meat also alters the equation - butchering yields an enormous amount of food, reaching absurdity if you include the tallow.  This was about pure farming, attempting to ignore/discount the impact of the meat industry, gathering, trading, etc.

I'd imagine if your fort was starving they'd still eat it, but yeah it just sits there in the armor stockpile and looks stupid.

From what I've seen (though I can't remember if it was 40d or 31.x), they won't eat food owned by someone else, period.  They'll starve to death first.  The part I'm not sure about is the dwarf that owns the food - I haven't looked at it carefully enough to be sure, but it seems like once a dwarf puts down / drops a prepared meal they gained ownership of, they don't come back to eat it, either.  They'll get a new one instead.  (if they just broke off the meal from the stack, but didn't get the "Owner:" line on the food, then it will continue to behave as normal food)

[KojaK]

I've gotta call BS on this.  My farm plot is 7x8, I have 2 legendary growers and 35 population, if I left my farming on (I only farm plump helmets), my fortress would be drowning in the purple bastards, in fact if I feel my stocks are getting low, I manually monitor my farms, because I end up growing too much food.

Right now I have 240 seeds, 1100 booze, 750 prepared meals, 150 plants, 45 meat.

I never let my planters fill up the farm plot with seeds either, or like I said, I'd be drowning in plump helmets, I usually turn the farm to inactive when they've planted a row (7 tiles).

Yeah, the point of this was to see what farming alone could do. I stated earlier that for a fortress 200 strong, a single 10x10 farm plot growing plump helmets year round with legendary growers is sufficient to meet all food/booze needs. So if you add in meat to the equation, I have absolutely no trouble seeing a fortress of only 35 supported on a 7x8 plot.

The whole point of this thread is to see what the bare minimum is, and the fact that you manually monitor your farms only supports this thread.

I'm not sure why you're calling BS. o.O

[noppa354]

how do i get my dwarves to plant my secondary crops? once the plump helmet field is full they act lazy until it is harvest and replant time!

[Quietust]

how do i get my dwarves to plant my secondary crops? once the plump helmet field is full they act lazy until it is harvest and replant time!

Simple - you order your secondary crops to be planted before the plot is already filled with other plants! If you want to grow multiple crops at the same time, then you need multiple farm plots.

[vogonpoet]

Yeah, clearly if you want flexibility, lots of small plots is better - I like to go with 5 2x5 plots each for underground and overground crops. Feels like more than plenty normally - I don't have the processing power for more than 100 dwarves.

[ioi101]

Textiles are indeed an excellent use of excess farming capacity; if ever I want to run DF for a really long time at low FPS i set up a textile sweatshop. 100 dwarves farming, weaving, dyeing, and clothesmaking; it attracts thieves like a big fungus-dyed fungus fiber magnet.

As a secondary benefit, you have a high probability of getting artifact cloth items. "But Trekkin!" you cry, "we want artifact weapons and armor!" Two counterpoints:

1. Flammable artifacts stay burning forever.
2. Kobolds try to steal them. [TRAPAVOID] kobolds.

You end up with a large number of satisfied dwarves happily chugging dwarven beer [50] by the light of kobolds burning to death in agony from trying to steal a sock. I can't help thinking of this as the dwarven version of a luau.

I have to build underground stereotypical Hawaii now.

Maybe I've missed something but in my experience textile industry is one of the worst for producing trading goods. You have to have a bunch of dwarfs - farmers to grow pig tails/dyes, food processing, milling, dying, weaving, and finally cloth-making. As far as I can tell the best thing to make with the cloth are robes, which come out at about ~500 if non masterwork (but still quite skilled) and about 1k if masterwork. Compare this to just pumping out quarry bush/syrup roasts which have prices in the 20-30k easily. You'll need more farm space for that, and your farmer/thresher will be busier, but overall it takes less effort for more gain.

Personally I do a setup which is 12x8, which allows me to put in 6 5x3 plots and have 6 extra plots near the middle for seeds/potash stockpiles. Fertilize, farm quarry bush/sweet pods whenever I can, with a little bit of the other crops just for booze variety - I normally leave it fallow in the winter and near the end of autumn. With this my one farmer goes from his starting skill of 5 to legendary in about a year and a half or so. With the fertilizer this translates to something like 2k syrup/leaves per year, or more actually.

The bigger problem is getting the cook to legendary, but it seems like I've always lucked out with an immigrant with 11-12 level cooking among the immigrants. The cook gains skill much slower, probably in part because my kitchens become cluttered extremely easily - normally just bringing the ingredients for a lavish meal is enough to bring them close to max clutter, even with nothing else.