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[Rune_Wolf]

My first shroom harvest is coming in, and I'm not sure how to control what happens to it. There's a food stockpile (everything but seeds) between a farming workshop, still, and kitchen. It's chaos with many dwarves running around in that area enthusiastically but gods know what they're actually doing to to the crops (I'm guessing I'm too n00bish to tell what's happening very well) and ominously, nothing is returning to the farmers' seed stockpile (seeds only) while sacks in the furnature stockpile (for all the seeds I expected for next year's planting) remain neglected. I fear everything's just being cooked or brewed, but I'm not even sure if a single drop of booze has come out of this.

It's probably too late for the pigtails, but what should I do with the plump helmets and cave wheat?

And what are good strategies for managing farming and food processing in general?

[Plutocrat]

Farming is indeed extremely over productive even if you leave it completely unmanaged. Plump helmets are the fastest to mature and can be grown all year, often they can feed a huge fort with only a minor plot. As for your questions, seeds are produced when you pretty much do anything to the food except cooking, so unless you have a cook and a kitchen dwarfs will eat the plump helmets and produced spawns for further plants. It takes a bit of time but once the seeds are planted they mature into a plant which by default is harvested by all dwarfs and brought to the food stockpile, ready to be eaten or brewed, and with that produce more seeds for another round of planting.

After a few times of this you'll find yourself with more seeds then you know what to do with.

[Sphalerite]

Here's how I set up food and booze production.  I like to segregate my food stockpiles by food type.

First, create a mid-sized (no more than 20 tiles) food stockpile near your farms.  Set maximum barrels to zero, and set the stockpile to take only seeds.  That is your seed stockpile, convenient for your farmers.

Now create a largish (100 tiles or larger) food stockpile near the farms.  Set maximum barrels to zero.  Set it to only accept plants.  This is your raw unprocessed plant stockpile.  Your farmers will take plants from the fields and put them here.  Initially, there's just one stockpile for later plants, but after I expend my fortress a bit I like to make one stockpile for each type of plant.

Over by your butcher's shop, make another large food stockpile.  Set barrels to zero, and set it to only take meat, fat, and tallow.  Optionally you can also have it accept fish, cheese, and eggs, since you won't need a stockpile for those unless you're doing a lot of fish, dairy, or egg production.

Around the kitchen, create a stockpile that only takes extracts (syrup, milk, honey, etc).  That stockpile can have its maximum barrels left to maximum.  Then create a food stockpile near your dining hall, set barrels to zero and set it to only accept prepared meals.

Finally, create one or more food stockpiles in some central locations in your fortress.  Leave barrels to maximum and set them to only take booze.

Go into your Kitchen menu and make sure cooking for seeds and plants is disabled.  I also disable cooking of booze, it's unnecessary if your food production line is working and wastes booze.

Now, as your farmers grow plants, they'll be deposited in the plant-only stockpile.  Dwarves may eat plump helmets raw, which leaves a seed that will get taken back to the seed stockpile.  Farmer's workshops and the brewery will also take plants from here as needed, leaving seeds as well.  Produce booze as needed.  Early on you'll have to carefully balance plant use between booze production and food, but once you have some butchery or egg production going on you can dedicate plants to booze and processing at the farmer's workshops.

[h45hc0d3]

I'm just going to add that a millstone in there, preferably between the kitchen and the main plant stockpile, is a great idea.

[Mushroo]

In addition to the excellent advice above, I also highly recommend assigning a bookkeeper and manager from your (n)obles screen. This will allow you to see exactly how many of each plant you have and queue up the appropriate number of brew/mill/process plant jobs.

[Rune_Wolf]

@ Sphalerite. Thanks for taking the time to write that, those are great ideas... your stockpile sizes will have to remain a dream until I get a big fort going though.

@ h45hc0d3. Hadn't gotten to the millstone yet... my mason went off picking crops, lol

@ Mushroo. Thanks, but the glorious magmawiki beat you to that advice ~_^

[Fishbulb]

What I do in my serious self-sufficient forts is similar to Sphalerite's idea, but a bit more complicated.

Each kind of crop I want to grow gets its own farm plot. I like 4x5 plots for this, because 20 is a goodly number while still being small enough for even the most easily distracted planter to service in a timely fashion. I usually end up with about ten plots total, four or five underground ones (depending on whether I'm growing quarry bushes) and one for each above-ground crop I've plant-gathered or traded for seeds for. Each plot will be set to grow one season only, either spring or summer. I try to kinda load-balance my post-processing jobs, by growing rope reeds (for cloth) in the spring and pig tails in the summer, cave wheat (for flour) in the summer and whip vines in the spring, that kinda thing. Point is, each plot is only planted one season out of four.

Next to each plot is a 4x5 stockpile — same size as the plot — set to accept only that plant, with the number of barrels set to zero. When it's harvesting time, my dwarves just pick up the plants from the plot and drop them in the stockpile right next door.

Now, this may not actually be true … but I believe plants in stockpiles, even not in barrels, are effectively in suspended animation. They never rot. At least, they've never rotted for me. Which means when each plant stockpile fills up, the dwarves will keep planting, but just let the plants rot in the fields and then take them to the refuse pile. This continues until I run out of each particular type of seeds, at which point they simply stop planting that crop.

But that's okay, because I've got seeds sitting there in the plant stockpiles, preserved in plant form. As soon as I order something to be brewed or processed or milled (or the dwarves grab a strawberry or plump helmet for a snack or something) I get the stored seeds back. That leaves holes in the plant stockpiles, which get filled at the next harvest, and we're back to the status quo again.

Now, I believe the game limits how many of each type of seed you have; you get a maximum of 200 of each type of seed, and once you hit that limit, things that should produce seeds (like brewing, milling or eating berries or mushrooms raw) just stop doing so. Seeds are stored in bags, and each bag holds 100 seeds, meaning you will at most have two bags of each type of seed. If you want to be really cautious, you can just wait for your dwarves to collect one full bag of some type of seed and start filling another, then forbid the first, full bag. Sometimes just for flavor I have them cart one full bag of each type of seed down into a locked room; that's my seed vault. As long as those seeds are safe, I know even if I flood my greenhouses with redwater I'll still be able to restart my farms. But I've never needed to use that contingency plan. I really only do it because it amuses me, same way I'll sometimes mint up a few stacks of gold coins and then lock them away in a trapped room. Serves no purpose whatsoever in the game, but it tickles me to do it.

[daggaz]

@Sphalerite:  Any reason for setting so many of those stockpiles to 0 barrels?  The seed stockpile in particular, if using barrels, can be as small as 4 or 5 squares, considering that each barrel can hold hundreds of seeds in bags..   Im a bit new to the whole things, but I had the idea that barrels also helped to prevent rot.  Is this inaccurate?

[Neyvn]

Don't forget to make a separate Storage Plot for SEEDS ONLY. Make it near you Farms that way its easily stored and planted.

[Sphalerite]

@Sphalerite:  Any reason for setting so many of those stockpiles to 0 barrels?  The seed stockpile in particular, if using barrels, can be as small as 4 or 5 squares, considering that each barrel can hold hundreds of seeds in bags..   Im a bit new to the whole things, but I had the idea that barrels also helped to prevent rot.  Is this inaccurate?

Barrels don't affect rot for food stored in a stockpile.  Food in a stockpile doesn't rot even if it's not in a barrel.  (For food outside of stockpiles, barrels do prevent rot, but you shouldn't have food that isn't stored in a stockpile anyway)  Barrels do protect against vermin, food that isn't in barrels can be damaged over time by rats and flies and such.  This process seems to be too slow to really be a problem.  If you're really worried about it, create pasture zones over your food stockpiles and assign a few cats to them.

Setting non-liquid food to not use barrels is something that I do to reserve barrels for liquids, to avoid the problem where you have hundreds of barrels of plump helmets yet your dwarves are dying of thirst because you have no barrels free to brew with.  It's a habit I developed back in the old days of 40d, before rock pots and universally available underground wood.  Admittedly, it's not as crucial in modern fortresses.

I have discovered that having your solid food stored outside of barrels seems to be required if you want to cook with dwarven syrup.  For some reason cooks will prioritize using ingredients stored in barrels to those stored outside of barrels, which you can exploit to force them to cook with liquids by having the solid ingredients stored outside of barrels.

[Plutocrat]

I don't know about you guys but efficiency is a dreaded word in food production, because of the demand on space in my fortress. New food fills up existing food stockpiles, and then the farms got cluttered with rot, wasting seeds (possibly my last ones for all I know) and filling the refuse pile. I could dig out new areas and fill them with food stockpiles, but first I have to clear the stone from the room, so I have to dig out a new area to house the stone... the cycle continues.

Its all a distraction really. Even committing a small number of dwarves to working only a couple minor plots is enough to feed even a fairly large fortress.

[Shades]

Setting non-liquid food to not use barrels is something that I do to reserve barrels for liquids, to avoid the problem where you have hundreds of barrels of plump helmets yet your dwarves are dying of thirst because you have no barrels free to brew with.  It's a habit I developed back in the old days of 40d, before rock pots and universally available underground wood.  Admittedly, it's not as crucial in modern fortresses.

Another option is to set your reserved barrels to 20 or so which should give you plenty for liquids without having to worry too much about the stockpiles. That said I tend to set zero barrels in a lot of cases too due to the same habit.

[daggaz]

@Plutocrat:  Yeah, feeding the bastards isnt such a problem.  One 4x5 plot of plump helmets has been more than enough for me so far.  Its organising all the other crops for use in various industries that is bothering me.  Seems my food rots or something, and I end up losing all my seeds (and yes, I have crop specific fields which lie fallow the season immediately after the last plantable season), or my dwarves are just too busy getting hopping mad on mushrooms to bother tending the damned dimplecups etc..  I dunno.  The whole crop thing is one of the more aggravating, seemingly convoluted and uncontrollable things for me so far.   I just want to get some stable industries up and running. 

[Plutocrat]

If your going for a cloth industry it can be frustrating, because its a long chain and not an even one most of the time. One bottleneck like milling or using a quern, cancels the dyeing. Not having bags to house the dye cancels the milling/quern. When your not milling/querning the dimplecups are backed up and left to rot, destroying their seeds. Suddenly you find yourself with no crop of dimplecups and no seeds left to replant.

[Mushroo]

I used to save 1 of each seed too, but now that underground crops grow quickly on soil layers when the caverns are breached, it is unnecessary. In the rare event I cook my last plump helmet spawn for example, I just send my herbalist out and there's a 1 in 6 chance each time he'll bring back a plump helmet.

In fact farms aren't even necessary any more, just mine out 1 or more soil/sand/clay layers and breach the caverns, a legendary herbalist can provide enough booze for the entire fort, assuming you have some meat/eggs/traded food/etc for food.

If your going for a cloth industry it can be frustrating, because its a long chain and not an even one most of the time. One bottleneck like milling or using a quern, cancels the dyeing. Not having bags to house the dye cancels the milling/quern. When your not milling/querning the dimplecups are backed up and left to rot, destroying their seeds. Suddenly you find yourself with no crop of dimplecups and no seeds left to replant.

Assigning a manager will solve this problem easily. Simply pick a number (say, 20) and assign that many milling, dying, weaving, and clothes-making tasks.