Farming

[artforce1]

Hi All,

Wasnt quite sure where to post this.  But, what is going to make more money for my city.  A bunch of little farms or one big one?

[rooker1]

Alot of little ones.
I know this for sure, but maybe Tage will come along to better answer.

Robin 

Edit...I went looking for some info. and found something HERE. that might interest you.

[meinhosen]

Howdy artforce!

Hope this helps a little:
Size and number isn't going to matter much, it's the growth stage of the farms that will determine your cashflow more.  There are several stages of farm growth, of course with higher stages being better for your tax base.  The more farms you have, obviously your farm tax money is going to be higher, so either way you go (large or small), the more area of your city tile you devote to farming the more cash you'll get.  I've personally found that a good mix of large and small farms covering about 2/3rds of a medium city tile is sufficient to give a decent cash-flow for a community that has a moderate population (below 4500 residents) and minimal services (grade school, hospital/clinic, small fire dep't, roads, sometimes a small high school).

I'll provide a visual example for you in a couple of hours.

[artforce1]

Great!!!  So how do I change the stages of the farming area?

[FrankU]

You cannot.

The farms grow by themselves if there is demand. The growth stage of a growing farm is a function of demand, wealth, population size and some other numbers in your region. I don't know exactly. There is somewhere a thread about farms and their growth. I advise you to take a good read in the "Playing the game" help forums. There is so many information!

And Tage, who is referred to, is one of the numbercrunchers of this site. He knows maybe not everything, but as near as a human being can get to everything, about these kinds of numbers....

[SimNation]

On the subject of farming...does anyone know how to lower the # of jobs for each stage of the BSC farms? I changed my suburban home capacities to reflect more real life capacities so that I could have my suburbs really be suburbs but because of doing that when the BSC farms upgrade from stage 1 to higher stages the I-Ag demand gets killed because I do not have enough sims in houses to work just in those farms.I like to grow huge farms per farm so I do not have little farms.

[wouanagaine]

You have a number of job on the farm lot, but also on the field lot

[SimNation]

That makes no sense and does not answer my question of how (if you can) do you change the job capacities of the 3 stages of the BSC Farms.

[wouanagaine]

You need to use Reader and edit all farms and all fields building examplars
Hope it makes sense to you

[RippleJet]

Even if you did lower the number of jobs in the farm itself, the total number of farm jobs wouldn't come down much.
Consider a farm lot sized 5x5 tiles (25 tiles in total), and consider that farm growing in an IR zone that's 20x20 tiles
(400 tiles in total, 375 of which are not occupied by the farm itself).

Consider that the farm itself employed 40 workers, and you reduced that to 10.

• Before the reduction, the number of jobs on that farm would have been 40 + 375 = 415
• After the reduction, the number of jobs on that farm would have been 10 + 375 = 385

Each tile covered with a farm field employs 1 worker!

Now, even if you managed to lower the total number of farm jobs considerably, it wouldn't help the farming demand overall though.
Farming demand drops due to other factors, not due to your city having too many farm jobs.

Each uneducated R§ resident actually raises the demand for no less than 16 farm jobs...
There is no way you can kill that demand by providing too many farm jobs.

What kills farming demand is:

• Too high education
• Too much traffic
• The agricultural CAP

The IR (agricultural) CAP is a bit tricky. When starting a new city, it is set at 30,000.
After that, each job of the following kinds: CS§§, CS§§§, CO§§, CO§§§, ID, IM or IHT reduces the remaining CAP.
As soon as your city gets close to 30,000 other jobs, your farming CAP will be filled, and the demand is gone.

If you want to keep having farms growing in such a city, you need to provide IR CAP relief.
At the moment there is only one building available that provides IR CAP relief: The Census Repository Vault.

[SimNation]

I understand about fields providing jobs but I never have farms as huge as 400 tiles.The largest farm I have is about 125 tiles large.Which according to what your saying Ripplejet would mean whatever the # of jobs on that lot + whatever is left total size wise of the full farm would give me more then 125 jobs. However lowering the capacities would save me close to 25 jobs per farm that I would make. So lets say I have 100 farms thats 2,500 jobs I saved by lowering my capacity meaning it will take more farming space to completely fill the demand. Stinks that there is nothing to relieve industrial I-Ag cap relief..however I have my suburbs so that each house only houses 3-8 sims so there really is no way that the demand would drop.

With each farm providing 45 jobs at stage 3 it kills the demand even faster. So lowering the jobs for my game would slow down the progression toward the I-Ag cap and fall of I-Ag demand and rise of R$ demand. If the R$ demand raises it will not work for my game because my suburb houses only have 3-8 sims living in them per house.Which would then mean I need to zone more area that I most likely do not have for more R$. I only use I-Ag for suburbs when I play and never for apartments.Unless making a area that I want to be the downtown of my farming section of my region.

[RippleJet]

So lowering the jobs for my game would slow down the progression toward the I-Ag cap and fall of demand.

No it wouldn't. Farm jobs themselves do not count up against the IR CAP.

Stinks that there is nothing to relieve industrial I-Ag cap relief..

There is one...

[SimNation]

I give up on getting someone to let me know how to lower the capacities of the farms. Based on everything you said I came up with a workaround. Just have a whole tile with nothing but farms next to a city that has nothing but residential suburbs. At least I know that the # of I-Ag jobs doesnt effect the cap at all (which I still find odd). I will have to test to see how big of a suburb I will be able to make that is employed by nothing but farms and light amounts of low density CS $.


Thanks for feedback though

[RippleJet]

The easiest tool to use, if you want to change building properties, is SC4Tool.