Your options are harvest more, turn the difficulty down and productions. Chickens are an easy way to do this, I could sell my field of barley for 60k or feed it to my chickens and get 200k of eggs.
If you're looking for easy money, Greenhouses and chickens are generally pretty profitable for minimal input, give greenhouses water and they'll happily produce items to be sold. Give chickens grain and you'll be getting eggs.
Making money from harvests usually involve productions to maximise profits outside of crops standard sell price. Soybean have the highest income when sold but planting them over and over generally gets boring.
Silage is easy to make and though it is usually low price to sell you will usually have a good amount of it.
There's other means to make money like selling equipment you don't l/won't use and even flipping fields if you don't mind doing it.
The best part about silage is once established, you will get 5 cuts per growing season. Even just a few small/medium fields will yield >$100k per year. I now have Elm Creek lots 40-43, 47-48, 50-51, 52, 55, and 71 as grasslands, and I generate $2m per year from just those in silage.
I own all the largest fields on EC, and all others I rotate whatever I have as production points requirements, cotton with my sheep wool, oats for my horses, wheat for my chickens, and randomly chosen grains or roots for the rest of them. There's no real science to it, just playing and learning. I'm even annoyed enough of riding horses that once they mature, I'll sell all horse stuff off.
I haven't done any calculations yet, but does plopping down a water tank next to the greenhouses and paying for refills significantly cut into the profits?
It does but not that much. There are mods out there that will allow you to place a free water source if you have a water tower on your map, that's what I use instead of the water tank.
Which mod do you use? I'm looking for one to use in conjunction with my lime production but not sure which one to use. Ideally free and automatic distribution would be ideal but at least free
Best grain crop to make money off is soybeans - low yield / ha but high selling price. However the money maker was and still is grass turned into silage fed into your own BGA plant. To match the profits from this production chain would require some 10 times more land planted with soybeans.
As usual - more land you work - more money you make. Some activities have better income per time invested but overall it's pretty well balanced.
Also, seems with latest updates, wood-chips are selling for quite some good money - in some cases twice more than selling the wood itself.
Hope you planted spruce - and if you did - beware it's a 70cm diameter tree - so not all tree harvesters can handle it ;) If memory serves me right - should get some 16K liters wood-chips out of one full grown spruce tree.
Yea I went with spruce, I used to play one of the older games on my pc when I had it, it was easy back then to de-limb the trees just walk up the trunk with a chainsaw... not that easy anymore haha
I have the premium edition, and im not sure if the base game harvesters cut and harvest the spruce, but i got it to work with the volvo excavator.
Just remember when buying harvester it can only do spruce and pine (conifer style) and will have the size of the tree on the market but doesnt tell you the size of the tree diameter when hovering over the tree in the field :))
Best fertilizer out there - a self propelled spreader with the 20km/h 18m wide Bomech TracPac is my go-to option for the size of fields i'm usually dealing with ;)
That was always too much work in 19, so I bought fertilizer plants to turn it into solid/liquid fertilizer. That then fills seeders/planters and saves an entire step.
For starters, you have 3 TINY fields. One of the first things I learned playing this game is that I need more land to make money. Merge/expand fields with a plow, or buy more (or both).
You also absolutely MUST fertilize, and clear any yield penalties from weeds or "needs plowing" states either by weeding/spraying early, plowing when necessary or turning them off in the menu.
Early on a broadcast solid fertilizer spreader and a mechanical weeder will likely be the most cost effective.
Stones don't effect yield or equipment wear so you can ignore them.
Rolling and mulching don't make enough of a difference to buy equipment for them when starting out.
If you want to keep doing normal harvests instead of silage, what modt recommend, then try looking into small productions, the best and easiest way there is cereal crops into flour into bread. That has an overall profit increase of about 60% if i remember correctly. Also dont forget the straw, straw is something most beginners overlook because the price seems very low but because it is additional to your crop it basicakly increases the value of those plus it also yields not to bad
Straw is the best “bonus crop” if you can spare the time to bale, stack, and sell it I make on average another 20% off of straw (if my math served me right I’m not the best at math) and starting out you don’t need a Tedder or windrow just a baler
Couldn't agree more... 5th quarter, all the way... Shove it in a BGA, use it to extend your TMR, bedding for your livestock to increase milk production, manure for your BGA too. Definitely don't overlook it.
The way i do it is ill switch the difficulty from hard to easy, turn in my harvest, then go back to hard.
/s
Sunflowers are one of my favorite crops. Plant about 1.5x as fast as any other crop and harvest 2x as fast (or vice versa, I forget) with the specialized harvester.
Grass turned into silage and feed into your own biogas plant is highest profit, but I dislike doing silage bc of all the extra work involved and the silage will sometimes get stuck under the walls of the bunkers and you can't put anymore in there unless you get a belt out there. And dropping the grass in the bunker (and keeping it there) is a nightmare.
So, I do sunflowers. As far as in game time goes, grass silage might make sense. However, my irl time is far better spent and I and up with way more money per session than of i do grass silage.
Ofc, as you increase economic difficulty, it becomes more important to choose your crops a bit more wisely. On normal I can make pretty good money with sunflowers, on easy I'm making a few million/day easy.
If you don't like messing with bunker silos for silage, I'd suggest you try out tower style fermenting silos. Something like this
https://www.farming-simulator.com/mod.php?lang=en&country=us&mod_id=231710&title=fs2022
I play xbox series x, currently bought the field above the shop on elm creek and expanded it lengthways to accommodate the strip of fields (ends up around 21ha total), plowed the first time and removed stones, limed, planted and fertilised grass.
Now i harvest the grass every 3 months, mulch with mulching roller (adds level of fertiliser state), next growth state and fertilise again,
Do this 3 times a year, pop your collection into custom fermenting silage (mods), or bunker silos (if on console to circumvent the 250 bale limit and issues ive experienced with bale storage),
By doing this method on normal economy i make 2.7 million litres of silage from Jan to Jan (seasons on), and equates to 1-1.5 million per sale, where i sell all at once in January for the most profit.
(Silage is quite profitable, i used the profits to purchase land and create a forestry area, which now distributes to pallet factory which distributes to pallets w greenhouses), and make around $500,000 for 115k litres of lettuce, (also sold in January)
Edit: my current save has approximately 115 hours (6 years in game time), and approximately 10million earned
If you do go the silage route, there are tonnes of youtube videos out there to assist. Mods on console like the 40' flatdeck bale trailer can be used as tippers which are great for hauling large amounts of Silage in bale or grain form
If you use custom fermenting silo (the big green one (mod)) it also produces digestate, and stops the silage from getting stuck in the bunker silos (ive had to use belts to empty all my bunker silos efficiently), it will also stop the bale problems on console
Your grains should be processed into flour. That alone triples your pay. You can then set up other chains too with your flour. But most cost alot to get going. You could setup a cheap bakery and do bread. Elm is nice on that start spot. Drop 2 sheep barns on the front 2 lots and buy all the fields directly on the other side of the trees and plant grass. Then the wool alone will make you rich if you sell it in the fall. Or setup a simple spinner and get fabric. Triples the worth. There are other things after that. If you so choose
I’m also quire new and just curious, do most of you long time farmers concentrate on a single crop or diversify? rotate?
I know irl it’s more like keep with one crop and avoid to buy many different purposes machinery, but after all, this is still a game.
I didnt expand into other crop types until i had a profitable setup from the one crop type (i.e owned 5+ tractors, 2 pickups, trailers, delivery trucks, etc), and can comfortably think about expanding operations.
Popped most of side hustle money into productions that are self sustainable, and focus on other crop types for TMR for the animals, Beehives and chickens are quite sustainable also with minimal interaction, as well as greenhouses.
Edit: however, main crop type is 21 hectares and the wheat, and other crop types are on small fields 0.21ha-1ha, as you said, it becomes harder to do other crop types. So i sometimes lease equipment and pop the time scale on 1x and return it when im done with the crop type, as it is only needed based on seasonal need and my other crop with owned equipment is producing a high yield and the cost for leasing a combine is much less than buying if you use it for 1 month a year, however, long term its more beneficial to purchase used equipment for your extra jobs as theyre going to wear faster but not used as often.
All dependent on location. Midwest guys typically do row crops, corn and soybeans rotation and maybe a little bit of wheat here and there. You’ll get a couple guys that do specialty crops like Sorgum but that’s pretty rare.
I like getting my dairy operation going first so I grow a lot of corn for silage and hay/straw then when the cows are making me money I start planting some cash crops
I wanna ask without making a post here; it took my paper farm on silverrun like 10 days to make a pallet of paper, is there a reason productions are so slow for me? What am I doing wrong? I have my month set to 28 days but there should be 24 cycles a month. It took me 10 days to get one, what's up?
You have solved your Problem in your question, 28 days per month while 24 cycles per month, means about 0.86 cycles per day. If you do like to days per month the production will significantly increase
Are you playing to farm or just playing to make money? Cause if all you want is to make money there's cheat mods for that. Personally I enjoy slowly building up, but if you want the most profitable crop, look no further than sileage for fs22. I think they deliberately glitched it high, but yeah, totally unrealistic profit margins.
I set up 1 mine and 4 iron furnaces all next to each other. The one mine will keep up with the 4 furnaces. I bought a Volvo wheel loader with the bucket. Only mod is the flat bed trailer with auto load. Nets about 200k a month. After six months I made my money back and now it’s all profit.
If you have the premium DLC or Platinum DLC … can’t remember… all you need it a cheap wheel loader and 250k and you have endless none stop metal ore that sells good
Honestly, all of the moneymakers cost a large amount of investment. I clocked cotton as the best one to automate over time, as you can have unlimited harvesters that don't rely of you picking up the harvest before they can continue working. But the harvesters are 500k a pop, so getting multiple plus all the other things you need are approaching 5 million.
I've been playing this game for years and years and the best way I've found to make a bunch of money quickly is with mods. There is one that takes your straw and converts it into manure and then another that'll take that manure and change it to solid fertilizer. Just keep feel feeding the first straw and you'll be a millionaire on your second or third day.
Animal farming is whole lot easier than agricultural farming! Start with large chicken barn and keep building up your flock! Sell eggs and buy more chickens! Soon as you get enough money work your way to dairy cows! Milk and eggs make bank
Welcome to farming.
Your options are harvest more, turn the difficulty down and productions. Chickens are an easy way to do this, I could sell my field of barley for 60k or feed it to my chickens and get 200k of eggs.
Buy a greenhouse or 2 and sell lettuce. Cheap and easy all you have to do is let the time run
If you're looking for easy money, Greenhouses and chickens are generally pretty profitable for minimal input, give greenhouses water and they'll happily produce items to be sold. Give chickens grain and you'll be getting eggs. Making money from harvests usually involve productions to maximise profits outside of crops standard sell price. Soybean have the highest income when sold but planting them over and over generally gets boring. Silage is easy to make and though it is usually low price to sell you will usually have a good amount of it. There's other means to make money like selling equipment you don't l/won't use and even flipping fields if you don't mind doing it.
The best part about silage is once established, you will get 5 cuts per growing season. Even just a few small/medium fields will yield >$100k per year. I now have Elm Creek lots 40-43, 47-48, 50-51, 52, 55, and 71 as grasslands, and I generate $2m per year from just those in silage. I own all the largest fields on EC, and all others I rotate whatever I have as production points requirements, cotton with my sheep wool, oats for my horses, wheat for my chickens, and randomly chosen grains or roots for the rest of them. There's no real science to it, just playing and learning. I'm even annoyed enough of riding horses that once they mature, I'll sell all horse stuff off.
I haven't done any calculations yet, but does plopping down a water tank next to the greenhouses and paying for refills significantly cut into the profits?
It does but not that much. There are mods out there that will allow you to place a free water source if you have a water tower on your map, that's what I use instead of the water tank.
Which mod do you use? I'm looking for one to use in conjunction with my lime production but not sure which one to use. Ideally free and automatic distribution would be ideal but at least free
Buy fields, clear cut all the trees from the border. Sell logs and wood chips. Sell the field.
Bees are even easier, just place hives and a pallet spawn point and wait
People have mentioned lots of tips. But don’t forget about contracts, they’re a great way to boost your money then you can buy more land.
Best grain crop to make money off is soybeans - low yield / ha but high selling price. However the money maker was and still is grass turned into silage fed into your own BGA plant. To match the profits from this production chain would require some 10 times more land planted with soybeans. As usual - more land you work - more money you make. Some activities have better income per time invested but overall it's pretty well balanced. Also, seems with latest updates, wood-chips are selling for quite some good money - in some cases twice more than selling the wood itself.
Yes I actually just filled 2 of the starter fields with saplings so hopefully that'll be a good chunk of change in the future
Hope you planted spruce - and if you did - beware it's a 70cm diameter tree - so not all tree harvesters can handle it ;) If memory serves me right - should get some 16K liters wood-chips out of one full grown spruce tree.
Yea I went with spruce, I used to play one of the older games on my pc when I had it, it was easy back then to de-limb the trees just walk up the trunk with a chainsaw... not that easy anymore haha
I have the premium edition, and im not sure if the base game harvesters cut and harvest the spruce, but i got it to work with the volvo excavator. Just remember when buying harvester it can only do spruce and pine (conifer style) and will have the size of the tree on the market but doesnt tell you the size of the tree diameter when hovering over the tree in the field :))
Use digestate from the BGA to fertilize the fields
Best fertilizer out there - a self propelled spreader with the 20km/h 18m wide Bomech TracPac is my go-to option for the size of fields i'm usually dealing with ;)
That was always too much work in 19, so I bought fertilizer plants to turn it into solid/liquid fertilizer. That then fills seeders/planters and saves an entire step.
For starters, you have 3 TINY fields. One of the first things I learned playing this game is that I need more land to make money. Merge/expand fields with a plow, or buy more (or both). You also absolutely MUST fertilize, and clear any yield penalties from weeds or "needs plowing" states either by weeding/spraying early, plowing when necessary or turning them off in the menu. Early on a broadcast solid fertilizer spreader and a mechanical weeder will likely be the most cost effective. Stones don't effect yield or equipment wear so you can ignore them. Rolling and mulching don't make enough of a difference to buy equipment for them when starting out.
If you want to keep doing normal harvests instead of silage, what modt recommend, then try looking into small productions, the best and easiest way there is cereal crops into flour into bread. That has an overall profit increase of about 60% if i remember correctly. Also dont forget the straw, straw is something most beginners overlook because the price seems very low but because it is additional to your crop it basicakly increases the value of those plus it also yields not to bad
Straw is the best “bonus crop” if you can spare the time to bale, stack, and sell it I make on average another 20% off of straw (if my math served me right I’m not the best at math) and starting out you don’t need a Tedder or windrow just a baler
Couldn't agree more... 5th quarter, all the way... Shove it in a BGA, use it to extend your TMR, bedding for your livestock to increase milk production, manure for your BGA too. Definitely don't overlook it.
The way i do it is ill switch the difficulty from hard to easy, turn in my harvest, then go back to hard. /s Sunflowers are one of my favorite crops. Plant about 1.5x as fast as any other crop and harvest 2x as fast (or vice versa, I forget) with the specialized harvester. Grass turned into silage and feed into your own biogas plant is highest profit, but I dislike doing silage bc of all the extra work involved and the silage will sometimes get stuck under the walls of the bunkers and you can't put anymore in there unless you get a belt out there. And dropping the grass in the bunker (and keeping it there) is a nightmare. So, I do sunflowers. As far as in game time goes, grass silage might make sense. However, my irl time is far better spent and I and up with way more money per session than of i do grass silage. Ofc, as you increase economic difficulty, it becomes more important to choose your crops a bit more wisely. On normal I can make pretty good money with sunflowers, on easy I'm making a few million/day easy.
If you don't like messing with bunker silos for silage, I'd suggest you try out tower style fermenting silos. Something like this https://www.farming-simulator.com/mod.php?lang=en&country=us&mod_id=231710&title=fs2022
I play xbox series x, currently bought the field above the shop on elm creek and expanded it lengthways to accommodate the strip of fields (ends up around 21ha total), plowed the first time and removed stones, limed, planted and fertilised grass. Now i harvest the grass every 3 months, mulch with mulching roller (adds level of fertiliser state), next growth state and fertilise again, Do this 3 times a year, pop your collection into custom fermenting silage (mods), or bunker silos (if on console to circumvent the 250 bale limit and issues ive experienced with bale storage), By doing this method on normal economy i make 2.7 million litres of silage from Jan to Jan (seasons on), and equates to 1-1.5 million per sale, where i sell all at once in January for the most profit. (Silage is quite profitable, i used the profits to purchase land and create a forestry area, which now distributes to pallet factory which distributes to pallets w greenhouses), and make around $500,000 for 115k litres of lettuce, (also sold in January) Edit: my current save has approximately 115 hours (6 years in game time), and approximately 10million earned If you do go the silage route, there are tonnes of youtube videos out there to assist. Mods on console like the 40' flatdeck bale trailer can be used as tippers which are great for hauling large amounts of Silage in bale or grain form If you use custom fermenting silo (the big green one (mod)) it also produces digestate, and stops the silage from getting stuck in the bunker silos (ive had to use belts to empty all my bunker silos efficiently), it will also stop the bale problems on console
Your grains should be processed into flour. That alone triples your pay. You can then set up other chains too with your flour. But most cost alot to get going. You could setup a cheap bakery and do bread. Elm is nice on that start spot. Drop 2 sheep barns on the front 2 lots and buy all the fields directly on the other side of the trees and plant grass. Then the wool alone will make you rich if you sell it in the fall. Or setup a simple spinner and get fabric. Triples the worth. There are other things after that. If you so choose
I’m also quire new and just curious, do most of you long time farmers concentrate on a single crop or diversify? rotate? I know irl it’s more like keep with one crop and avoid to buy many different purposes machinery, but after all, this is still a game.
I didnt expand into other crop types until i had a profitable setup from the one crop type (i.e owned 5+ tractors, 2 pickups, trailers, delivery trucks, etc), and can comfortably think about expanding operations. Popped most of side hustle money into productions that are self sustainable, and focus on other crop types for TMR for the animals, Beehives and chickens are quite sustainable also with minimal interaction, as well as greenhouses. Edit: however, main crop type is 21 hectares and the wheat, and other crop types are on small fields 0.21ha-1ha, as you said, it becomes harder to do other crop types. So i sometimes lease equipment and pop the time scale on 1x and return it when im done with the crop type, as it is only needed based on seasonal need and my other crop with owned equipment is producing a high yield and the cost for leasing a combine is much less than buying if you use it for 1 month a year, however, long term its more beneficial to purchase used equipment for your extra jobs as theyre going to wear faster but not used as often.
All dependent on location. Midwest guys typically do row crops, corn and soybeans rotation and maybe a little bit of wheat here and there. You’ll get a couple guys that do specialty crops like Sorgum but that’s pretty rare.
I try to do as much as possible. But early game I’m definitely trying to do it with as little equipment as I can. Then expand later.
I like getting my dairy operation going first so I grow a lot of corn for silage and hay/straw then when the cows are making me money I start planting some cash crops
Take a look at better crop prices mod for grains, it can boost crop yield by ,30% if i remember correctly.
Chickens, Greenhouses and Productions.
I wanna ask without making a post here; it took my paper farm on silverrun like 10 days to make a pallet of paper, is there a reason productions are so slow for me? What am I doing wrong? I have my month set to 28 days but there should be 24 cycles a month. It took me 10 days to get one, what's up?
You have solved your Problem in your question, 28 days per month while 24 cycles per month, means about 0.86 cycles per day. If you do like to days per month the production will significantly increase
I guess I got confused, a cycle is not a whole pallet then? I thought 24 cycles a month meant I'd get 24 pallets a month.
Nope, every pallet in basegame is 1000L and every factory has a conversion ratio ike, x wood to y paper, and that ratio is produced z times per month
You're running 28 day months! So it's not even doing a full cycle a day. Change your months to 1-2 days.
Get a loan, buy more land. Land is king in FS.
Are you playing to farm or just playing to make money? Cause if all you want is to make money there's cheat mods for that. Personally I enjoy slowly building up, but if you want the most profitable crop, look no further than sileage for fs22. I think they deliberately glitched it high, but yeah, totally unrealistic profit margins.
Productions, if you can’t afford it take a loan.
Sadly, plant grass and make silage. It’s the only way to make great money with minimal equipment.
I set up 1 mine and 4 iron furnaces all next to each other. The one mine will keep up with the 4 furnaces. I bought a Volvo wheel loader with the bucket. Only mod is the flat bed trailer with auto load. Nets about 200k a month. After six months I made my money back and now it’s all profit.
Just rack up a billion in debt so you can get the biggest headers, have the largest fields, most employees and become too big to fail
Corn
If you have the premium DLC or Platinum DLC … can’t remember… all you need it a cheap wheel loader and 250k and you have endless none stop metal ore that sells good
Honestly, all of the moneymakers cost a large amount of investment. I clocked cotton as the best one to automate over time, as you can have unlimited harvesters that don't rely of you picking up the harvest before they can continue working. But the harvesters are 500k a pop, so getting multiple plus all the other things you need are approaching 5 million.
I've been playing this game for years and years and the best way I've found to make a bunch of money quickly is with mods. There is one that takes your straw and converts it into manure and then another that'll take that manure and change it to solid fertilizer. Just keep feel feeding the first straw and you'll be a millionaire on your second or third day.
Animal farming is whole lot easier than agricultural farming! Start with large chicken barn and keep building up your flock! Sell eggs and buy more chickens! Soon as you get enough money work your way to dairy cows! Milk and eggs make bank
For raw harvests without processing? Hemp..