u/Wicketwarrick191

TLDR: skim for notable statements in italics and a summary in bold

Grains have several uses in Farm Simulator: making straw, feeding animals, fulfilling production recipes and making flour. There are six main grains: Barley, Oats, Sorghum and Wheat are the standard grains, and Rice and Long Grain Rice are two additional options that involve more complicated growing processes. Canola may also be considered a grain, but its uses are different than the rest so we won’t be grouping it within this exercise. In addition, while we will discuss their impact on the flour mill, we will not be including Rice or Long Grain Rice in the bulk of this exercise as they are not really apples to apples in terms of generating their raw form.

Goal: discover the best grains for the purposes of making straw, feeding animals or productions, and making flour.

The Raw Data:

I grew Barley, Oats, Sorghum and Wheat on three separate fields and measured their output in grain and straw. I estimated one of the fields (46) at a flat three acres and used its results to calculate per acre figures:

Barley - Crop / Straw
45 19052 / 58931
46 19864 / 61474
47 18772 / 58698
Ratio Crop / Acre 6621
Ratio Straw / Acre 20491

Oats
45 10468 / 57333
46 11312 / 59381
47 9965 / 53765
Ratio Crop / Acre 3771
Ratio Straw / Acre 19794

Sorghum
45 16731
46 16971
47 15902
Ratio Crop / Acre 5657
Ratio Straw / Acre - Sorghum doesn’t produce straw…

Wheat
45 17662 / 58997
46 18416 / 61468
47 17357 / 57233
Ratio Crop / Acre 6139
Ratio Straw / Acre 20489

Straw

This might have been the most interesting finding of the exercise. I expected, perhaps ignorantly, that we would see some differences in straw production but it appears the three straw producers all create roughly the same amount of straw per acre! The takeaway is that it doesn’t matter which of the three grains you grow for straw, what matters is the size of the field. You’ll get roughly 20000 liters of straw per acre, so plan accordingly.

Feeding Animals and Productions

We’ll look at flour as its own category, but grains also have the following feed uses:

Barley: chickens, pigs
Oats: horses, cereal
Sorghum: pigs
Wheat: chickens, pigs

If you’re growing a grain specifically to fill any of those purposes, the important number for you is crop per acre. Our data tells us that barley slightly out produces wheat on a per acre basis, while Sorghum is about 10% less efficient, and Oats is about 39% less efficient.

Flour

To discuss flour means understanding how the grain mill and its recipes work. It has two outputs: flour, and rice flour. The four standard grains all produce the same flour while the two rice inputs both produce rice flour. The grain mill is different than most productions in that its recipes stack cycles rather than sharing them. Another way to put it is if you run all six recipes concurrently, you will receive the full output of each recipe. A third way to put it is you will receive the most flour by running all six inputs. Here are the recipes:

Barley - 30 in / 22 out, 48 cycles, 73.3% efficiency
Oats - 15 in / 15 out, 120 cycles, 100% efficiency
Sorghum - 15 in / 13 out, 120 cycles, 86.7 efficiency
Wheat - 5 in / 4 out, 252 cycles, 80% efficiency

Long Grain Rice - 15 in / 13 out, 72 cycles, 86.7 efficiency
Rice - 9 in / 15 out, 72 cycles, 166.7% efficiency

Here are the full capacity inputs and outputs for one month ranked according to total output quantity:

Oats - 1800/1800
Sorghum - 1800/1560
Rice - 648/1080
Barley - 1440/1056
Wheat - 1260/1008
Long Grain Rice - 1080/936

The four grain recipes yield 5424 liters of flour per month and the two rice recipes yield 2016 liters of rice flour per month. Therefore, the max yield of a small grain mill is 7440 liters of total flour, and the large grain mill would produce 74400 liters of total flour.

Now we can calculate the number that really matters in terms of flour: flour per acre, ranked in order:

Wheat - 4911
Sorghum - 4902
Barley - 4855
Oats - 3771

With all of the relevant data and resulting calculations in focus, let’s summarize what we have learned:

1) Straw generates at roughly 20000 liters per acre regardless if derived from barley, wheat, or oats.
2) The more different inputs you have, the more flour your grain mill can produce per month.
3) Wheat and Barley are nearly interchangeable in terms of both crop and flour yields per acre.
4) Oats are by far the least productive in terms of both crop/acre and flour/acre.

Hmmm…since Sorghum gives no straw and Oats has terrible yields…why would anyone grow them instead of wheat or barley?!?

Aside from the very meaningful benefit of maxing out your grain mill by providing multiple inputs, there is more to the story and data doesn’t capture it:

Compared to the other three grains, Sorghum is a bit easier to produce and requires less equipment (no forage wagon or bailer required). Sorghum therefore offers the path of least resistance to flour production, and has the least headaches associated with growing/harvesting it. It is also the only of the grains that uses a planter instead of a seeder. If you’re running corn, soybeans, cotton or sugar beets already, your planter can handle sorghum and you don’t need to buy a seeder to get a flour-producing crop in the ground.

Oats, however, are truly special…. In addition to being the only grain input for cereal and horses, if you look at the crop calendar you’ll notice Oats may be harvested in July - the soonest of the spring-planted crops. And you might also notice that carrots can still be planted in July, which means Oats and Carrots are the only rotation that can be planted on the same field within the same calendar year. You can see how this works HERE.

This dive was interesting because it really didn’t provide a whole lot of exciting angles from a data perspective. Instead of being pointed in an obvious direction, I learned that growing grains in Farm Sim 25 is a more operations-driven decision than the typical yield/profitability equations we usually lean on. Choosing the right grain is more often dictated by factors such as what animals you want to raise, what equipment you have, what your crop rotations look like, and how much flour you actually need on a monthly basis.

Have you ever tried to set up a clothing empire? If the answer is yes, I'll bet it wasn't nearly as efficient as it could have been, but it’s not because you are a dummy! It’s because it’s complicated, not straightforward at all, and requires a metric fuck-ton of math. And only really weird people like me play this game for the math…

Disclaimer: Everything in this dive was derived from my own experience playing FS25 on an Xbox Series X console. It utilizes vanilla maps, productions, and recipes, and the data was pulled, tested and confirmed through...a LOT of in-game farming and manual transcription. Nothing was scraped from other creators or databases. Current as of May '26.

When diving into the production chain for clothing, you might notice some interesting relationships between the inputs and outputs of your two raw components: wool and cotton. Since the processes to create those two goods are so different, we are only going to focus on total inputs and outputs in this exercise, without factoring in the costs and labor involved with producing the raw inputs...

To start, let's consider the two productions and their recipes:

Spinnery (small) -- recipe cycles do NOT stack:
(wool 3 = 1 fabric) x 144 cycles
(cotton 9 = 3 fabric) x 240 cycles

Tailor (small):
(fabric 4 = 2 clothes) x 240 cycles

480 clothes = 960 fabric = 2880 cotton = 2880 wool

Even though both raw inputs are equally efficient at converting input liters to fabric liters with a 3-to-1 ratio...they have very different monthly inputs/outputs based on the number of cycles their recipes run:

Wool 432 = 144 fabric

Or

Cotton 2160 = 720 fabric

Or

Wool 216 = 72 fabric
AND
Cotton 1080 = 360 fabric
= 432 total fabric

In the same month, cotton will produce FIVE times as much fabric as wool would and require 5x the liters of input! And because the spinnery is a non-cycle-stacking production, activating the wool recipe concurrently with a cotton recipe would actually bring DOWN the output efficiency of your spinnery from where it is when running 100% cotton.

Ok, COTTON IS KING, got it... So what do I do with this knowledge? Let's look at the yearly inputs/outputs of the cotton fabric chain since cotton is a once-a-year harvest:

960 fabric x 12 months = 11,520 fabric required
x 3 (recipe ratio) = 34,560 liters of cotton required per year

But...a single spinnery running just the cotton recipe can only produce:
720 fabric x 12 months = 8,640 liters max

Adding a second spinnery brings us to 17,280 liters max capacity. The 11,520 liters of fabric we need for our tailor per year is 67% of two spinneries' maximum cotton recipe capacity (same as maximum overall capacity). The way this would play out is your two spinneries would run from October through May-ish (eight months), producing all the fabric your tailor would need through the following September. You can shut them down from June-ish through September (four months). "Ish" depends on how quickly you get your cotton off the fields and into the spinneries in October -- unless you are into night farming, you won't get full cycles in October...

100% cotton in a nutshell: the small tailor's maximum cycle count per year is achieved by harvesting 34,560 liters of cotton per year and utilizing 67% of the cotton recipe cycles from two spinneries. Switch to large spinneries and 10x your cotton/fabric input to fulfill the requirements of a large tailor.

But I like sheep. I want to roleplay the finest wool tailor the world has ever seen! I'm going to corner the sock market!!! Sure, we can do that too:

We don't need to look at yearly inputs since wool can be a monthly delivery, but the same fabric requirement applies regardless of the raw input:

We need 960 liters of fabric per month, which will require 2,880 liters of wool.

However, wool produces 5x less fabric than cotton per month, so we will need more spinners...

One spinnery running just its wool recipe only makes 144 liters of fabric. 960 / 144 = 6.667 spinneries. You will need seven spinneries, and they will run just under their entire allotment of cycles each month.

100% wool in a nutshell: 2,880 liters of wool and seven small spinneries are required to fulfill the maximum clothing cycles of a small tailor each month. Again -- 10x the wool input and switch to seven large spinneries to fulfill a large tailor.

Now that you have all the necessary data and have gone through the logic for the 100% recipes, try plotting out on your own how much wool and cotton and how many spinneries you would need to utilize both raw inputs to fulfill the fabric needs of a tailor.

I'll just leave this here for inspiration:

If you max out a small tailor for an entire year you will have 5.76-ish pallets of clothing x $32,112 (easy economy peak price per 1,000-liter pallet) for ~$185k gross revenue. Just bump the decimal down for a large tailor -- 57.6 pallets for ~$1.85 million a year from clothing alone.

I hope you enjoyed this in-depth look into one of the most rewarding chains in Farming Simulator 25. I am working on another Deep Data Dive on grains, straw, and flour that I'll post as soon as my in-game data collection is complete.

Are there any other chains or mechanics the community would like to see a similar analysis of?

I am expanding my grass/silage operation on my Zielonka farm so I’ll have two 700k liter fields next to each other I’ll alternate harvesting starting in March. I remember how intimidating field creation was when I first started playing so I figured I’d snap some screenshots of how I do it now and share that process with the community. I hope you find it helpful!

To create fields, simply select Allow Field Creation from your implement options while towing a plow and the land you plow will now be field. Don’t forget to toggle that setting back off when done:)

The best time to merge fields is the month of seeding. Pro tip: Bring any fields involved up to the most current state possible before you begin merging. The reason for this is that the AI won’t function once you challenge it with multiple field states on the same field. For example: if one field is missing a fertilization state do your fertilization pass before you merge it with another field that was already 100%. If you don’t use AI this isn’t a concern. AI will eventually handle the merged field just fine once a uniform crop is rolling.

Step (pic) One: Unless you want to take on the greatest driving challenge in the game, get yourself a small straight plow mod!!!

Step (pic) Two: Gameplan. We are going to combine these three grass fields (all in different stages lol) into one huge field.

Step (pic) Three: Save now!!! The main concern when using the create fields function is creating field on land you don’t own, and therefore can’t fix. This is a major problem if it happens on public land especially. I tested the area around where I was planning to create field in the pic and confirmed this map didn’t allow that glitch to happen - I could paint over anywhere the field was created. I had to give up a Riverbend Springs playthrough because it let me gash a road when I hadn’t saved in a long time. My OCD wouldn’t let me suffer that horror so…yeah…I burned it to the ground and took my insurance money to Zielonka. We’ll do better next time!

Step (pic) Four: Set your edges. Basically create the outlines (and headland buffers) for your field. If you are merging, you are looking to make straight exterior lines between the existing fields. If you are creating an entire field, draw your entire exterior. For this step, as long as you did step three, you don’t have to sweat precision too much. The important thing is to make sure you plow ENOUGH - you can go back and paint over excess field for your precision but it’s a little more work to have to go back with the plow because you missed something, and missing something isn’t always visually apparent… When you paint, use the smallest setting and think of it more like a cursor than a brush - more like you are clicking on clumps of field you want gone than painting any lines, and you’re often clicking just to the side of it rather than right on it. You’ll see what I mean and get the hang of it…. If you mess up painting, re-plow and try again!

Step (pic) Five: Fill in the field. Again, it’s better to plow too much than not enough here. Plow once, paint after! Now that we have plowed headland buffers, it’s easier to work with a bigger plow if you want to save some time during this step…

Step (pic) Six: Run a cultivator or disc harrow over the created field (in plowed state) to convert it into a seedbed. The Powerman 5000 disc harrow in the pic is the perfect width to handle converted paths in one pass.

Step (pic) Seven: Seed. I love this pic because you can see FIVE different field states merging into a single field. There are three existing grass fields: one is recently cut and grass-rolled, one is in first growth stage, the last is recently planted and seed-rolled. Then the center of the path is unfertilized seedbed state, and edges of the path that were part of the original fields but got hit by the Dalbo are in fertilized-seedbed state. After seeding you can seed-roll for your 2.5% bonus.

Pic Eight: Using the crop-type map, you can see that we now have one field of grass. Great success!!!

Step Eight (not shown): When merging fields, the new created parts of the field won’t come with fertilization. You can hit it once now then a second time in first growth stage, or you can wait and do the entire field uniformly your next planting. You can only hit 97% max bonus in the new sections the first time, even with 100% fertilization, because there was nothing you could mulch.

I think that’s it…. Now you can merge/plow that 100 hectare cotton field you’ve been dreaming of!!!

As always…PLEASE share your best tips and tricks, personal experiences or stories about field creation in the comments.

Despite our tendency to want to crown a GOAT in all comparisons, there really isn’t a such thing when it comes to medium tractors in Farm Sim 25. It’s a broad category that covers a wide spread of options and they all come with unique personalities that will appeal to various preferences and budgets.

As someone who came into the game with no brand loyalties, I decided to indulge my ignorance and try them all out over a couple thousand hours operating the full gambit of tasks. Here are some strengths (and negatives) across the category according to my experience with them:

Bang-For-the-Buck: Fiat 180-90-DT - front equipment capable, front-end-loader, drives nicely, can handle any job from 180hp down, which is pretty much everything on a small to medium farm, all for $75k!

Coolest: Valtra T255 Versu - super customizable (including colors) and the only medium that is reverse-driving capable. 271 max HP is a drag and I found the maintenance was constant and expensive, but it’s certainly fun and unique.

Budget Puller: Deutz Fahr AgroStar 8.31 - lack of front-end options are a drag, but for pulling < 230hp implements, you can’t go wrong with the cheap and reliable $90k green box.

Best Puller: John Deer 6R 250 - you barely feel the tools driving this well-rounded tractor around. It’s too cushy for my tastes, but if you want to yank a few thousand liters of cow shit around a field in a Rolls Royce, this tractor is your best bet.

Workhorse: Steyr Absolut 6280 CVT - It handles like an “Absolut” tank, very difficult to spin out or oversteer. With front and rear equipment hookups and front-end loader capability, it can handle any task, and feels and sounds like a tractor while doing it. It usually gets the most hours on my farms because it hits the sweet spot of 300hp, all the hookups, and rock-solid performance and reliability. Bonus points to its white paint proudly showing off the mud and manure from an honest day’s work.

The Supercar: Deutz Fahr Series 8 TTV Warrior - the matte black-trimmed option along with a whispering exhaust make this speed-demon feel like you’re piloting a stealth fighter. It’s smoother and faster than a Steph Curry 3 and I love driving it, but its 287 hp is a drag at the second highest price tag.

Death Trap: Fendt 728 Vario - It cooks at 37mph, looks awesome, and I know the community loves it. But I can’t drive this kamikazi coffin. All my most spectacular crashes have come in it. I steer clear of the Marktoberdorf Drifter and get my Fendt fix from the bigger 1050.

Best Looking: the blood red/black rim McCormick X8631 is dead sexy, no? Not sure how practical a tractor that you’d hate to get muddy is though:(

What are some of your favorites? Any tractors I didn’t mention that you feel have definitive strengths?

I always see the AgroStar 8.31 listed as everyone’s go-to budget tractor, and I followed the herd for months. Then I tried out this beautiful machine and I’ll never go back.

Advantages of the Fiat 180-90 DT over the Deutz Fahr AgroStar 8.31:

1. Front end equipment. For me this is pretty huge. This tiny tractor can handle the cheap duo Kuhn mower setup or add a front seed/fertilizer tank to a seeder/planter (can then handle big cotton/grain fields). It also makes it more useful as a shuttle since some mulchers etc… can be front mounted for transport.

2. Driving - it has very little pause from stop in both directions. The turning radius is amazing. It’s not a complete snail in reverse. It feels more mechanical than the modern tractors but is still really smooth which makes it a dream to zip around in. It is pretty squat so it can take turns pretty quickly without a bunch of oversteer. Normal tires are surprisingly ideal, can handle fields/equipment just fine.

3. Maintenance - it’s doesn’t wear down quickly and is dirt cheap to maintain when you do take it in.

4. Cost - $15k-ish less. Not a huge amount but why pay more for less capability?

The only benefit to the AgroStar is 230 hp > 180 hp, which on the surface seems like a lot! But if you look at the actual implements, 180 is really about the peak requirement of the better non-huge tools, and 230 isn’t enough to get to that next tier anyway (300 is where you can handle some of the direct-drill/fertilizer combos, the bigger mulchers and rollers etc…).

At 180hp you can handle a Dalbo PowerChain disc harrow, the Lemken Solitaire 12 seeder, the Kverneland Optima RS planter, the Knoche Speedmax 560 mulcher, the Kuhn GMD front and rear mowers, the Dalbo Maxiroll 630 grass roller, and the Vaderstad Rexius 1240 roller. That’s an entire farm’s worth of great equipment.

I really don’t see any tools in the 180-230hp range that make up for the four advantages I mentioned of the little Fiatagri!

I have had both on the same farms a few times and I always find the Fiat ends up with a lot more hours because it’s simply more useful and fun to drive.