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.

Must have got separated from the herd. I-270 East on the north side of Columbus, Ohio. This isn’t the first time seeing a Claas in central Ohio, either. Just don’t see them too often.

This is my first attempt in the Annual Farmers Hay Bale Throwing Competition 🤣 🤣 🤣 🤣

This is how my wife runs a field… I swear it’s not a troll post. “It’s easier to turn around.”

Currently trying out different seeder combinations to see how the work on my map.