Farming Field

The Farming Field is a room added in the Going Green DLC, to grow cereals and grains. These crops can be sold at export for profit. They cannot be used to cook food in the kitchen. The logistics menu's crop distribution option allows you to set up your preferred crop allocation. Unlike the Fruit Orchard, cereals and grains must be replanted in the farming field.

Farming Field are tended to by farmers, or prisoners that have passed the Farm Work Safety program or have the Green Thumb reputation. Barley and wheat seeds are bought in packs of 20, while corn is bought in packs of 10.

Improving Growth and Automation[]

Items and machines can help improve several parts such as growth and automating the harvesting process. Hiring 'The Botanist' as the prison warden will double export price for each crop, increase drop chance for seeds, and extend wilting and spoiling time for growing crops and harvested ingredients.

Objects[]

Compost Fertilizer and High Quality Fertilizer will decrease the growth and ripening time by 25% and 50% and increase the low and high chance of dropping seeds respectively.
Crop Sprinkler and Drip Pipe will automate irrigation of the field.
Basic Auto Gatherer, Advanced Auto Gatherer, Auto Harvester, and Auto Scythe help with harvesting, gathering, and storing the harvest. See the machines individually for more information.

Policy Tab[]

Various automation options can be enabled in the report->policy tab

Continuous Planting - On / Off
- Automatically replants your vegetables and crops.
Automatic Fertilizer - None / Compost Fertilizer / High-Quality Fertilizer
- Automatically buy more fertilizer when you run out.
Crop Type - Natural Crops / GM Crops (genetically modified)
- GM crops takes half the time to grow, however they sell for half price of natural crops and don't gives bonuses to satisfying prisoner needs when used in prison kitchens.
Ratio - This sets the proportion of kitchen ingredients taken from farming

Cereals and Grains[]

Barley is unlocked by default, but corn and wheat requires farming researched. The plants require also the correct terrain to grow (dirt, grass, grass corner, or flower field.)

Type	Seedling to Harvest, Hours	Yield per Harvest	Yield per Day	$ per Crop	$ per Day
Barley Plant	32	2	1.5	3	4.5
Corn Plant	48	5	2.5	5	12.5
Wheat Plant	72	4	1.33	6	8

You can use Compost Fertilizer and High Quality Fertilizer to increase your yields by 25% and 50%, respectively, bearing in mind you'll also need to expend resources (usually money) to acquire the fertilizer.

This means corn is your best earner: it has the greatest yield per day of anything in the farming field or vegetable allotment, and while it is inferior to the best fruit, bananas, in terms of both yield per day and necessary work done, its tile usage is superior: a banana tree takes up 9 tiles. Even using the relatively tile-inefficient Auto Harvester will beat this easily: you can spend 108 tiles on 2 Auto Harvesters (8 tiles, harvests all remaining 100 tiles), 1 Advanced Auto Gatherer (4 tiles, gathers all remaining 96 tiles), and 4 Crop Sprinklers (4 tiles, sprinkles all remaining 92 tiles). That's 92 corn plants, as opposed to only 12 banana trees in the same number of tiles. Tile efficiency can be improved further by using Auto Scythes rather than Auto Harvesters.

Contraband[]

A Shed placed in a Farming Field contains several contraband that can be used as weapons. For that reason, security measures should be put in place to avoid dangerous contraband from being moved out of the Farming Field. Farming field can also be taken over by gangs.

Be careful because crops growing within can be tampered with by prisoners to grow Drugs. They count as smelly so they can be discovered by dog patrols patrolling the area. Inmates can grow drugs even if they haven't completed the Farm Work Safety program.

Shakedown[]

Farming areas are not included in shakedown searches (except for seeds, fertilizer, and boxes). However, reports->policy tab allows you to set scheduled search Frequency for farming areas. (Never / Daily / Every 3 days / Every 5 days / Weekly), and what should be searched (Crops Only / Inmate Labourers / Everything).

Note: Guards searching crops and vegetables have a chance of destroying the plant. Any destroyed plant will be moved to compost bin as organic waste. If there is no compost bin, it will be trashed in black bags as everything else.