Genuine question, I don't see any other resource talked about as much here as silage... is it the most profitable resource or the most interesting to create, or what? Please enlighten me as someone who just recently bought a baler with a silage wrapper :)
Because Giants made the mistake of making silage overpriced. Just look at straw/grass/hay price compared to silage. You're literally doing the same thing as you'd do grass, but your baler is slightly more expensive and it applies a wrap. Silage is not balanced, unlike where soybeans/sunflower have lower yields but higher price compared to wheat.
To add to the broken factor of silage, you can buy grass bales and wrap and then sell as silage for a profit without even having to mow or anything. All you need is transport from shop, and a bale wrapper.
There's also the thing of silage being limited to smaller bales whereas with straw and grass I can make much bigger bales but besides that, I agree
Or just forage harvester, auger trailer, fill larger trucks fill bunker silo.
Next thing you know you need the Giant Ass Cat Dump truck (TM) and mining equipment to move your grass, chaff and silage around with and it's redic fun.
Bunker silos are the bane of my existence. Give me a fermenting silo and I will HAPPILY pay the production costs.
The fermenting silo is such a game changer
I don’t remember if 22 has fermenting silos in the base game but I know there are mods for them
Not in base game but there are plenty on the mod hub
With mods you can make 240cm wrapped square bales or 180cm wrapped round bales, and there are setups for both types which allow you to do non stop baling and wrapping
Oh I see, personally I'm trying to exhaust everything vanilla FS22 has then only move onto mods once vanilla gets boring
Personally this is one of the few games that feels incomplete without mods. As long as you are careful what you install it’s quite easy to get things that are helpful without being busted
Only mod I'd recommend then is the ingame realtime clock to keep track of time in the real world. no more going to bed at 5 in the morning...
You can use the official DLCs tho. Vermeer has 1.80 round bales, and the Andersen (which is a mod by Giants) will wrap them into sausages.
That's a good thing, I played about 200 hours vanilla myself before getting the first mod
You can make 1.80m grass bales with the Vermeer and then wrap them in sausages with the Andersen wrapper.
For the record. 80% of the world’s silage is not baled. Because feeders care about moisture of silage and it’s much harder to control in a bale.
Can confirm. Only reason we did baled silage in our field was because we didn't have anywhere to store loose silage. But another benefit is it made an amazing makeshift arena for paintball.
Also don’t need to replant/reseed grass and it can be harvested every two months.
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1mo
Good analysis, but you forgot "supply and demand". If all farmers in the mid-west plant grass and all do silage, the price will plummet, but prices for crops would probably rise. In game not so much anymore, back in fs13(maybe even 15)prices would actually go down hard if you only sold one product to discourage the players from doing mono-crops.
Since we got seasons now(even if you play without them, the time to grow crops is still the same), they figured that prices don't need to fluctuate too much since you're limited in how fast you can grow crops now, except that grass grows like 2-3 times faster than most crops instead of all crops growing in 1 day like before.
Also, i play on North Dakota 12x, I planted 1 field, 50 hectares with grass, the profit was like 2-3 million compared to sunflowers 1 million. How is it not overpriced? You aren't even counting equipment costs, you need a tractor with an average of 150-250 hp for grass work while needing 300+hp for field work for same size equipment. The harvester alone is worth as much as all equipment needed for grass work, except the tractor.
In the end, it's broken and personally I don't like to use silage as a way to get the millions up.
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1mo
So I thought thirty cents was awfully low, it was. in North Dakota for two plants that produce sunflower oil, just roughly averaging the price per cwt is $14.00 so your idea is right but your math is wrong
It's extremely profitable.
It is cheap to get into (method dependant)
There are a lot of different ways to make it.
At least those are the reasons for me.
And it’s extremely boring after a period of doing it non stop too 😓
Everything gets boring if it is all you do.
Silage at least gives me different ways to do the same thing.
Tired of bunker silos? Bale it. Tired of grass? Switch to corn. Tired of silos? Bale the corn.
Tired of all of it? Do soybeans for a while. Then do potatoes and you will want the simplicity of grass again bringing you full circle.
I agree with this statement, something I really love about this game is the variety of ways to stay busy and still keep things fresh.
Silage is a very good and easy way to make money. You don‘t really need expensive equipment for it (depends on how you do it).
It's very profitable and it's a more interesting gameplay loop compared to other crops imo.
Just as an example, here in northern Ireland we focus almost solely on animals. For ever crop field you find you'll find 100 grass fields. Silage is like our whole thing, we are pretty much the world's best place for growing grass. I prefer silage because it's what I spend my time doing in real life! My entire summer is just working silage so I'm pretty biased for it. I just love the whole process and find it very enjoyable.
When I was very little we grew potatoes and barley and wheat but that's long ago, combines haven't started in a decade atleast.
Have you seen Grassmen on YouTube? They were apparently in a big documentary a little while ago.
I've been watching their dvds since I was born. I have family members who have been on their YouTube channel!
Wait they have dvds? There's more to it. That's so cool!
They are bound to have nearly 50. Atleast it's been years since I watched them but I had atleast 10 as a kid.
Cool. I'm going to go down such a deep rabbit hole now lol
Have fun! Check out their YouTube video on Joe black agri. That's my uncles squad.
Ima check that one out, thanks!
Silage is very profitable… but boring as all hell.
Politely disagree. I love the whole mowing and baling cycle.
It’s fun to do it on small fields. Good luck trying to do it on combined fields, two or three times a year.
Easiest way to become a millionaire quickly.
A lot of variety with silage. Silos, pits, bales, grass work, forage harvesters. Feed it to cows, mix it for TMR, sell it, input to BGA. Crop rotation. I like grass, sorghum, grass, grass. Vintage choppers mods available for small farm work.
What's the most profitable way? I only have the bales so far :/
Bales for the simplicity imo. The pits seem overly and unnecessarily complicated compared to just collecting with a baler.
If you have a big farm and have a big clamp and big machinery to level and compact, and move the silage after fermenting The clamps are super easy to use. On a small farm pretty much pointless depending on how much grass/chaff you’re dumping.
Bales are easier to start with, but as you grow it's easier to move to clamps unless you use a modded baler with unrealistic bale sizes.
And for reference, I had 10 million liters in clamps at one point in FS19.
Might not be the most profitable but IMO the simplest way if you're doing grass is to use a front mounted windrower and pull a forage harvester and then dump it into a modded fermenting silo. Yes, you'll pay a production cost but then I don't have to worry about picking up and storing the bales the silage just hangs out in the siolo until I sell it.
I use a forage harvester, but then again I use fermenting silo mods, so not sure if it counts.
I haven’t spent that much time on the sub or reading into how to max out profits but this week I kinda stumbled on how profitable silage is. A trailer full of grass got me 20,000 while the same quantity of silage earned me 75,000. The silage profit vastly outperformed my crop yield, and I can harvest silage three times a year without needing to recultivate, roll, or weed. Seems to be massive profit for relatively little work.
I know nothing about production chains but it definitely seems like the best way to make money early on.
Recently I also discovered clothing and how one pallet of it can fetch over €20k and seeing as I had sheep already, it seems like a viable way of making money... last run netted me like €180k from one pickup truck's worth of pallets
Sheep are like printing money.
They also work well with grass silage operations since there is no output differencebetweengrass and hay for sheep. Make enough grass bales to feed the sheep then wrap the rest for silage.
You can feed sheep straight up grass or silage?
Grass yes, not silage.
Not sure about sheep but cotton takes 8 months to grow. The whole production chain also whittles down the cotton a lot, and takes awhile. It can make you money, but you need huge fields to feed the production chain and isn’t really ideal if you want/need money now.
Sheep just need you to give them bales to eat, and you need some kind of fork to lift the wool to get it into the spinnery, then to get fabric into the clothes shop... I put all of those buildings close so it's only 3-5 irl minutes of work per month
Variety of work/methods to make it.
Scales well with beginner equipment to end game equipment.
Without using production chains makes the most cash per yearly costs per acre of most crops (though does involve alot more work).
Is fun to set up huge uperations with friends that all work together on the field/bunker/transport work.
Also fun to set up ai workers (course play and autodrive) to make a seamless automated system with bunker silage.
Leada into the next logical step of having cows, many cows if using bunker.
The bale work is fun too with mixing tmr with the right bale ratios.
Stores cheaply (bunker or bales).
Can make fun designs in bale storages with diffirent colored Wraps :)
Silage is great in every FS I played (FS 17,19,22). Compared to 19 it was slightly nerfed. I personally think that it’s balanced. Yes you get great profit but if you think vanilla game (without autoloads, and balers where you need to stop) it’s quite time consuming. Baling at lest on console you need to do yourself. Using bunkers is also time consuming.
Bunkers are the most infuriating thing in the world honestly. It's impossible to get everything level and to stay inside the bunker.
It's not impossible, but material moving physics definitely suck. Lol.
I have a compost mod that uses silage physics. It's so annoying to squeeze everything into the bunker and then level it out without spillage.
We’re all silage simps over here
Grass silage makes every month interesting. And if you run animals as well, it's just a great time all round.
Because you don’t have to wait almost a year to harvest/regrow silage, you can cut your grass every 3-4 months and it makes the gameplay loop way less boring when you’re not wasting time waiting for crops to grow
It's fun, useful and high value
I make silage, turn that into methane, then turn that into cow feed and gold. Then that turns into money.
For me, it's just therapeutic. Like vacuuming or rinsing all of the syrup from a plate after waffles. It tingles the brain lol.
silage is the best profit wise and offers excellent ROI as it requires no replanting or upkeep if using grass, lets you play around with some very big and fun machines. Lastly its worth a lot of money
is it the most profitable resource?
Yes.
or the most interesting to create?
It's unique. Most interesting will depend on you, but if you're stuck in the till, plant, fertilize, harvest loop, it's a change of pace.
or what?
It has two flavors, the base can produce grass and hay as well, and is a component of cow feed.
It's been a craze for YEARS. I remember back when Daggerwin had an MP server running I would consistently join daily just to harvest all of the corn with a corn header to stop people from doing silage, good times
$$$$$$$
I find it quite satisfying to see the mowers and windrowers work… thats mostly it and the fact its easy to start
I don't really do silage, as I don't do animals. Can someone enlighten me on the profit of silage, vs other crops like soybeans or sunflowers.
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1mo
So would corn to silage be 1:6? Maybe I should sell my Lexion for a Jaguar.
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1mo
I'll test it out with different trailer combos to see which ones work and which one's don't with the jag, and/or any other forage harvester.
Because of the amount of uses and money you can get out of it, sell it to the animal dealer or use it as food
Personally only do silage for my own cows etc , but cotton is the most profitable
I'ts easy, fun and makes tons of cash. The loop for silage is simple and enjoyable. You only have to roll, cut, roll, cut, roll, cut, harvest, bale then wait. You get insane amounts of money without having to plow, cultivate, seed, weed, or fertilize.
I am more into doing animals now, and just growing what you need to feed them, then I sell what I don't need. It's a nice change of pace having multiple crops to grow, but so you can use them rather than sell.
idk if its just me but i find silage one of the most boring things to do in this game
i only do it if i have to for cows, or at the start of a playtrough doing contracts
The trailer hitch is around the same height on the Jaguar and collosus forage harvester. The only trailer that doesn't look obsenly weird on both is the lizard 2 axil silage/grain trailer. I modded this trailer to suit my specific needs, it now olds 10 million liters.
I like chopping corn and hauling it to bunker silos usually end up with around a million litres of silage. Easy money maker
I usually liked silage because of the co-op element of it, never got enough buddies to consistently harvest a field tho
I think silage is operated. You can make a million super fast but I find it tedious. I prefer soy or download a mod that makes prices more naturally fluctuating.
Shit makes money. Literally 😅
over here. i do not do the silage. my first save on fs19 i grew grass because i didn't know how to merge my fields. haven't messed with grass since.
How do you merge fields? I’ve been playing less than a week and an instantly hooked on this game.
Buy a plow and set it to "create fields".
Right, and just plow over the dividing line? Makes sense. Thanks!
very few production methods in the FS series involve the amount of work one can invest into silage. Like you can buy a bailer that automates most of it, but you can also use a forage Harvester, a dump trailer, a silage pit, a roller, a front loader and a feed mixer to do it all yourself. Think of the active steps involved.
Mulch, fert, cult, lime, seed, roll, fert, harvest, dump, compact, cover, load, mix. It's a lot of active steps. All involve active machinery. This is likely why I think anyways.
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I think its because silage can either be used for the market (€) or used as food for cows. Besides silage is fun and easy work with big machinery. It also is very profitable indeed