Huge demand for Agriculture Industry regardless of how much I build!?

[Riot55 2]

Ok, so I went out and bought SimCity 4 Deluxe because I didn't want my game to crash and I wanted better plug in support.

The game is stable and I can even do GLR now without the game crashing,but regardless of how many farms I build, regardless of how many new lots (I've made 5 lots so far) the argiculture stays extremely high.

I've built cities on a single tile with 130k sims with 6 small 9x9 lots of farm. Never had this issue.

Wondering if its something in my game?

[BowynAerrow 0]

Rush hour changed how farms worked. (Rush-hour addon disk and the Deluxe version) You may note that with the rush-hour you can tax agriculture, this sort of changed the way the game works if you are playing the game as it was meant, balancing a budget this this is pretty helpful because you can lay in a lot of ag to start your game and turn a profit before educating those sims thus making them move away from ag to other forms of industry and trade.

Education levels will determine how much demand you have for ag. If you zone in a lot of new residential stupid sims will move in (Education and health will be red). they will need work, agriculture demands will go up.

Mind I have gotten a couple hundred thousand sims in a tightly packed city with ag around it and still had demand for more ag due to little or low education. I have also had populations of 20 thousand and less with uber high education and no demand for ag by having a school on every corner, having lots of libraries, three colleges, university and all of the private schools *yes I cheated*.

Check your education, its probably still fairly low, or you have areas of red.

[Riot55 2]

education is a good place to look, - i did start a new region however, "Big Easy" - LOL!

considering i have 20,k sims and just started building extra public schools. apparently they're in the wrong spots.

i'll re organize my city tomorrow

the transit networks are all green and they all take busses to el rail, but i dont have a down town yet.

although, this might be my biggest city yet considering how i've been playing.

my only fault was letting the game run without pop-up windows and 10 years passed and a whole section of my industry burnt! lol!!!!

although, this

[IronDogg 0]

One thing to try to reduce your "farm sprawl" as you call it is to de-zone the unused, unnecessary tiles of a farm, then rezone those tiles as ag again. After a while you can have 6-10 farms on a 6*6 zone. Typically 6-10 farms could hog up hundreds of tiles otherwise.

[Lukfi 3]

but do they also satisfy more demand? I don't think so, usually when a farm develops on a huge lot, the demand jumps down... 

[City Planner 121]

 Is there any further information regarding rezoning farms as ag again, and putting 6 to 10 farms on a 6x6 zone?

 

I too have a city of mine that the AG demand seems unquenchable and they keep demanding more regardless of how much I give them, on this one particular city it's spread out way too much, not only does it "look" unbalanced in the city with such huge demands for farming, but it IS pretty much taking up all the space I had initially alloted to be given to farms and industrial.

[SC4BOY 20]

Farms do not function quite like normal industry. A few notes:

1. Their demand is driven by a huge ration by uneducated R$ workers (forget the number, but just a few residents will basically ramp you to full farm demand. Seems it is 1500 to 1 or something like that)

2. Demand isn't filled directly by "workers" driving to the farm either (some go to the "farm building lot" but that is only a fraction of the actual "workers") You can confirm this easily by looking at the number of "IA" workers on the RCI graph. You will see that there are MANY more workers than are driving to the farms. The reason for this is that each "farm tile" employs workers.. I've not bothered to see exactly what the ratio is. You should be able to estimate it pretty easily from the graph. For this reason it is of NO ADVANTAGE to make a LOT OF SMALL FARMS such as some of you are suggesting.. it also looks very fake

3. These farm workers (and the attendent farm output ... those freight you may observe leaving the farms) act as BIG drives to other city demands and thereby allow the farm community to quickly spur your demand for especially industry, but somewhat less so for commercial too. This lets you get on to a thriving community if you use farming to get you started. Farms also act to give things like the Farmers Market which gives health benefits and the County Fair and possibly other things I forget.

4. Farm demand is limited (it is 30,000 as I recall) and there is no "cap relief" for farm labor built into the game .... Ripplejet tied 30000 added IA CAP relief into his small "Census Repository Lot" building if you use that mod which he made to allow tiles pretty much filled by farms if that is what you want...  Otherwise as you see the city growing beyond 30000 IA workers, the demand is capped and becomes zero pretty much no matter what you do. This is designed to work this way so the "farm need" goes away as your city expands to become an industrial or commercial center. For that reason, if you plan farms to be part of your "city" you should get them grown before you reach this city cap or lose the uneducated R$ workers.

5. Just as a note for those of you who are complaining.. just because there is a demand doesn't mean you have to fill it!!

Recall also that farms are VERY SENSITIVE to especially traffic pollution. Thus farms will not grow within 4 or 5 tiles of a busy road and will turn an ugly dark color. I've never checked to see if those "delapidated" lots still give employment or farm output. .. I usually delete farm areas that turn black like that.

[BattleshipAgincourt 1]

Is there any mod in which could allow you to tax farmland? I just don't like how you have a lot which can be 144 that gives the same tax income as one which is only 16 tiles in area. Even if you only got 1/10 of simolean for a farm tile, that would still be much better than nothing.

It also would be great if there were a mod for increasing demand for a larger population, but that's wishful thinking.

[SC4BOY 20]

I find that I absolutely am ROLLING IN MONEY for a farm based city tile.. why are you having problems? Where are you using up your budget? I'm not sure of the tax mechanics, but based on my income I'm pretty sure that income IS based on "tiles total in agriculture" and tax rates.

[Mithrik 562]

Also the Agriculture demand cap will skyrocket when one of the cities in the region reached about 20000 or more. I should tell you that the best way, as stated above, then less dumb R$ citizens, the lower.

Also if you don't notice any change, kill the demand with high taxes, that cannot fail.

[Livin in Sim 83]

The funny thing about farm demand is that everything satisfies it, except CS$ and I-R itself.  (Yup the cap is 30,000.)  So farms will not satisfy farm demand.  But residential, commercial, other industry will.  So as your city grows farm demand will go down.  I think it was designed this way so that you could use farms to get started, as has been mentioned.  Due to this, I am baffled by the poster who had I-R demand with a large city. 

[SC4BOY 20]

Originally posted by: Livin in Sim
 

The funny thing about farm demand is that everything satisfies it, except CS$ and I-R itself.  (Yup the cap is 30,000.)  So farms will not satisfy farm demand.  But residential, commercial, other industry will.  quote>

Exactly correct.. glad you added that..I'd forgotten it in my list.