SPAM unemployment - Farm Degredation

[new.orendor 11]

I've searched and hadn't found a similar topic, so I'll post here.

When playing with the SPAM addon, everything goes well at first, but pretty soon, most farms start to lose jobs. For example, a plot might go from 24 jobs to 15 or 39 to 32. Since agriculture is the base of the economy in SPAM cities, this triggers unemployment, especially in medium wealth neighborhoods.

 

I've tried to prevent the degradation by keeping the farms away from any main roads and making sure they are covered by fire and water services, but some degradation still occurs. I've also checked for crime, and there is zero crime in the entire city.

 

A likely related problem is the difficulty of keeping large numbers of low wealth sims available for work in the fields. (The SPAM documentation encourages placing schools and other services because reportedly the farms will now employ educated and wealthier sims along with the poor and uneducated).

Is it possible that the degradation is caused by a lack of R$ employees? Or is there some other factor I'm missing?

 

 

[APSMS 1,893]

How many workers are actually working in those farms, though?

Keep in mind that the building query is only for the main building; each tile of fields employs its own amount of workers, typically between 1 and 2, and the amount of people working there is only given by the route query, not the lot query. The lot query job indicators only tell you how many potential jobs are available, as distinct from the maximum possible under perfect conditions.

As a rule of thumb, it's best to always have a large poor population to pull workers from, but I've not actually used the SPAM in a proper manner in a very long time. When I was using it I did not notice degradation of the farms or the jobs provided, but I always used farms alongside commercial. SPAM's main benefit to me was that farms would continue to develop and not degrade when near higher traffic areas or when the region population reached 30k (the usual stopping point for farm development in the standard game). I never viewed SPAM as making farming the backbone of my cities, but rather a viable supplement to the local economy that can remain strong long after initial development.

Workplaces are almost never impacted by a lack of workers, though. Instead demand is driven by population demands for work. When there are too many jobs demand may decrease, but not necessarily. How is your farm demand? Keep in mind the CAM is technically incompatible with SPAM, and that you probably shouldn't use the SPAM traffic simulator either as the NAM one is superior in basically every way (and the intrepid can adjust their NAM to perform similarly if so desired).

 

[new.orendor 11]

The SPAM includes a query for the fields as well as the main farm building.

Using that and the route query, I found that my most prosperous farm is on a 15x17 area, has 200 workers total, 32 in the main building, and the rest across the fields. It currently hasn't lost any jobs.

 

My most degraded farm is on a 9x6 tile area. It has 42 workers total, 17 in the main building (which had a capacity of 32 jobs) and the rest in the field tiles, about half of which display 0/1 jobs when queried.

The total population of this city is 2,014 sims. There are no other cities in the region yet.

Total Ag demand is close to the top of the scale, approximately 5500.

Since it worked for you, I'll see if zoning some commercial closer to the farm lots helps.

  Edited September 13, 2017 by new.orendor  
Clarified that I used the route query to determe number of sims traveling to the farms

[jeffryfisher 2,176]

Do you have CAM to worry about? Can you build a census vault, query it, and post a screen-shot of its numbers?

[licoricebomb 93]

The answer to your question is no, lack of workers will not cause jobs to become unavailable at a workplace. NB, SPAM farms employ R$/R$$/R$$$ on a ratio of approximately 50-45-5 where each number is a percentage. So only half of the workers on your farms need to be R$ anyway.

I'd recommend checking your freight times, as well as following jeffryfisher's advice. For a more aesthetically pleasing building with the same custom query as the census repository, get this:

You do have the NAM installed, right? And have you looked at pollution/radiation/desirability data views? One of those things might give you a clue as to why one farm is doing so much better.

[RobertLM78 1,598]

As @licoricebomb was asking, I'm curious what the pollution levels are like.  Keeping things clean is probably going to help (I use some mods for to get rid of pollution, so I've never had a SPAM farm degrade).    Also as he mentioned, the freight times could have something to do with it, too.

 

(No folks, pollution is *not* an unavoidable fact of life, as we've been 'taught')