Too many farm jobs

[Brad 343]

This may sound crazy since most players seem to want more jobs.  to me the farm jobs is over powered compared to reality. did they forget tractors when developing the game? the farms are showing at least 3 to 5 times as many jobs than they really need. am using SPAM and have a few CAM farms but did not install the full CAM.

what i have is some rural regions with farms and a small village. the farms need more workers than the villages can support. even making the farms substantially smaller didn't help much. a grain farm that in reality might employ the owner family and maybe 5 hired hands has almost 40 workers for 30 tiles. a small Amish community that started out with 6 or 8 farms, needed a whole community just to try to supply enough workers.

 

[rsc204 21,808]

There will always be lots of disagreement as to what constitutes the right amount of jobs/workers and residents for various buildings in the game. This is primarily because the game isn't trying to use realistic values, rather a set that allows for the game to work as intended.

However, farming was added specifically to enable players to grow their populations more quickly, but they aren't really a sustainable solution either. Eventually demand will be totally diminished as other Ind types and Com will contribute to the demand cap for I-AG, in addition to I-AG jobs. Farms include the actual Farm lot which has a set number of jobs, but then the remaining zoned area becomes fields for crops, each tile of which employs a certain number of sims, think of these as fruit/vegetable pickers. Adding SPAM increases the I-AG demand cap, but also tends to add many more workers, usually the number employed for every field tile of the farm. There isn't a way to have these picking jobs as seasonal, which they would be in the real world, so either those jobs exist or they don't. It was very much a deliberate thing for SPAM to generate even more jobs from farming, if that's not working for you then you have two options really. Either remove the SPAM mod or modify it to adjust the number of jobs as desired, although the latter is not a two minute job and requires some knowledge of files/modding tools.

[Brad 343]

I understand the purpose as intended by the game is to increase population. in some cases, that might be helpful. i don't see how demand will help. my understanding is the demand  affects what will move into the city or town. I can't see how that could affect the # of workers needed by the farms already built.I don't think it is the SPAM itself causing the over powering. I do think it is the # of workers per tile which will have an affect for all farms. as you said, these could be considered seasonal pickers. depending on the crop, the total workers for the farm might be closer to reality at harvest time. since the # doesn't change with the seasons, the # should have been lowered to compensate. so divided by 6 if we figure 2 crops per year, or 12 for 1 crop per year.

 

I'll have to run some tests this week and look back at other regions. there may be some differences between the mods or type of farm on how many workers are required. again, I don't think it is mod related as much as the per tile #. at the moment the solution looks to be build deco farms and the SPAM addon barns with jobs mod to control the # of farm workers. and no it is not a 2 minute job. for every 1 placed farm, I'd need to build 3 to 5 deco farms. and load another set of mods for the crops.

my hope was for these small regions to have extra people that would commute to a mine or industrial region nearby.

  

[TheMurderousCricket 5,055]

On 25.06.2023 at 4:26 PM, Brad said:

my hope was for these small regions to have extra people that would commute to a mine or industrial region nearby

If this is your goal, then the ideal solution would be to build up your population at exact spot where these workplaces exist. Alternatively, close to an accessible and fast throughway that leads there. As a matter of fact, you could also make your roads to the farming areas a bit more "hostile" to discourage your Sims from obtaining jobs there... (narrower network types, more curves, longer road instead of a straight line).

Just like @rsc204 said, the workplace numbers in vanilla game are intentionally higher than normal (about 3x as high for any likewise real-life building) and there are several valid reasons for that...

Large(r) amounts of open jobs at a single workplace allow the game to allocate more of your population to a single employer. Otherwise, you could face a situation in which you'd have to cover 3/4 of your city with commercial zones and industry just to provide jobs for some meager number of residents, say, 10 000 of them. Well, you can still do that of course... 

Anyway, SPAM mod was created specifically to allow players to enjoy building countryside paradises rather than regular skyscraper cities. This, required elevating farms' status beyond the "necessary, early-game evil" to something more stable and substantial. It clearly seems (no offence meant) that this solution does not match your playstyle. In this situation, you may want to see if pure CAM farming caters to your needs better or whether it is time to return to the vanilla farming that Maxis offers.