knowledge center

Sim farmers will only plant their crops in low land value, low-density industrial zones. They need a lot of room, too -- they figure it�s only worth their while to plant in areas that are 8x8 or larger. Farmers need power to run the machinery in their barns, but they don�t need underground water pipes--farms come with their own wind-powered wells and irrigation.

Farmers are finicky about the size of their farms, and also about the roads nearby. They need to have a road along at least one side of a farm. On the other hand, they don�t like to have roads all the way around its edges, or even along three edges. If you surround a 10x10 block with roads, and fill it with low density industrial, no farm will grow. If you put only an 8x8 block of low density industrial inside this 10x10 road area, or even a 9x9 block or 9x10 -- so that one edge does not touch the road -- a farm may grow.

It gets trickier with very large blocks. Farms have a minimum, and also a maximum size -- 18x18. Farms will appear in blocks larger than 18x18, and sometimes sit next to each other to cover a very large area, but any particular farm will max out at 18x18. If you surround a 20x20 area with roads, and fill it with low density industrial zones, a farm may grow somewhere inside. In a large enough block, more than one farm may appear.

Speaking of finicky, all Sims are choosy about the purity of their food. Therefore, farmers won�t bother to grow anything unless air and water pollution are low. Trying to get farms to build on an area that was previously dirty industry will not work, if the pollution is still there -- even if it�s only on one tile and the rest are clean. Even where a farm does get established, it will go out of business if air or water pollution increase to Medium rating in the area (you can see the pollution level though the Query tool, or by viewing the pollution map).

Now that you have a farm, how do you get it to stay that way? For one thing, you should put your farms in low-lying areas on the outskirts of town, wherever land values tend to be lowest and pollution the least (nowhere near your power plant!). Sim farmers are not terribly devoted to their jobs. As soon as the land value under a farm goes up, they tend to sell out to slick downtown real estate speculators who replace the wheat fields with smelly warehouses and the like. Pretty soon the whole area starts to get polluted and the farms disappear.

It�s not good to let other kinds of industrial development mix with farms. Suppose a farm develops in a block of low-density industrial, but it doesn�t entirely fill the block. If the block is large enough for another farm to appear, it will, but there still may be areas left over that aren�t big enough for farms. If some smelly, polluting industry then moves in, pretty soon the farmers next door will head off for greener pastures, and the whole area will fill with motor oil recycling businesses, storage sheds and the like.

What to do? As soon as a farm appears, stop the simulator and trim out any leftover zones around it. Demolish any polluting industry that has shown up and de-zone all the extra land.

If you�re really dedicated to keeping part of your city rural, you can declare a farm historically preserved. Since you do that through the query window, the process can take some time -- you�ll have to query every last barn, silo and chunk of field, one at a time!

Historical preservation guarantees that nothing else will come in and replace the farm, but it doesn�t guarantee that it will stay in business. If your city experiences negative industrial demand, the farm might end up abandoned, and abandoned farms -- even historically preserved ones -- are as blighted as any other abandoned area. But when industrial demand picks up again, the farm will spruce up and return to its cheerful bucolic state.

Author: Maxis
Source: SimCity.COM
Formatted and Edited by (the Webmaster)