The El Plantador DLC for Tropico 4 introduces a new building, the Plantation, that acts as a larger farm, for cash crops only. How much more productive is it? Does it produce more crops-per-worker, or is it simply a farm with a larger number of workers (it has up to 8 farmers, as opposed to a farm's 6)? Does it grow crops faster?
How much more productive are Plantations than Farms
tropico-4
Related Solutions
Planting trees, building botanical gardens and issuing anti-pollution edicts helps.
Make sure all your applicable industries have pollution-reducing options enabled; build a garbage dump somewhere out of sight of the city but within operating reach, and have it recycle and use high temperature burners.
Praise the environmentalists during your speeches - it's a +10 bonus that doesn't cost you anything.
Try not to bulldoze areas of high natural beauty for industry sites.
Keep an eye out for subtasks from their faction; they may not always be things you /want/ to do, but it's worth hearing them out to see what they want.
EDIT: Can't remember why I forgot to add this originally, but shacks cause lots of pollution. Make sure everyone has somewhere at least halfway decent to live.
And now, SCIENCE! A ten-year experiment to determine whether bio farms are better than farms, for a particular crop. I chose Tobacco for this experiment, because I had to measure the Bio Farm via exports rather than just looking at its production directly.
The Method
Bio Farms show up at 1967, so I found a challenge that started in 1965, built a farm, and then built the bio farm when it showed up later. (The crop quality was uniform when I started this experiment; this image is from a few years in.)
I then set the wages to 1, made sure all of my citizens had a job, and imported a bunch of foreign experts. Then I raised the wages to 25 so none of them would look for a better job.
Most of the farmers were the same (below-average intelligence), but there was one ringer on the Farm that had Exceptional intelligence, and his final skill was completely maxed when the experiment ended, and another one with Good intelligence. None of the bio farm farmers had any better than Above Average intelligence. The results are therefore a bit biased, but hopefully still useful. The farmers with Below Average intelligence ended the experiment with about 55% skill. (The Ministry gave a 30% learning boost, and the Literacy Program gave another 30% learning boost.)
If you're curious, the other crop conditions for the bio farm: coffee was a pale green, corn was yellow, and sugar was orange. Tobacco, of course, was a deep green.
There were no problems with transportation during the experiment; the teamsters did their jobs.
The Results
The farm produced 6769 tobacco, and the bio farm produced 11578 goods. (This is, of course, horribly inaccurate; either number could be off by 500+ if I ran this experiment again.)
Over the course of the experiment, I exported a total of $203,836 in tobacco, and the price held steady at $1728 per 100 tobacco. That means that the farm was responsible for $116,968 of the exports, leaving the bio farm with the remainder of $86,868 in exports, or 5027 tobacco.
The farm produced 35% more tobacco than the bio farm, but it also had more skilled farmers. In all likelihood, the production of a bio farm is very close to the production of four farms producing different crops.
Also, a bio farm does not degrade the soil, but a normal farm does. I demolished the farms when I was done with the experiment, so you can see how the soil fertility for tobacco was degraded by the farm.
Given that the productivity is fairly similar, but the normal farm degrades the soil, I highly recommend bio farms as more productive over the long haul.
Summary
- The construction of a bio farm is about 3x that of a regular farm
- The upkeep + wages (when paying 5/month) is roughly equal to a regular farm (bio farm = 384/year, farm = 408/year)
- The productivity (across all goods) is 2x-4x higher at a bio farm (depending on whether you can find the perfect spot for all 4 crops; the Fertilize! edict will help here)
- Bio farms don't degrade the soil over time like regular farms do
- If you need 2 farms to feed a factory, you will need 2 bio farms to feed the same factory.
Best Answer
I have committed SCIENCE! to answer this question: a ten-year experiment to see who grows more tobacco.
The Method
This setup was a little ways from the rest of my city:
All of the farmers lived in those tenements. I hired all of the farmers as foreign experts, so they all started with about the same skill (10%-15% of maximum), and I raised their wages to 15 so that they wouldn't leave and find other jobs. One guy on the farm died during the experiment, but he was replaced fairly quickly by a farmer of similar skill from one of my corn-growing farms down the road.
This experiment was as fair as I could possibly make it; I scrapped an earlier experiment because the skill of the farmers and plantadors was completely off-kilter. One interesting note: vacancies are more likely to show up in the plantation than in the farm, because the game tries to have equal numbers of people working in similar buildings. So if a couple of farmers die, you're likely to see 6 people working the farm (its max) and 6 people working the plantation (2 people short).
The Results
The farm produced 6245 tobacco, and the plantation produced 10637 tobacco. (The precision here is awful, of course. Either number could easily be off by 300+ tobacco.) Building-for-building, the plantation produces 70% more crops than the farm, and takes up only slightly more space (for the additional crops).
Output per farmer: The plantation wins with 1330 tobacco per farmer, while the farm made 1041 tobacco per farmer.
Output per maintenance cost: I grossly overpaid my farmers to make sure they wouldn't wander off, but if you just pay them the basic $5/month, the ongoing costs for the farm are $408/year ($48 upkeep, $360 wages) and $4080 for 10 years, and the ongoing costs for the plantation are $552/year ($72 upkeep, $480 wages) and $5520 for 10 years. So the farm gives 1.5 tobacco per yearly maintenance dollar, and the plantation gives 1.9 tobacco per yearly maintenance dollar. Note that the cost will improve with time, because the first tobacco didn't appear until two years after the buildings were constructed.
Output per total cost: Because I love math too much, let's figure out the total cost per unit of tobacco. The 10-year cost for the farm is $5580 (including initial building construction), and the 10-year cost for the plantation is $8520. The farm's tobacco cost about 89 cents apiece, and the plantation's tobacco cost 80 cents apiece. This number will only get better as time passes, because you only pay those initial costs once.
Final farmer skill after 10 years' farming and no edicts: If you're curious, the farmers' skills varied between 50% and 85% after the experiment was over (probably due to their individual intelligence); most of them hovered around 60%.
Do plantations grow crops faster? Nope; they both got their first crops about the same time. The farm was maybe a month faster, but that's probably because the farm was closer to my city and thus the jobs filled up there a hair faster.