Why do my crops keep failing?

[Keizer Harm]

Crop Failure Reported. I keep getting that message at least every minute; I feel like I have had zero successful harvests for a while now. I've got mainly Hydroponic farms, a couple regular farms, the former growing either leaf crops or wheat grass (ratio 2:1) and the latter wheat. Usually 2/3 work slots are filled, occasionally 1/3 - for the regular farms 1/6.

What could I be doing that's causing every single harvest to fail? I thought having less than full employment would simply reduce the output a bit; but it shouldn't reduce it to zero, right? The wiki is of no help here...

 

[Jeridan]

Not enough water will definitely cause it. IIRC in my testing less than half crew would also cause it.

 

[Keizer Harm]

Funny enough, water is the one thing I've always had plenty of - I have had short power outages and oxygen shortages. But those are a while ago now, and my crops keep failing.
I'll check if any of my 2/3-crewed farms yield any crops.

 

[SillySMS]

First: fully staff your farms. That's probably your biggest mistake.
Second, production appears to be base yield times average building performance. Having more farm area is useless unless you can staff it.
Third, at least when building performance is >= 100% (have not extensively tested this), each 10% of soil quality means +10% building performance, thus +10% of base crop yield.

So: shut down your excess farms, concentrate manpower, and, very importantly:
Soybeans
Soybeans
Soybeans
Soybeans
Soybeans

Only then wheat or soy-potato cycling.

 

[Tamerlane]

Usually 2/3 work slots are filled, occasionally 1/3 - for the regular farms 1/6.

That's the problem. A farm with 1/6 slots will almost always fail to produce a crop, because the worker quality is too low. And each farm is still consuming a full amount of water, so you're hurting yourself a lot here.

If you're short on workers, farms or fungal farms are the better choice. It takes 9 workers in 3 hydroponics farms to produce about the same output as 6 workers in a fungal farm or regular farm.

Fungal farms have the unique benefit of producing a constant daily output of food with no risk of crop failure. They also consume very little water, but they consume instead of produce oxygen.

 

[Promethian]

Never understaff your food production.

 

[Kevin Lorenz]

Also having skilled farmers helps

 

[dreamrider]

If you really need the farmers for other jobs, you can take them away during the middle of a given crop's growing cycle. But you need to be fully staffed at planting and harvest. It is a lot of micro-management to pull them out for a couple of Sols at a time, though.

Also, you can get away with about 1/2 farm manning if the soil quality is at 90% or 100%. It wil just, as you expected, reduce yield. Even 1/3 manning at 100%, with botanists.
But if the soil is less than about 70%, you better man as fully as possible until you can run through some soil enriching crops.

When you are just starting up a farm, and you may not have 6 bodies to work there, if you have at least a couple of botanists the farm will usually produce. Be prepared for the occasional crop failure, however, until you can get either the manning or the soil quality up, or both.

I haven't figured out a way to thoroughly test the premise, but it does appear to me that water/oxy/heat shortages during the grow cycle makes the crop more prone to failure, even if all OK at harvest time.