Do farms produce goods for free?

[Scorten]

http://i.imgur.com/GhSO9XX.jpg?1

I resell the goods from my farm to one of my stores for 0.01$ since there are no production costs listed. How is this even possible? Do farmers work for free or does low cost have some impact on the product?

[Chads]

http://i.imgur.com/GhSO9XX.jpg?1

I resell the goods from my farm to one of my stores for 0.01$ since there are no production costs listed. How is this even possible? Do farmers work for free or does low cost have some impact on the product?

I sort of assumed that the $0.01 was the base profit after expenses. But, I'm not sure that works out right. I haven't built a mine yet, but I'm curious if it has similar properties, being the start of the supply chain.

[saffgee]

There is a cost for a farm which covers the farm + employees and then the training level as a multiple of that, this is paid once per month I think and not over time. I suppose theoretically it would be possible to have that expressed as a per unit cost - but you can see the impact of that cost at the top of your picture where it says "firm profit", which is (obviously) currently negative.

The number you are setting to $0.01 here is the price of each unit - if you don't factor in your overall cost though, you will lose money overall in this business every month.

[Scorten]

There is a cost for a farm which covers the farm + employees and then the training level as a multiple of that, this is paid once per month I think and not over time. I suppose theoretically it would be possible to have that expressed as a per unit cost - but you can see the impact of that cost at the top of your picture where it says "firm profit", which is (obviously) currently negative.

The number you are setting to $0.01 here is the price of each unit - if you don't factor in your overall cost though, you will lose money overall in this business every month.

Thanks, this makes sense. Is there a way to see how much this particular farm is costing me monthly/yearly so I can adjust the price per unit? I'd basically like the price to be equal to the cost per unit since the farm only exists to deliver its goods to retailers who then are going to make profit for me.

[saffgee]

That's doable, but the issue here is you simply don't know how many eggs you will sell (deliver) over the month. Veterans will generally use warehouses to get a better handle on overall cost and variable quality, but I appreciate that might be a bit of overkill here and is mostly useful when you have multiple units feeding your retail empire and some spare cash.

A quick, back of the envelope calculation would simply be $50k (the amount the business seems to be losing each month) divided by last months total volume. In other words if you delivered 100k eggs last month, each needs to cost 50 cents for you to break even. You can always adjust as needed as your deliveries increase and/or your skills rise (as you then produce more eggs).

[Njeroe]

As you can see in your screenshot it loses money (around -50k$ "profit" a month) this is due to costs of production. It does (unfortunately) not make money out of thin air by creating goods. You can check the amount sold in the quantity graph, you can also use the profit graph to determine if you're breaking even or not. Even with factories you can sell goods at cost but you will still lose money due to overhead so it's not possible to exactly break even. But why would that even be an issue? All goods produced and sold by you will ultimately make you a profit if you sell it at a price high enough to make money.

[CarylKillam]

As you can see in your screenshot it loses money (around -50k$ "profit" a month) this is due to costs of production. It does (unfortunately) not make money out of thin air by creating goods. You can check the amount sold in the quantity graph, you can also use the profit graph to determine if you're breaking even or not. Even with factories you can sell goods at cost but you will still lose money due to overhead so it's not possible to exactly break even. But why would that even be an issue? All goods produced and sold by you will ultimately make you a profit if you sell it at a price high enough to make money.

Thanks for those replies, they appeared to be rather handy for such a noob like me
Have a nice day!

[Stuballs89]

Hey, I know this is kind of off topic but is the only place I could find anyone talking about farms.

Does anyone know how to increase the quality of livestock products? I couldn't find an option in the R&D.

[saffgee]

This is a function of how skilled your workers are - their training levels can be adjusted by a slider found in the middle of the two information boxes. When your livestock unit and processing unit is high level, the animals/products they produce will also be. Alternatively in order to get there quickly, you can organise intensive training via your HQ.