Farming Simulator 22 has an awful lot of different crops you can raise, and animals to rear. The process is laborious to learn for new players, and that’s where this guide can help you out. One of the more complex elements of the game involves raising cows for dairy products and beef. You used to be able to do this very simply in previous games, but that’s changed a lot now. The changes to cows in Farming Simulator 22 are pretty vast, and drastically alter the life of a digital dairy farmer.
Instead of one type of cow that produces all the dairy and meat products, the filltype for cows has been broken down into multiple production chains. And not only that, but the way in which you raise cows affects the items they produce. For example, cows raised in a pasture produce milk and breed more cows, but don’t produce slurry or manure. For that reason, the barns are much more useful to most players. But let’s go over the basics first
Buying Cows and Needed Tools
Before you get started with cows, it’s advisable to have a few hundred thousand dollars in the bank to afford the needed equipment. At the most basic, you need a barn or pasture, as well as frontloader with a bale spike. If you plan to use TMR, which we go over below, you will also need a mixing trailer to take Sileage, Grass and Hay to turn into TMR.
You can buy a barn via the Shift+P build menu, and then place it down on your farm. You can also buy them via the store in the construction menu. Once you have your barn placed, it’s time to buy some cows.
- Go to the store and click on the Animal dealer.
- Choose a cattle you want to be placed in the barn you have purchased.
- As an alternative, you can drive to the animal paw symbol and have the cattle transported to your farm via a worker.
- Once you have your cows, bring them to your barn and you’re ready to start making bank off milk.
You can buy Brown-Swiss and Holstein for dairy farming, while you can buy Angus and Limousin which are beef cows and can be used for breeding purposes. But first, you need to take good care of your cows in Farming Simulator 22.
Feeding Cows in Farming Simulator 22
The type of enclosure you use also matters, at least a bit. Each one has a specific capacity limit, as well as products that it can produce. Here are the basic types of cow enclosures within the game:
- Basic Enclosed cattle pasture: It can hold 15 cows and is worth $75,000.
- Small Cow Barn: It can hold 45 cows and is worth $254,000.
- Large Cow Barn: It can hold 80 cows and is worth $518,500.
- Automated Large Feeding Cow Barn: It can hold 80 cows and is worth $722,50.
Each cow has the same basic diet, so you don’t need to worry too much once you understand how the process works.
The barns without the feeding robot are pretty basic and easy to use. You just drive your feed up to it and load it in either via a frontloader or bale spike. Just drop the food near the icon and let it go. If it disappears, it should have been added to food stocks for the barn/pasture. If it didn’t, you’re either using the wrong type of feed or you placed it in the wrong spot.
Adding water is the same way, although a bit more complicated. You need a tanker of some kind, like the Lizard MKS. Fill it up at any water source in game by backing said tanker up to the water source and hitting the relevant button to fill it. Then, you need to drive the tank to the pasture or barn—backing it into position. Once the filled tank is in position, trigger the onscreen button prompt to fill the cow’s water receptacle. Cows need a steady supply of both feed and water to remain healthy and produce products for your farm.
The first thing you need to know is that the type of cow will affect what you feed them. There are dairy cows which produce milk, and other breeds that are sold for meat. Non-dairy cows only need Hay or other grass bales.
But that’s just the basics, there’s actually a bit of science to feeding cows a proper diet. To optimize the productivity and health of dairy cows you will need to feed them a Total Mixed Ration (TMR). TMR is a mixture of Hay and Silage with optional straw produced by using a mixer wagon. You need to use the proper ratios of mixing ingredients to get the best nutrition for your cows. Other basic types of feed such as hay only provide a portion of the nutritional value that TMR does—but only if properly mixed.
The ratio for TMR is best seen via the mixing wagon, here’s the optimal mixture:
- 2 Bale Silage
- 2 Bale Hay
- 1 Bale Straw
- 1 Pallet Mineral Feed (Optional for better milk production)
If you bring up the help menu (F1 on PC) with a Mixing Wagon attached to your vehicle, you will get a window that shows the included ratio for what’s currently inside the wagon. When the bars on this menu turn green, you have the proper ratio for your TMR. Be careful not too overadd ingredients, it’s a big pain to dump the messed up mix, then slowly add it back to rebalance the TMR.
The process is simplified if you have the Automated feeding Barn where you have to add the ingredients and the robot will execute the task of feeding the cows.
When it comes to making other products such as manure, you need a barn and Hay bales. Using a bale shredder (purchased from the Animals tab of the store) you can throw Hay bales into the barn directly. You can also place a bale into a mixing wagon and use that. Be careful not to add more than 1-2 bales, depending on the size of your barn, as too much Hay can result in a messed up feeding schedule for your cows. You will want to have this process ready to go ASAP, as slurry and manure are free fertilizer for your farm.
Breeding Cows in Farming Simulator 22
When you have space in a barn or pasture, and healthy cows, they can sometimes spawn another cow of the same variety. If you have more than one variety in a single enclosure the randomized chance to produce cows is reduced. So for making more cows to sell, make sure keep one type in each enclosure.
The age of the cow, as well as its Health, are most important here. You will need to age a cow to 36 months to get peak value from it. Feeding a balanced diet to your cows is vital for the Health. Once you feed TMR to your cows, wait a day and then you should see their health shoot up. Just keep feeding them and focus on making your farm sustainable.
Dairy cows will continually produce milk, so don’t worry about selling them or getting them to the right age. As long as they are 18 months old, they will produce milk.
That’s all there is to cows in Farming Simulator 22, at least for the basics. There’s a lot of minutiae to this game. And all that’s to say nothing of mods that are out for the game. You can get mods that completely change the way the game works for pigs, chickens and other animals. Those are way beyond the scope of this guide though, so you’ll have to wait until next time if we cover something that vast.
