Farming Guide: Trees, Agricultural Tower & Biofarms

Farming in Factorio covers renewable resource production methods separate from standard mining — primarily tree cultivation and other Space Age farming (fish, bacteria, biochambers). Farming is useful for renewable wood supply, pollution mitigation, and on some surfaces as a sustainable source of resources unavailable by mining.

Trees: planting, harvesting, and uses

• Trees can be planted manually or automatically by the Agricultural Tower. Planted trees take 10 minutes to reach full maturity.
• A fully grown tree yields when harvested:
  • Mature (live) tree: 4 wood
  • Dead tree (or many cleared methods): usually 2 wood (exceptions noted below by type)
• Harvest time (hand-mining) for trees:
  • Live tree: ~0.55 seconds
  • Dead tree: ~0.5 seconds
• Harvest methods that preserve wood (collectable) versus destructive methods:
  • Collectable (gives wood): hand-mining, shotgun/combat shotgun clearing strips, grenades (when used to drop trees but not destroy outright in some cases), deconstruction planner with construction robots, running over trees with a vehicle (tank). These methods give wood.
  • Destructive (do not yield wood): flamethrower fire, tank flamethrower, atomic bombs — these destroy trees and their wood.
• Good methods list (usable to gather wood): hand mining, shooting with shotgun/combat shotgun, grenades, deconstruction planner for robots, driving a tank over trees, certain grenade/cluster grenade uses.
• The Agricultural Tower automatically harvests and replants trees within its area provided it has seeds available. The tower plants with a spacing of two tiles between trees — less dense than manual planting.
• Tree seeds:
  • Baumsamen (tree seeds) are produced from wood: converting 2 wood → 1 seed. Because mature trees yield 4 wood, processing all harvested wood into seeds will increase seed stock over time, enabling sustainable planting.
• Trees absorb pollution: each tree passively removes a tiny amount of pollution per second. At high pollution (>60 units in a sector) trees can lose leaf density or become grayer; when they do so they each absorb a fixed amount of pollution at that event. Leaf density affects absorption rate (fewer leaves = slower absorption); grayness does not affect absorption.
• Uses of wood:
  • Wood is a fuel and an ingredient in some early-game recipes. It can also be converted to seeds and used for replanting.
  • There is currently no fully automated vanilla method to collect wood at scale without using the Agricultural Tower or robots with a deconstruction plan.

Agricultural Tower: automation and practical notes

• The Agricultural Tower both harvests mature trees and replants seeds within its coverage when seeds are available.
• It cannot plant as densely as a player; it leaves two tiles between planted trees.
• Use towers to create renewable wood farms and to reclaim polluted tiles as a passive pollution sink.

Space Age farming: fish and bacteria (surfaces where applicable)

• Space Age introduces additional farming mechanics on specific surfaces:
  • Fish breeding (aquaculture) is unlocked via research and produces raw fish automatically on certain surfaces. Fish produced by breeding have a fixed initial freshness and cannot be used as breeding stock.
  • Biochambers and bio-production can generate resources such as copper or iron indirectly by cultivating bacteria on specific surfaces (e.g., copper bacteria on Gleba spoil into copper ore when cultivated).
  • Nutrients have multiple alternative recipes; they can be produced from different inputs (e.g., rot/compost, yumako mash, bioflux, fish, or creature eggs) in the appropriate facilities. Some nutrient recipes behave as though made from rot and have spoilage rules; modules (productivity/performance) are restricted on certain nutrient outputs (for example, quality/productivity modules cannot be used in fish- or egg-derived nutrient recipes).
• Farming on each Space Age surface differs: some surfaces provide renewable substitutes (bio-derived ores, fish), some require importing resources.

Renewable hydrocarbons and solid fuel considerations

• Some "farming" strategies replace mining by converting renewable or recycled inputs into fuel or chemical feedstocks:
  • Solid fuel is craftable from heavy/light oil and petroleum products; whether solid fuel is a good primary fuel depends on map resource distribution. Solid fuel provides substantially more energy per unit than coal but requires an oil processing chain to produce.
  • Barrel handling and emptying can be part of fluid logistics for farming/refinery setups; empty barrels are crafted and returned when fluids are unbarreled.

Practical logistics and scaling tips

• Preprocess vs raw transport:
  • For long-distance transport (trains), pre-processing ores into plates can increase throughput because processed items have different stack limits and conversion ratios (e.g., iron → steel reduces item count but raises value per item). Apply this principle when moving farmed resources (some bio-surfaces produce ores directly; consider whether to smelt before shipping).
• For automated renewable farms (trees, biofarms, fish):
  • Use logistics robots and deconstruction planners for bulk harvest when you want to collect wood as items.
  • Agricultural Towers are the in-game automation for planting/harvesting trees without micromanagement.
  • Monitor product freshness/decay for farmed organic goods where applicable (fish freshness has a fixed initial value and limited shelf life).

Pollution, defenses, and environmental interactions

• Trees act as a passive pollution sink; planting belts of trees can slow pollution spread and delay biter expansion, but trees near high pollution will visually degrade.
• Farming installations (esp. in Space Age) may attract enemy attention indirectly if resource processing or expanded pollution provokes biters; defend farms like other productive infrastructure.

Summary: use Agricultural Towers and seeds to create sustainable wood farms; use deconstruction planners and robots or weapons for selective wood collection; leverage Space Age bio-systems on their native surfaces for renewable ores, fish, and nutrients while respecting recipe and module restrictions; balance whether to preprocess farmed outputs before transport to maximize throughput.