Farm Station

Farm Station is a farming support building used to produce Micronutrient Fertilizer and apply it to crops in the same room. It only affects plants grown within the same room, so a Farm Station placed outside a Greenhouse or other plant room will not fertilize crops elsewhere, even if it is still being operated. It is also the building that enables the Farmer's Touch job, letting Duplicants fertilize plants and gain Farming-related benefits from doing so.

When a Duplicant works at a Farm Station, they create Micronutrient Fertilizer for eligible plants in the room. This process grants Agriculture XP, while applying Farmer's Touch grants Machinery XP. The building can be used even in a Greenhouse with no plants present; in that case, the produced fertilizer is carried to any plants that need it, as long as those plants are also in a Greenhouse room. This makes it useful to keep one station active as a supply point even when the crop room itself is inconvenient to work in, though setting such a station to low priority is often better than disabling it entirely so fertilizer can still be delivered there.

Farm Station fertilization has several important limits. Mealwood, Wheezewort, and Oxyfern cannot be boosted. Decorative plants that can only be planted in Flower Pots and similar buildings also cannot be fertilized. Arbor Trees can be boosted, but only the trunk benefits; the branches do not, so once the trunk is fully grown, continuing to apply fertilizer wastes resources without improving harvests. Wild plants can be boosted as well, effectively doubling their growth rate to 50% of domesticated growth.

A few practical behaviors make the building worth managing carefully:

• Only one Micronutrient Fertilizer can be produced at a time per Farm Station, so a Duplicant may alternate between crafting fertilizer and walking it to a plant, creating travel delays if the room is spread out.
• Duplicants will fertilize plants even if the plant is already ready to harvest or has stopped growing because of missing inputs or poor environmental conditions. Prioritizing harvests helps avoid wasting fertilizer and plant growth time.
• If a room has multiple Farm Stations, and all of them are turned off, Duplicants will not fertilize plants in that room, even if another room’s Farm Station is producing fertilizer.

In terms of resource efficiency, fertilization is often worthwhile compared with simply feeding crops through another growth cycle. The exact savings depend on the crop, but the system is generally most attractive when the needed Fertilizer ingredients are already available in surplus. The Fertilizer Synthesizer uses Dirt, Phosphorite, and Polluted Water, and the resulting fertilizer can be especially efficient for crops that would otherwise consume expensive inputs.

Because of the room restriction, Farm Station placement matters more than with many other support buildings. A station is best placed directly inside the crop room it is meant to service, and it should remain in a room that actually qualifies as a Greenhouse if you want fully automated fertilizer delivery to nearby plants.