Farmville Tips: Breeding Cattle & Horses

Week 37: I finally have a permanent stallion! It wasn't difficult filling my five dairy barns with bulls. It's harder to find lots of females to fill the barns, but I've finally got a permanent stallion for my stable, so I've decided to get serious (sort of) about breeding cattle and horses.

Horses:
I don't have any truly exotic breeds, but I've decided to concentrate on breeding cream draft horses because they are pretty and they seem to me the rarer of the two possible horses I can raise in my nursery barn. Light blue ponies and cream draft mini horses are also interesting, so if come across any of those, I'll put them in the nursery barn, too.

My stable holds 40 horses, 39 mares and 1 stallion. My goal is to fill it with 13 cream draft horses, 13 light blue ponies and 13 cream mini horses. I will get these animals from my Nursery Barn. Because it takes so long to grow a foal into a horse in the nursery barn, I don't want to waste time rearing breeds I don't want, so the only foals I can put in my nursery barn are the breeds that will grow into cream draft horses, light blue ponies or cream mini horses. Those breeds are: cream draft foals (of course), Clydesdale foals, Percheron foals, all ponies and all mini horses.

I don't want to put in any brown foals, black foals, gray foals, white foals or any other foals because they all grow up to be black horses.

Cattle:
All calves will grow up to be Holstein cows or chocolate cows. Holsteins earn 12 coins per day. Chocolate cows earn 80 coins per day. My plan is to only raise the following calves in the nursery barn: fan calf, green calf, Kelley green calf, Neapolitan calf, pink calf, pink patch calf and Simmental calf. Oddly, the chocolate calf does not grow up to be a chocolate cow, but my chocolate cows will breed chocolate calves, so cattle breeding is not as sustaining as horse breeding. In order to produce one of the calves listed above, I need to purchase "special" cows.

Multiple Harvests per day:
I think I finally figured out how to harvest my stable more than once a day and it is simply this: fill up the stable, keep a few extra horses outside the stable. When you arrive on your farm, the stable will be ready to harvest because the stable is ready every 23 hours. Harvest the stable, share the newborn foal with your neighbors. Then, remove one horse from the stable (not the stallion), and place another horse in the stable. The other horse must be at least 34% ready. Horses are 100% ready in three days, so if you play once a day, they should be about 34% ready when you arrive on your farm. When this one horse enters the stable, the entire stable will be ready to harvest again. I haven't actually tried it yet, but I keep reading about it, and think this is what the writers are trying to describe.

This same trick can be duplicated with the dairy barns.