This is the sixth (and final) part of a series of posts touring Sitlington Animal Park, my low budget British zoo built on the side of a farm.
To complete our tour, let's take a look at the final section of the park and the place that started it all: the farm! In the zoo's lore, the farm is the original business which has been run by the same family for many generations.
For any farmers reading this, I apologise if I don't use the right terminology here; I'm more of a zoo nerd than a farm one!
If you follow the one by the main entrance, you'll eventually reach the staff car park and the administration building. I didn't put too much detail into this area as I just wanted it to fill the background. I did make it functional though by burying some staff facilities underground. On the other side of the car park, there's two gates: one into the zoo and one that goes deeper into the farm.
One thing I found whilst building this farm was that there aren't a lot of items to use for produce. There's even less when it comes to things that can actually grow outdoors in a temperate climate like the UK's. Things like grapes and tomatoes are usually grown in greenhouses, so I built two of them next to the apple orchard. They're very basic in design, made from the modern glass building set, but I think they look good enough with a few added details. I filled each one with mulch, added a square walkway and added the plants. I used some enrichment items for some added detail, including a sprinkler and some coolers to double-up as extractor fans.
I also discovered last minute that the game has olive and fig trees but instead of giving them their own greenhouse, I added a single fig tree in the centre of the grape greenhouse and added pots of olive trees outside the other one (so they can be moved indoors during winter).
Behind the greenhouses, I added a row of vegetable patches where I planted some of the vegetable props we have in the game. These props are great for farm shops and kitchens but they're not as good for planting because the plant parts are cut off. The carrots look okay but the turnips and leek look a bit weird neatly pruned but still in the ground.
A plant that's probably overlooked for farming in Planet Zoo is bramble. I love using bramble as a bush to decorate my zoos but I've never used it for farming before. In real-life, bramble is harvested for its raspberries, blackberries, dewberries, and bristle berries. I built a trellis system for it to grow on, based on a photo I found online. I guess this is where the jars of jam in my farm shop are from.
I added a potato field just across from the bramble trellis. Since I couldn't find a good plant to stand in for a potato plant, I made the field look like it was being actively harvested. I found a few photos online of potatoes freshly dug up (for example here) and used the idea for my field. Of course, there's no equipment in sight and the reason for that is I didn't have the patience to make my own and I wanted to keep the piece count down.
The next field is planted with cauliflower, with a scarecrow on guard for birds!
Another planted crop we have in the game is maize, so I used it to plant a few big fields.
For hay storage, there's a few shelters dotted around the farm, ranging from simple metal ones to larger stone ones. As for equipment, like tractors, let's just say they're stored off-site since farms in real-life do operate multiple plots of land.
One of the things I learnt whilst researching farming was that farmers keep their livestock indoors during the colder months to keep them more comfortable and to stop them damaging the pasture. Since they can't graze outside, they're fed silage, which is basically fermented grass and other green crops that were cut down earlier in the year. Silage is kept in a "clamp" — basically a pit with an airtight sheet pulled across the top. The sheet is sometimes weighed down with tyres, so I added some to mine which you can see below.
Another crop I planted was wheat, one of the most well-known of all crops... except it's "implied wheat" since we don't have real wheat in the game. The plant I used as a stand-in was triodia grass but I think it looks close enough.
Next to the wheat is a field of sunflowers, which in real-life are harvested for their seeds. I like that they provide a nice splash of vibrant colour.
With the crops out of the way, let's take a look at the livestock.
The large dairy tanks on the side of this shed might make you think of cows but, if you remember at the start of the tour, this farm actually specializes in dairy goats! They're milked in the large shed (which I didn't make an interior for as the zoo was too laggy at this point) and of course, they have access to a large pasture outside. The pygmy goat is my preferred goat breed but I do appreciate that the alpine goat is at least a dairy one for things like this.
Next to them is a large pasture for free range chickens which I've surrounded with a fox proof fence. The house at the back is based on something I found online and I didn't give it an interior due to lag. In real life, the Sussex chicken is used for both meat and eggs but the chickens here are strictly for egg-laying.
Last but not least is a set of bee hives which the farm uses to produce honey, which is then sold in the farm shop.
And with that, we come to the end of our tour of Sitlington Animal Park!
If you'd like to see more of this zoo, I plan on making a video walkthrough on my YouTube channel, so keep an eye out for that.
Until next time, I hope you've enjoyed what you've seen and I'd love to hear your thoughts!
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