Livestock is the closest thing Manor Lords has to compounding interest: buy in once, breed up, and the herd pays out in wool, meat, hides and resale more or less forever.
Sheep remain the strongest opening. They cost about 30g, sell for around 20g at a price that stays stubbornly high, and one worker at a sheep farm can turn a flock into hundreds of units of wool a year. Import adults rather than lambs — only grown sheep shear and breed — and butcher lambs rather than adults, since lambs give the same meat and hides without costing you a producer.
The Beta changed the economics. Pasture animals now eat animal feed through every winter month or die, and feed comes from oats at a 1:2 conversion — roughly six feed per adult cow and three per sheep across the season. Pastures also cost planks now and demand noticeably more land, breeding runs on seasonal windows rather than continuously, and shearing happens once a year in summer.
Cows are the new option and pay twice, in milk and then in beef and hides at the butcher, but they cost roughly double a sheep and need that winter feed chain planned before the first animal arrives.
Sheep & Pastures
The mechanics are fiddly pasture geometry, but the practical result holds up: subdivide instead of consolidating (see the pasture diagram below). Beta note: one source reports this subdivision advantage has since been patched out, with pasture capacity now scaling with total area regardless of subdivision — treat the 3× figure as pre-patch and worth re-testing in your own game before relying on it.
You still shear, still butcher lambs, still have stock to sell. Possibly the best trade item in the game — spam in every region.
Read all 9 Sheep & Pastures tips in the field book →
New in the Beta — livestock
Pasture animals (cows, calves, sheep, lambs) eat Animal Feed every winter month or die. Oats → Animal Feed at the Livestock Farm at a 1:2 ratio.
Passive monthly Milk (except winter), plus Beef and Hides at the butcher. Calves yield half of adults — let them grow.
Pasture fences have a dynamic plank cost scaling with size, and the same pasture space needs about 2.2× the area. Budget planks before expanding herds.
Cows breed in summer, sheep in autumn, offspring arrive in spring — and sheep are sheared once per year, in summer only. Plan wool contracts around it.
Reselling loses money (adults resell for less than the ~60g import cost) — the real profit is bred offspring and milk, not flipping bought stock.
Roughly 9/year at baseline, climbing to about 13.5/year around 50% meadow — still only a modest step up from a goat, which throws in hides a cow doesn't.
During the breeding season, every animal gets a small pregnancy check every 10 days that compounds to about 37%. Total offspring per herd is capped around 150/year — a ceiling that needs a genuinely large herd (400+) to hit reliably, so treat 150 as aspirational, not a target.
Since feed converts from oats at 1:2 (#121), that's about 3 oats per cow and 1.5 per calf or sheep — size your oat fields against your target herd before importing animals.
Reports vary from the two sharing one enclosure outright to offspring simply spilling into a neighboring pasture of the other species — either way, don't assume separate pastures fully separate the herds.
Oxen now purchase through the livestock trading post like any other animal, with no wait between orders — bulk-buy several at once if you need them.
Previously you could order animals before your pasture was ready and they'd wait. That's gone — if there's no free pasture space when they arrive, they simply leave and you've lost the money. Build the pasture first.
Expect less wool per shearing than before — budget a bigger flock or lean on flax-based linen clothing to compensate.
Leaving it unlimited lets the livestock farm turn every harvested oat into feed, leaving your human population with none to eat.