This guide intends to help answer the question: should I grow grass or corn for silage, animal feed and or money?

Or if you've ever asked the question: will I make more money from grass silage or corn silage? Then this guide is for you.

This guide is for Farming Simulator 25.

Let's look at some numbers...

Considering all the other factors here about yield. We can consult the prices. At base game values, on hard economic difficulty, the selling prices are:

Grass $0.045/L
Silage $0.121/L
Corn $0.38/L

On easy difficulty you can multiply these by 3x, 1.8x for normal difficulty.

If we multiply these prices by the expected yields per acre per year, we get

Grass Only $795 = 4.37 * 4046 * 0.045 * 1
Grass Only $1590 = 4.37 * 4046 * 0.045 * 2 (Harvest 2x per year)
Grass Only $2385 = 4.37 * 4046 * 0.045 * 3 (Harvest 3x per year)
Grass Only $3180 = 4.37 * 4046 * 0.045 * 4 (Harvest 4x per year)
Grass Silage $2139 = 4.37 * 4046 * 0.121 * 1
Grass Silage $4278 = 4.37 * 4046 * 0.121 * 2 (Harvest 2x per year)
Grass Silage $6418 = 4.37 * 4046 * 0.121 * 3 (Harvest 3x per year)
Grass Silage $8557 = 4.37 * 4046 * 0.121 * 4 (Harvest 4x per year)
Corn Silage $3513 = 7.176 * 4046 * 0.121
Corn Only $1414 = 0.92 * 4046 * 0.38

So it seems if you turn your grass into silage, then grass wins on gross revenue if you harvest at least 2x per year, and it wins by a large margin if you can harvest more than that.

Grass yield is 4.37 and there is no scalar for turning it into chaff, a mower just produces mowed grass. Grass can be made into silage.

Corn (called maize in the game files) yield is 0.92, and the scalar for corn silage is 7.8. This means that for a single harvest of corn silage using a forage harvester, your yield is 7.176.

You can harvest grass more than once per year, so at twice per year that then already puts grass slightly ahead with a yield of 8.74 per year.

Let's consider only the harvesting part. You get a slightly better yield (compared to corn) when harvesting 1 acre of grass twice per year. However, that's also double the work per year compared to harvesting 1 acre just once per year.

There is extra work on both sides, for the corn chaff you must turn it into silage by compacting it in a solo bunker. Grass may or may not involve: forage wagon, windrowing, tedding, baling. I won't try to evaluate which one is truly more work in the end because it's variable depending on your goals and play style, if you are making hay you need a tedder, if you're not, you don't. You may or may not decide to bale it.

In simple terms, the more times you harvest grass per year, the better the work to output ratio becomes compared to silage.

Strictly speaking you can get more gross volume output per acre per year from grass than silage, but it generally comes at the cost of more work.

Again, this is only considering harvest time and not e.g. time to ted, windrow, bale or compact etc..

If you wrangle grass, say, three times per year, then you can produce more total volume (per year) off of that one acre from grass than from silage, but it will be three times the work (per year) for about an 80% gain in gross volume (per year). In other words, three times the work for less than double (1.8x) the output. Four grass harvests per year is 4x the work for about 2.4x the output (per year) compared to corn silage.

Many factors will influence which you choose. There is no right or wrong answer. Consider how you feel and your personal situation. Do what makes you happy. Or don't, I'm not your mom.

If you have a co-operative multiplayer session with like 4-6 players where you can all tag team one field back to back, then you can rock out a bunch of product quickly and all the extra steps and extra work like windrowing, tedding, etc might be negligible, and maybe you and your friends all greatly enjoy these activities. Conversely, if you were playing solo and you don't enjoy grass related fieldwork...

Dairy cow productivity on grass is only 40%. Silage and Hay both have the same 80% productivity rate for dairy cattle. TMR is best for dairy at 100% productivity, 111% with straw bedding.

But you may not have dairy cows and or just may not care.

Silage requires a forage harvester, but you may not have a forage harvester and generally that equipment is quite expensive and you may not have the money to buy it. Grass equipment like mowers, tedders and windrowers is very cheap by comparison.

TMR (assuming you intend to use it) needs both Silage and Hay. However, you can choose to lean more heavily into one or the other since both Silage and Hay may range anywhere from approximately 20% to 70% of your total mix, so you could make your TMR silage rich or hay rich, depending on your preferences, gear, gameplay style, etc..

Personal preference and gameplay factors will probably play a role in any such decision.

This still doesn't tell you what your profit per real world hour (i.e. hours you spend playing the game) will be. The grass is generally still more work if you need to harvest multiple times per year. But that extra work may be worth it for the increased revenue.

Farm on!
- Cheers

DISCLAIMER None of this is to say what is right or wrong, just to hopefully provide insight for comparison. What you choose ultimately has to do with your goals, what is fun for you, how much money you have, your current equipment on hand, how much land you own, whether you're doing animals, etc.

NOTE Yield is in Liters Per Square Meter. Prices are in Price Per Liter. Scalars are just multipliers, like a 2x scalar means you multiply something by two, i.e. you get twice as much. Source for this data is the game data XML files. An acre is about 0.4 hectares.

NOTE I'm not going to try to account for using mods, this is in regards to vanilla base game only. This doesn't consider economic difficulty, yield bonus or precision farming, because you can get the same yield bonus for grass as for corn, and a 100% or 150% yield bonus acts the same regardless of crop type. Similarly the economic difficulty scalar is independent of the crop type.