Forestry Stage

The Forestry Stage of both your farming education and your farm economics while not overly complicated does require you to master a narrow learning-curve in which you apply a specific set of kit and actions in order to efficiently embark upon a your new Logging Career.

Whether you opt to cut existing trees throughout the land or dive into the new side-career full-tilt and plant and harvest trees as crops, in the end you will find that forestry is among the most profitable of your farming and agricultural pursuits.

Kit and Gear

Forestry is a brand new feature in Farming Simulator 15 which allows you to cut down trees and plant new ones. You have access to the following equipment:

Tree Planter

You can use the tree planter to plant several types of trees. To fi ll the planter, you need to buy a pallet of saplings at the garden center. Then drive the planter close to the pallet and fi ll the machine. Trees can also directly placed by purchasing them as Placeables in the shop. However, this is more expensive

Chainsaws

Using a chainsaw is a cost-efficient way of cutting down trees.

Tree Harvester

Use a harvester to cut a tree and remove its branches. The resulting wood can be sold or turned into wood chips.

Forwarder

By using the crane of the forwarder, you can place trunks on the load space and then transport them.

Stump Cutter

A cut down tree leaves behind a stump which you can remove with a stump cutter.

Wood Chipper

A wood chipper allows you to reduce trunks into wood chips which you can sell at the biomass heating plant.

Some Casual Observations

It should be noted that at least in practical terms, the process of, well, processing lumber into wood Chips is, on the PC version of the game, far easier and more efficient than it is on the console versions. That may very well be due to reasons of the control differences and perhaps a different level of precision in the code when it comes to inserting the wood into the chipper, but either way and having experienced both, we do not recommend going into the Wood Chip business on the console versions unless you happen to be a player of immense patience and skill.

That said, the real industry as it pertains to lumbering - and the mechanism that a very large percentage of players feel is akin to -- if not outright -- cheating is found in the placement and harvesting of trees at locations that are not of the farm.

That said, nobody is claiming that tree farms - that is to say farms where trees are planted as seedlings, grown, then cut and sold - are in any way, shape, or form, a cheating act.

Regardless of your take on the matter - either matter - tree farming and/or lumbering is certainly among the most profitable of activities in the game. Whether that maintains with the updates that are destined to arrive, or is altered by the DLC also destined, remains to be seen.