How To Feed Your Cows, Sheep, and Alpacas (SoS: FoMT)

by Kal S.

The barn animals (Cows, Sheep, and Alpacas) in Story of Seasons: Friends of Mineral Town need to be fed with fodder every day. This fodder allows them to mature into adult animals that regularly produce milk and wool.

Feeding is especially important for cows because they will only produce milk if they’ve been fed the day before.

Feeding Barn Animals

To feed an animal, hold a piece of Fodder from your inventory and press the action button while standing next to a hungry cow, sheep, or alpaca.

The farmer hand-feeds a sheep.

You’ll know you managed to feed them successfully if a heart dialogue box pops up from the animal. If they won’t accept the fodder, they’ve likely already been fed.

If you have a lot of barn animals, you can also just dump the fodder into the feeding bins and refill them daily. This will save you some time and also ensure that everyone has access to the food.

How Feeding Works

There are actions you can take to raise your animals’ heart level by one Love Point (LP). Brushing, petting, hand-feeding, and letting them outside the Barn will earn you 1 LP for each action.

So even aside from getting animal produce, feeding is also important to increase LP with your animals.

The farmer brushes an Alpaca.

The quality of the milk or wool you harvest will actually depend on your animal’s heart level (A.K.A. the amount of affection they have for you). A higher heart level means they’ll produce better quality milk or wool, which sell for a much higher price compared to S-quality products.

Where To Get Fodder

All of the barn animals are fed via fodder, which can be obtained in multiple ways.

The most cost-efficient option is to let Wild Grass grow all over your farmland, and then harvest it with a Sickle once it’s ready.

The farmer harvests Fodder from a field of Wild Grass.

You’ll automatically get pieces of Fodder added to your inventory, in stacks of 9. If you want to grow more Wild Grass, just make sure that there are empty tiles around the area (so it can expand) and ignore it until it’s time to harvest more.

But there are two more options for getting fodder in the game:

Alternate Method 1: Planting Grass Seedlings

You can actually plant your own Wild Grass from scratch using Seedlings from the General Store. Simply head over to Jeff at the counter and buy Grass Seedlings for 500 G each.

The farmer buys a Grass Seedling from Jeff at the General Store.

You can place the Grass Seedling anywhere on your farm, and they will have a 25% chance of spreading to adjacent tiles the following day. Once you have enough Wild Grass, use the Sickle to harvest fresh fodder!

Alternate Method 2: Buying from Yodel Ranch

If you don’t have enough time to wait for the Wild Grass to spread, you can buy Fodder directly from Mugi. You can visit his shop at Yodel Ranch to buy Fodder for 20 G each.

The farmer buys Fodder from Mugi at Yodel Ranch.

Buying individual pieces of fodder can be quite expensive to maintain in the long run, so only consider doing this for emergencies!

Storing Fodder

To keep excess fodder, you can deposit it into the Silo. This can store up to 999 pieces.

If you want to take some out, interact with the silo chute to withdraw a stack of 9 Fodder.

The farmer holds up fodder next to the Silo.

Keep in mind that leaving animals to graze outside will automatically feed them if you have Wild Grass growing on the farm! If you allow them to stay outside, skip the manual feeding since the fodder will just disappear the next day.