farm help for cottage living

I agree...I would love to hire a farm hand just like the maids and etc. I have almost all of my sims farming and it is a full time job lol. The animals and bugs are hard to take care of all day long. I do also have my sims living a simple life with eco friendly life styles...more stuff along these ways would be awesome and helpful. Having the sims be more automated and attuned to real life as you stated would be nice also...

I use Register with Ministry of Labour on the phone to make Farmer my Sims job. Then earn money from the crops and produce. If you have Get to Work you can make a retail lot to sell their products and use Canning to make preserves to sell. So the farm is their actual job and it can be more profitable than many careers. I add some fishing too and other harvestables as well as the farm crops. I've got one Farmer with a garden centre and had another one that had a jam shop. 

It does get busy but if you add in the various aspirations and switch between them to gain more reward points it helps your Sim get everything done. So I get the Seldom Sleepy reward, Carefree, Steel Bladder, etc as soon as I can to help them out. You can also hire a professional gardener to help out with plants. While they're busy I have mine eating fruit from their inventory instead of cooking too, to save time.

If you befriend the local rabbits by gifting them with produce, they will also help you with the gardening. It takes a while though as they can be a bit cantankerous!🐰

@Natelinchen I absolutely agree that it would be amazing if you could hire a farm hand! What a great idea, as a farm is a handful, especially if it's big! 

Great points, @simsplayer818, that there are 'gardening helper' options... and I would like to add a few more options...

• Patchy. Patchy comes with 'Seasons'. I've even had him come in the house and help if the gardening is done. I've had a Patchy change a diaper, clear dishes, paint a painting I sold on an empty easel... (and I had one that could swim in the ocean!).
• Butlers. Butlers will help with many things, including gardening. (I doubt they would help with any farm animals, though. They do repair things, though, and socialize with pets... though I don't know if they do with farm animals. I never had on on a farm.)
• Add one or two Sims to the household that are intended to be farm hands. You could even build them a separate building to stay in on the lot, or make a basement or attic apartment with an outside entrance to play into them being mostly outside the household (though they would technically be in the household). You could involve them as much or little as you want in the household space and socializing by locking doors, etc. However you want to play it. Anyway, you would need to stay on the lot, though, to tell them what tasks to do. You could give them traits that lean in the direction of their tasks, cloth them in 'farm hand' attire, and lean into it as much as you want.
• Edit: I forgot about the bird tree that you can add from Country Living. It you becomes friends with the birds in it you can ask them for gardening help and they will eat bugs in the garden, and they can sing to oversized crops to help them grow.
• Also, if you add a bee hive the area will get a small fertilizer bonus (and you get honey).

Anyway, that's just a bit of additional food for thought. I have added my 'Me Too' and 'XP' to this thread, though, as I think it would be a great option to hire a farm hand! 🙌

@Natelinchen The ability to hire a butler comes with the Vintage Glamour Stuff Pack. I personally love having a butler if my Sims can afford it... or if they have the free services perk. Butlers don't cover everything. and some have better personalities than others, but they are a fantastic safety net, and I have had many great experiences with them. I had one in the home where I had a servo and that broke down continually... and the butler would autonomously fix him, I have one in my home with infants where he is a better assistance for a safety net tan the nanny I tried (though not 100%)... the butler I had that was a lifesaver was in my most chaotic home where I had 6 sims, a servo, and a dog, and several were attending university, 3 roommates... and one of the sims was a toddler in the middle of a needs-depletion bug... That butler helped with everything from cleaning, gardening, servo and other repair, social interaction, toddler & pet companionship and some attendance, to keeping the roommates happy and cared for. No standing around in that home! 😉

You can check your butler's personality, and even adjust his traits if you don't like them via cheats (if he/she isn't a good fit to your household)... or fire him and hire a different one. That pack comes with the smallest and least expensive bar, also (a globe), and my favorite female up-do hair. Butlers could use some tweaks to their code and are not perfect (my current one seems obsessed with the tub and takes a bath at least once a day... unusual for a butler, they seem to have slow need decay... but in the end I gave up worrying about that and I put in a second tub - hahaha!) but I'm fine with 'working within that' and am a fan of them. As far as adding a bed for them, I've done everything from give them a nice little mini-apartment room within a huge home (which was rather a waste - all they do is sleep in the bed occasionally - but could be used via locks to encourage them to use their own bathroom, etc... though then you would need someone else to clean the other bathrooms if they can't get in) to assign them to a bunk in the kids' room. There is some good intro info on them at this link: https://www.carls-sims-4-guide.com/stuffpacks/vintageglamour/butler.php

@Natelinchen ... I forgot to mention sprinklers. Seasons comes with a sprinkler, and it can be invaluable with a huge garden. It is useless, though, if you don't upgrade it to 'unbreakable' and 'no puddles'. In that case, they still break occasionally and need to be fixed or replaced, but they are a huge help.

your very welcome! Glad I am not the only one wanting this and are expriencing issues as welll...we are all in good company lol!