Thanks. Dev build has been updated with the alchemy fix and several other fixes and tweaks. Notably -- reputation increases in guild auction were broken, end of decade billing now applies barn profits/losses before determining if you ran out of sparks, small mood penalty added to shackles, work-in-progress rebalancing of ingredient costs (they've been reduced a bit), fixed the bad mood increasing bruises issue, tweaked barn and prisoner diets/calories, made all slave roles use the same calorie system as the primary slave so if you swap them around, the modeling should work out the same, made farmhand and assistant use either spawn semen (if available and they have a fiend tattoo) or fresh food, made farmhand automatically exercise daily to gain endurance up to A+, and some other miscellany.
Some analysis on profitability ... the barn can be quite profitable with just an egglayer, barely profitable with a good cow if you're selling the milk and feeding her standard diet (much better if you feed her spawn semen), and run at a loss if you have a less than good cow or you're also feeding a pig that you don't actually plan to slaughter. I haven't analyzed the pig profit/expenses ratio recently, so it's possible that it's inherently unprofitable at the moment. If anyone has any data on that feel free to share. You can also further boost barn income if you have more than one egglayer; any wombs you don't need (assistant, slave) can be repurposed into spark factories. You can also make them lactate, but eggs are an entirely passive income stream...