Forestry Towers and RP/Buildcraft

[netmc]

Here is how to make a stacked fully automated tower. My example is a peat farm, but the same principles can be used for a wheat farm as well.

Materials required:

1 Sorting Machine
1 Relay
A bunch of pneumatic tubes
multiple paint colors
an input chest
iron transport pipes
stone transport pipes

You will also need peat bogs and 1 turbary per 3 peat bogs. The turbarys will harvest peat starting at the layer below the turbary, so you will need to arrange them as shown to minimize the turbarys you need.

The input is fully redpower tubes. The initial output of the machines are buildcraft pipes. I thought about going redpower completely, but the buildcraft pipes are so perfect for this, it would be a shame not to use them. (Plus they are a lot cheaper.)

Here is the input side

Spoiler

Make sure to use covers on the top of the peat bogs and side of the turbarys. You only want the pneumatic tubes to connect to the bottom of the peat bogs.

Here is a close up of the bottom layers

Spoiler

And here is the configuration of the sorting machine. I used 2 bog earth with a different color each time. Notice the new sorting machine mode selected. In this mode, the sorting machine will automatically pull items from the chest, then advance to the next column all without a timer providing a pulse. The number of bog earth sorted each time can be set to any number. I recommend using a small number depending the amount of bog earth you have.

Spoiler

 

[netmc]

For the output

Spoiler

And a closeup of the bottom

Spoiler

Iron pipes are used where there are multiple paths items can go. Stone transport pipe is used elsewhere. At the bottom of the stack, the pipe goes into a RP relay, then everything is added to the tube network to the destination of your choice.

 

[netmc]

Since the peat bog is something you will build early on, you may not have access to the sorting machine yet. There is a cheap alternative. All it takes are some pneumatic tubes and some transposers.

Spoiler

A little known fact about red power tubes is that they will automatically balance the items if the length of pipe to two valid destinations are equal. Here you can see the logical layout of the system. The pipe front and center is the input line. The transposers are the "destinations" for determining tube length. Since everything is the same number of tube segments, the items transversing the pipes will alternate between all the valid destinations. The colored pipe behind the transposers can be any length of pipe needed to feed the bottom of the peat bog. (Painting the pipes is not necessary, and only used for illustration purposes.)

As you can see, the number of valid destinations are doubled each time. This setup can be used for 2, 4, 8, or 16... destinations. Other configurations are possible, but these are the easiest to configure.

This system can be used in the peat bog setup I posted above, but you would only be able to do 2, 4 or 8 peat bogs with this setup.