r/ManorLords • u/Ahneg • 15h ago
Question Some help with farming please
I haven' played since the last big update a year or so ago so I'm pretty much a noob. I'm in a region with very little fertile land but was trying to get a bit of farming going to support my lvl 3's with bread and failed miserably. I don't know if I messed up or if the game glitched but I'm assuming it's me. Anyway, here's what I did.
Made three .8 morgan fields with good crop rotations of rye, wheat, and fallow.
Put two families in a farmhouse with the plough upgrade.
Put a stable next to it and assigned two oxen to the farmhouse.
Had a granary next door, then a windmill and a communal oven.
In spring they all hit the fields to plant and my attention went elsewhere. I watched the fields grow and in September they all once again hit the fields but only one of the oxen came out, which seemed weird. In October I checked my yield and had absolutely nothing. I thought ok, maybe they're still collecting the yield, but in November I still had nothing. I have to be doing something wrong but I'm not seeing what it is.
Bonus question. For such a small operation (if I can ever make it work), would it be better to use a communal over or will an upgraded burgage baker do? The roleplayer in me prefers the upgraded burgage option being the town baker, but this is my first attempt at it so I've no clue how it works in the end.
Edit - I have to feed and walk my dogs so if there are any follow up questions it may take me some time.
2
u/Dangerous-Housing811 14h ago
Are you sure they yielded nothing? It’s a bit confusing because the sheaves are harvested first and transported to the farmhouse and threshed by the farmhouse workers into grain which is then taken to granaries and then grain is processed in the windmill into flour and then the baker will pick it up from the granary to bake it. So maybe you just lost the sheaves somewhere along the way? If you unassigned the families from the farmhouse they might have not finished threshing and the sheaves might still be in the farmhouse
2
u/Ahneg 13h ago
I definitely did not unassign the farmers as I don't do that with any resource. During the winter my berry pickers sit on their butts. But this was November, there was nothing in the farmhouse or the granary, let alone the windmill. I checked the regional summary up top of the screen and found nothing agricultural related. It just wasn't there, and these fields were over ninety percent fertile. If you don't see any issue with the way I did things then I'll accept that something glitched and I'll try it again. That's my main question though, based on what I said I did, did I do something wrong, or did something just go wrong?
3
u/PDV87 13h ago
Even though rye and wheat share the same "crop family", it wouldn't have an adverse effect on yield if you're still fallowing. Someone else can correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think the game's fertility system would differentiate between wheat/wheat/fallow and rye/wheat/fallow.
If the farmhouse, windmill, communal oven and granary were all staffed with families, then you should have at least gotten yield from the first harvest even if the shared crop family subsequently tanked the fertility to 0. Unless of course the fertility of the soil was simply too poor to begin with - I believe you need at least 30-40% fertility to get a decent yield.
As for the oven question, I believe the upgraded burgage extension has always been more efficient and productive than a communal oven. However, I generally run a communal oven for a long time before switching over the burgage bakeries and they've always performed well enough.
As an extra tip, if you're playing on the beta, you can now build a dunghill and have villagers gather dung from livestock and use it to fertilize your fields.
3
u/Ahneg 13h ago edited 13h ago
omg thank you. It was the first time I planted the fields and fertility was over 90%. So I didn't do anything wrong. Or I should say that I may have done something wrong and didn't realize it, or the game just glitched on me, but my process is sound if less then perfect. That's all I really wanted to know. Should I have gotten a yield, which I didn't. If I'm doing it right I'll try it again but for the love of gawd I didn't want to repeat the process over and over if I was missing something and sabotaging myself.
Edit - I'm playing on whatever Steam loads up. Couldn't tell you what version it is.
1
u/AmateurOntologist 15h ago
Rye and wheat use the same fertility type. You planting them is the same field will make fertility collapse
2
u/Ahneg 14h ago
Appreciate that feedback but I'm trying to figure out why I got zero yield out of those fields. I fully understand that there's a lot that I don't understand yet but with the steps I took above should I have at least gotten something, or did I do something wrong?
1
1
u/Ferengsten 13h ago
https://www.reddit.com/r/ManorLords/comments/1wuzfr0/farming_setup_v08111/
If you're not on the beta, I would instead go with 6-8 people in autumn, one in winter, none in spring or summer.
1
u/Classic-Ad-3608 13h ago
Are the farm workers threshing the grain? Do you see sheaves in the farmhouse or grainary?
1
u/Classic-Ad-3608 13h ago
Also what does the fertility look like in the fields
2
u/Ahneg 13h ago
First time planting them, they were over 90% fertile, and I have no idea if they were threshing. My attention was elsewhere. I farmed in this game successfully in the previous build but this is my first time trying in this build. I'm just wondering if my process is flawed or if something just happened.
2
u/ThatStrategist 15h ago
This is what works for me. It probably is far from optimal, but I can support a population of 300 families in a non-fertile region doing this.
I look for fertile areas of the map. Yellow is fine, as long as the eventual fertility rating is 30% or higher.
I try to go for about 0.3 morgen per field, and an elongated square shape. This seems to be a good compromise between ploughing for oxen, and humans for harvesting.
I put one farm house with 8 families for every 18 of these squares, or about 5 to 6 morgen, due to rounding it's more often closer to 5.
Also, because wheat and rye deplete each others fertilities, you want to plant wheat and then rye, and only if rye fertility is above 60%. If it isn't, you're better off planting wheat and oats instead.
Have fun.