How to farm in Manor Lords

Farming in Manor Lords takes a lot of work to understand and it’s hard to make it work properly. There’s a lot to consider — from soil fertility to acreage (morgenage?) to processing the crops — and it can be really frustrating and time-consuming if you mess something up.

Our Manor Lords farming guide will explain how farming works, including finding the best place for your farm fields, how big to make them, how to rotate your crops, and how all of the crops are used.

How farming works in Manor Lords

We’ll get into more specifics below, but let’s talk about all the pieces you’ll need to have an effective farm in Manor Lords.

First, you’ll need to find a fertile patch of land and place some fields on it. But the fields can’t be too big (see below) or else they won’t get planted in time for the crop to grow and you’ll miss out on an entire year of farming. You’ll also need to make sure you have farmers available during the times of year when farm work needs to be done — mostly just in the autumn.

Once it’s done, you’ll have a crop that doesn’t actually do your town any good — all of the crops in Manor Lords have to be processed by at least one (and usually several) other buildings before it becomes a useable good.

If all of that sounds complicated, that’s because it is. Let’s go through every step of farming in Manor Lords so you can get your farm up and running.

Fertility overlays tell you where to place farms

When you hit the Construction button, you’ll have Overlay options on the left side of your screen that put a heatmap overlay on top of the map.

For farming, we’ll focus on emmer, flax, and barley fertility. The fertility the overlay is showing you is basically how much of a given crop that chunk of land will produce. Red means not much, yellow is average, and green is quite a bit.

Emmer (wheat) is what you’ll use to make bread, flax becomes linen for clothes, and barley can be turned into ale — all of which figure into upgrading your burgage plots and the settlement’s level.

Barley is (arguably) the most important crop, followed by emmer (wheat). Look for an area with at least yellow fertility that doesn’t overlap with other resources like wild animals or berry deposits.

Once you find one, we can start building fields.

Start with small fields

In the Construction menu, pick Farming and then choose a Field. This will let you place four points to define a plot of farmland.

As you place your points, you’ll see the area of the plot measured in morgen. The specifics that particular unit of measurement aren’t worth getting into right now (and they’re confusing as hell). For our purposes, know that a single family working on a farm can manage — plow, plant, and harvest — about ²⁄₃ morgen per year.

While the farm plots might look small, even just 0.6 morgen of wheat field grows enough wheat (to turn into grain to turn into flour to turn into bread) to feed a town of 100 people and still have a surplus.

When you’re ready to start farming, you’ll also need a farmhouse (3 timber). This is where you can assign a family to start working the fields. What they do, though, depends on the season.

Seasons determine what happens on a farm

What tasks your farm takes on depends on the season — there’s a bit of wiggle room on the dates, but the following is generally true.

Starting in the autumn, the family assigned to a farm will look for a nearby field (basically any field in the region) and start to plow it. Plowing is followed by sowing, which also has to happen in autumn. If a field isn’t plowed and sowed by the time winter starts in December that field will be fallow for the year — you’ll also get a notification about it. Like we mentioned above, a family can harvest, plow, and sow about 0.6 morgen during a season.

For spring and summer, there’s nothing to do on the farm except watch the crops grow.

The following autumn, the family will harvest the crops, plow the fields, and then sow the next year’s crop. If the crop you just harvested was wheat (emmer), it’ll be taken to the farm where it’s threshed into grain.

Over time, planting the same crop over and over will reduce the fertility (and productivity) of a field. To avoid that, you’ve got a couple options, but the easiest is just to rotate your crops.

Rotate your crops to restore fertility

When you click on a field, you’ll get a menu that allows you to pick what type of crop to grow the next year — wheat, flax, or barley. You also have the option to not grow anything at all and to let the field lie fallow. Setting a field to fallow for a year restores that field’s fertility.

Setting a field to fallow means you won’t get any crops from that field for the (next) year, though. But, with a bit of planning, you can avoid that too. Instead of creating one big field, start your farm with three fields that are each (about) 0.3 morgen in size. When you open each field’s menu, click on the checkbox for crop rotation and then:

• Set the first field to wheat, wheat, fallow
• Set the second field to wheat, fallow, wheat
• Set the third field to fallow, wheat, wheat

This means that you’ll only ever have two fields with crops planted — for a total of 0.6 morgen worth of crops. That just so happens to be about how much a family can manage in a year. Meanwhile, you’ll always have one fallow field that’s resetting its fertility.

Unlock the heavy plow to farm faster

As you level up your town, you’ll earn development points that unlock new technologies for your town to use. One of the first you can get is the heavy plow. This lets you add a plowing station to your farm and use an oxen to plow and move crops. This increases the area a family can handle by quite a bit — to the point where you can basically double the size of your fields (or just have twice as many fields and crops).

How to use wheat, flax, and barley in Manor Lords

Each of the crops you grow don’t do anything for you in their raw form. They all have to be processed (at least once) before they’re usable.

• Wheat gets threshed at the farm and turned into grain. From there, you’ll need a windmill (4 timber) to turn it into flour and a communal oven (2 timber) to turn that flour into bread. At that point, it’ll get sold in the marketplace as food.
• Flax needs to be taken to a weaver workshop (4 timber) that will turn it into linen. Linen heads to the marketplace and satisfies your town’s need for clothing, but it can be processed further. A burgage plot (level 2) with an extension slot can be turned into a tailor’s workshop (5 Regional Wealth, 5 planks). That artisan workshop will make gambesons from just linen, but can also make clothes from linen and dye — which, in turn, comes from a dyer’s workshop (2 timber).
• Barley heads to a malthouse (4 timber) to become malt. From there, you’ll need a burgage plot (level 2) that’s been turned into a brewery to turn the malt into ale. Ale isn’t useful on its own, though, so you’ll also need a tavern (5 timber) with a family assigned to it so the ale gets distributed.