Farming

New players should begin with the Farthest Frontier Official Farming Guide before continuing with this article. "While not the only method of producing food in Farthest Frontier, crop fields are one of the most effective. Anyone that’s ever contended with nature can attest that planting crops is not as simple as setting seeds in a patch of dirt and calling it done, and Farthest Frontier respects that. Proper care and maintenance and even soil mixture can make the difference between a bountiful yield and one choked out by disease and weeds."

- Crate Official Farming Guide

Yield
This determines the base value of how much of the crop you get when you harvest it, with all other factors affecting this base value. The higher the better!

Frost & Heat Tolerance
This determines the likelihood that your crops will suffer frost/heat damage. Crops that have a low frost tolerance will likely suffer frost damage if planted early in the year, while crops with a low heat tolerance will suffer heat damage if planted in the summer.

Grow Time
This is an unchangeable value that determines how much space crops take in the growing year, and is the main hard-limited on your crop cycle designs. Each year has a total of 270 workable days, and all crops planted in that year must fit into that window (unused space is just idle time). The goal of a good crop rotation design is to minimize idle days while respecting all other factors.

Fertility dependence
This determines how strong of an effect the field fertility will have on the final yield. Crops that have a low fertility dependence will not be overly affected by the field fertility, and vice-versa.

Fertility Impact
This determines how much of an affect that crop will have on the field fertility. It is defined as a range with the exact value being randomly chosen within this range (e.g. Rye has a fertility impact rating of -4 +-5, so will change the field fertility by a random number between -9 and 1 (also affected by yield).

Weed Suppression
This affects reduces the speed at which weeds grow when this crop is planted. Crops like Buckwheat will almost completely inhibit the growth of weeds while carrots and leeks will allow weeds to grow at maximum speed. The higher the better

Rockiness Resilience
The higher the rockiness resilience the less the rockiness of the field will affect your final yield.

Soil Preference
Each crop has a soil preference, yielding a 10% yield bonus if the soil composition of the field is in the green zone of the crop, down to a 10% yield loss if the soil composition lies outside in the red zone

'' Note: This property is not visible in the crop information view, it is only visible once you add the crop to your rotation and click on the crop. ''

Fertility
Factors into the final yield you will get from your crops. The higher your fertility, the more stuff you will get when you harvest.

Fertility can be increased by:


 * Planting fertility-positive crops (clover, peas, beans)
 * Applying fertilizer to your farms (collecting from house waste)
 * Grazing livestock on your clover-planted fields

Fertility is decreased by:


 * Planting fertility-negative crops (most crop types)

The exact amount crops will affect fertility is a mixture of RNG and the yield that season (needs confirmation), so ensuring a high yield will also make it easier to keep up fertility. Likewise this works the other way - if you field fertility is low, you will have a lower yield, resulting in a worse impact to fertility, creating a downward spiral. This can be addressed by adequate field preparation in the strategy section below

Weed Level
Factors into the final yield you will get from your crops. The higher the weed level of your field, the lower the yield from your crops

Weed level passively increases as time goes on, and the speed is affected by the weed suppression of the crops you plant.

Weed level is reduced by performing field maintenance

Rocks
Factors into the final yield you will get from your crops.

Rockiness is reduced by performing field maintenance

Soil Bonus
The soil you plant a field in will lie somewhere on the scale from very clay-like to very sand-line. . You can change the soil composition at the cost of clay/sand.

Changing the soil composition cost resources + consumes workhours, so it is inadvisable to plant crops that have extremely different soil preferences. However in most cases they will differ a little, so it is best to adjust the soil composition to match either the midpoint of all the crops in the 3-year cycle or closer to the main crop you want to get a yield bonus from.

Disease
Every crop is susceptible to different diseases, which will significantly affect the yield of those crops. Disease can also spread to neighbouring fields, and persists through planting seasons. If left untreated, the disease will grow stronger and have a stronger affect on the yield + be harder to remove. Most diseases affect more than one crop type, which make it advisable to diversify your crops such than a single disease cant spread through all your fields

Each disease functions differently in its method of spread and how to deal with it, but in general:


 * Make 1 of your 3 planting years a "rest" year (i.e. only perform maintenance + plant clovers) so that the crop diseases can die out.
 * Plant crops that do not have any overlapping diseases in alternate years (e.g. wheat and leeks) such that a disease affecting one will die out when the other is planted.
 * In the case of a disease that had taken a strong hold it may be necessary to leave the fields completely barren for more than a year until the disease is completely removed.

Rot
If crops are not harvest within a 25-30 day window of reaching maturity they will rot in the field, so it is important than farmers are available to harvest at the end of a crop season. It is also advisable to stagger the harvest time of your crops across the different fields, so that farmers are able to attend to each field with enough time to harvest.

Crop Rotation Design
When designing any crop rotation, you will be looking to achieve the following:

The exact crops you plant will depend on your settlement needs, but you can look at several example rotations below.
 * Minimize Idle time. Some unused time is inevitable with most rotations, and can actually be useful to ensure your farmers are not overly busy at any point of the year such that they missing planting/harvest time.
 * Maintain a positive fertility field rating. This is done by ensuring across all 3 years, the sum of the fertility impact of all your crops is greater than 0. Generally this will means planting things like clover/peas/beans to offset your other crops. A sub-zero sum is acceptable if you plan to fertilize or graze livestock during your clover seasons.
 * Keep weed levels down if planting anything other than buckwheat by incorporating 1-2 field maintenance seasons somewhere in your 3-year rotation
 * Respect the seasonality of the crops planted to minimize frost/heat damage. There is some flexibility, but generally crops can be grouped up into 3 overlapping categories
 * Early Spring: Pea, Rye, Carrot, Turnip, Cabbage, Leek, Clover
 * Late Spring: Wheat, Flax, Beans, Buckwheat
 * Summer: Beans, Buckwheat, Wheat, Rye, Flax, Cabbage, Leeks, Clover
 * Reduce the chance of disease by planting crops that are not affected by similar diseases and/or by introducing gap/maintenance years into your rotation (where 1 of the 3 years does not grow that main crop to give the disease a chance to disappear)
 * Avoid combining crops that have vastly different soil preferences in the same field. This is not an extremely important metric (particularly because you can change the soil composition permanently at the cost of clay/sand) but it can affect your overall yield by +-10%

Rotation Staggering
Because a field can be set to plant unique crops in a 3 year period, Generally it will be best to employ 3n (where n is any multiplier like 1,2,3) (e.g. 3, 6, or 9) fields for any single rotation, as this will ensure you get the same crops harvested every year. This is accomplished by setting each field do use a different combination of the 3 years in the base rotation.

For example:

Given the base rotation: Year 1: Crops Year 2: Crops Year 3: Maintenance Field 1 would be set to have the rotation: Year 1: Crops Year 2: Crops Year 3: Maintenance Field 2 would be set to have the rotation: Year 3: Maintenance Year 1: Crops Year 2: Crops Field 3 would be set to have the rotation: Year 2: Crops Year 3: Maintenance Year 1: Crops

Field Preparation
The yield of your crops will affect the fertility impact from that season (needs confirmation), so ensuring a high yield will also make it easier to keep up fertility. Likewise this works the other way - if you field fertility is low, you will have a lower yield, resulting in a worse impact to fertility, creating a downward spiral.

Therefore it is important that before you being planting useful crops (things than can be gathered), that you prepare your field.

This will involve:


 * Getting Rockiness down to 0%
 * Getting Weeds down to 0%
 * Getting Fertility as high as possible (at least > 60%)

Start with a maintenance year when your field is first build to address weed/rockiness levels as well as fertility. As a standard 2x field maintenance + 1x Clover, but if fertility is already high you can do 3x Field Maintenance seasons.



Based on the rotations you want to go for, you can either keep running fertility-positive configurations to get your field fertility up or if its already adequate switch to fertility-neutral rotations.

General Tips

 * The first year after building a field focus on 2-3 seasons of field maintenance (or 2x field maintenance + 1x clovers if the fertility is low)) so that the next year you can setup your proper 3 year rotation without having to worry about getting the field state to normal levels over many rotations
 * Peas can be serve as a great fertility-boosting crop as they can be planted in the earliest part of the year AND will still allow a clover and a maintenance season in the same year. This is currently one of the best fertility-boosting year designs that still has a maintenance season.


 * Consider the timing of your different crops and when they keep your farmers busy. The start of a crop season is busy with planting, the end with harvesting - so you want to make sure your farmers don't have too many conflicting things to do at any one point of the year across all your fields
 * Plan to graze livestock on your fields when clover is growing, as this will boost your field fertility and provide fodder for the livestock. Since the livestock grazing area is 10by10 it is advisable that your field size is standardized to at least this size.


 * Every crop has a preferred soil composition - so you want to plant similar (or close) soil preferences in the same fields


 * Crops that have a high weed suppression will not require more than 1 field maintenance season per 3-year rotation, so you can instead focus on clover seasons to keep the fertility high). Likewise crops that have a low weed suppression will require (usually) 2 seasons of field maintenance per 3-year rotation


 * Rockiness Resilience is really only an important trait if you intend to plan immediately after your field is built, as you can get the rockiness down to 0 quite quickly by only performing field maintenance for the first year or two, and it will stay low with very little maintenance after that
 * Farmers will prioritize the construction of a new field over working existing fields, meaning that you might miss a few harvests while the new field gets setup. You can get around this by pausing construction of the new field during planting/harvest times (clover season is great too as there’s no harvest) and unpausing during growth phases.

Clover Fertility Growth Only Rotation (~+30 Fert/3 Years)


This rotation is completely unproductive but will raise the fertility level of your fields faster than anything else. You can also graze livestock on this rotation year round for an extra fertility boost. 3 years of this rotation with grazing livestock will generally take 50% fertility land to 100%.

Fertility-positive rotations
These rotations are useful if you need to bring up the fertility level of your fields while are the same time producing some food, but are not efficient once your fertility level is high due to their relatively low output

Peas + Clovers Rapid Fertility + Maintenance (~+21 Fert/3 Years)


You can run this rotation to generate small amounts of beans but mainly to rapidly grow your field fertility. Once fertility is at desired level, you can swap to a fertility-neutral rotation for more yield

Quick start Peas + Leeks (3 Fields Staggered) (~+3 Fert/3 Years)


This is a good rotation if you need to get food out quickly, as peas/greens are produced early and yearly. This is also a good rotation to use both early and into the late game on your non-grain producing fields for a source of greens

Note: Due to the 1x field maintenance + 3x peas/1x Clover seasons, this is a very self-maintaining rotation

Yearly Rye (~+3 Fert/3 Years)


Due to Rye's natural weed suppression you can run this early rye cycle without having a regular field maintenance. Note while this rotation will produce tons of grain, it is more susceptible to disease (as there is no gap maintenance year). You may also eventually need to do a maintenance season (swap out one of the clovers for a season) to get the weed level down but it should be infrequent.

Fertility-neutral rotations
These rotations are more efficient but require your fertility level to already be high (>70%) as they do not passively grow the fertility level (indeed if you get bad RNG the level may go down requiring some compost to get back to desired levels)

Root Vegetables Self Sustaining (3 Fields Staggered) (~+-0 Fert/3 Years)


This rotation produces lots of spoilage-resistant root vegetables from early spring to mid summer, which is a good choice if you are suffering spoilage related food issues, and can be further canned if glassmaking industry is setup

Wheat/Root Vegetable/Peas Self Sustaining (3 Fields Staggered) (~+-0 Fert/3 Years)


This is a wheat-producing rotation that is self-sustaining (no compost required to maintain fertility) and produces a good variety of different food groups. Excellent Rotation to use before you have large amounts of compost available.

4x Flax (3 Fields Staggered) (~-1 Fert/Year)


This rotation is extremely time efficient and produces a huge amount of flax, and is mostly self-sustaining (fertility will very slowly creep downwards, but a single manure application will last you a long time

Fertility Negative but Productive Rotations
These rotations are highly productive but require regular applications of composting to maintain fertility

High-Yield Wheat/Rye + Leeks with Compost (3 Fields Staggered) (~-4 Fert/3 Years)


Note: You will need to supplement with Compost to keep fertility high. You can opt to replace the wheat for Rye for a quick-start version, as rye is more resistant to rocks and weeds at the cost of lower yield