Manor Lords – Best Farming Tips for Beginners

Many new players of Manor Lords claim that farming is bad since it defies logic and the game does a poor job of teaching it. However, after you pick up a few tricks, you’ll be reaping enormous rewards.

Useful Tips to Farming

Seasons

• September is the official “harvest season” when villagers will automatically harvest any grown crops over 15%.
• In October/November you’re meant to sow new crops before winter.
• If crops aren’t fully sown before winter, the fields get nuked.
• However, you can actually plough, sow, and harvest any time outside September and winter with no penalty.
• It’s better to sow earlier in the year to get more time farming.

Field Setup

• Make rectangular fields – this shape is most efficient for oxen ploughing.
• Medium 1-3 morgen fields are ideal – not too big to be inefficient.
• Fertility doesn’t impact yield as long as it doesn’t hit 0 while crops grow.

Ploughing

• Always upgrade to the heavy plow and assign oxen. Hand ploughing is very slow.
• You can “pre-plough” many fields with oxen before sowing.

Sowing

• Set different field priorities to avoid villager indecision between multiple fields.
• Plan an efficient sowing route to minimize villager travel time.

Harvesting

• Also prioritize harvest fields to avoid indecision.
• Use “force early harvest” if harvesting outside September.
• Deselect fields after full harvest so oxen retrieve the yield instead of villagers.

Crop Storage

• Harvested crops go to the farmhouse storage initially.
• Build housing near farmhouses that use the respective crop types.

Timing

• Sowing earlier gives more total farming time but risks winter killing immature crops.
• Later harvests let you pre-plough many fields first while still harvesting summer crops.

With some micromanagement and good field layouts, you can get over 1500+ harvest yields per year, even with just 8 farming families. Farming is quite viable if done properly.

Video guide for those who are too lazy to read