Crop size to Farmers Ratio

Question

I am wondering how the size of the farm and the number of workers for that farm relate to each other. In my first town I was able to build large farms but went through many different layouts and sizes. I settled on a 10x10 farm and it seemed that as long as I kept my farmers with tools, a single farmer was able to plant, tend and harvest a 99-100% yield on the farm.

In my second town my layout is a bit more constricted as I decided to play in a mountainous area. My fields at 6x15 but still restricted to a single farmer on each of them.

What has struck me as odd here however is that I am often able to start harvesting a complete field in Summer in the second town. This pretty much never happened in the first town and the size of the fields is only differing by 10 units vs half a season (the first town would always start to harvest in fall).

So, this has brought up a few questions in regards to farming that I would like to figure out.

• What is the best size of a field either by dimensions or by area they cover?
• Is there any benefit to having more than one farmer on a field?
• If I do not restrict the farmers will they roam from field to field to take care of them?
• Should I build something like a second Fishing dock to send the farmers to during the winter?

Any additional 'Keep this in mind's area also welcome in this post, but these are the topics that I would like to shed some light in the area of farming.

Answer 1

Size - I tend to build as big as possible. My reasoning is that if fields were very small, there would be lost work time between planting and harvesting while waiting for the crops to grow.

Farmers - With only one farmer, there will likely be crops lost to freeze as winter begins. The more farmers you put to work, the faster they will harvest the crops and thus produce more crops. If your goal is sheer food production, you should max out farmers on every field. If your goal is maxing out efficiency per worker, you should have one or two farmers per field - they will hit their maximum amount of crops planted and gathered even if some go to waste. If your goal is maxing out efficiency per space of land, you should max out the farmers on every field to reduce the need for more farms.

Roaming - Farmers are "assigned" to a particular field, split up evenly if you do not micromanage the number of farmers per field. If farmers on one field die or are reassigned to another job, farmers from other fields will come over to even out the numbers to each field.

Fishing dock - If you want to further micromanage your farmers every year, you can re-assign them to other tasks. Without any intervention, they will act as laborers during their downtime. Personally I think it's too much effort to go to that level of micromanagement, but if you really needed extra production in a certain area it wouldn't hurt, so long as you get the farmers back to their fields in time for spring planting.

Regarding your comment on a single farmer able to handle a field by themselves - this could be a number of factors, size of the field, quality of the tool, level of education, the farmer could have just eaten just before it was time to plant, harshness of the weather in early spring or late autumn. Leaving it up to these factors sets you up for large swings in food supply.

Answer 2

Single farmers are able to farm up to around 120 squares by themselves, each year. This is, of course, assuming they are educated, have tools, and live nearby.

You can see the optimal layouts of farms here: http://banishedinfo.com/t/Size_calculator