Farmer villagers not spawning

Question

Are there rules governing the profession of spawning villagers?

In my world, a village spawned on top of a lake. This was really interesting, but the villagers would exit their buildings and immediately fall into the water. I connected the houses with floating sidewalks so they could traverse the buildings, but apparently they liked jumping off the walkways. Eventually they drowned themselves to extinction.

So I revamped the village with fences and walls to prevent suicides and invading hostiles, and began a long re-population effort through curing zombie villagers. After augmenting the village with additional buildings, they finally bred, and I was able to get to a large enough population that an iron golem appeared.

Strangely, however, none of these villagers are farmers! I had a few farmers in the early days, but those guys must have died somehow. Now I probably have a population of thirty or so, but not a single one working the land. The two naturally-generated farm plots are still present. I even built animal pens on the outskirts.

I'd like farmers, because they give me the easiest means to earn emeralds. All these librarians, priests, mages, and blacksmiths don't have the best trade offers.

Is there anything that controls whether farmers will be generated? If so, how can I get this to occur?

Answer 1

Villagers are all randomly assigned a profession on spawning, and unfortunately, this is an even 1/6 chance for each one. For specifically Farmers (so you can trade) this is then further broken down to the 4 different brown coat professions, ultimately making the chance of a Farmer spawning only 4.17%. Source.

Fortunately, it would appear that baby villagers are also assigned their professions at random, so it is entirely possible to create a Villager Breeder in order to find the Villager you are after, or simply boost the amount of doors you have in your village. Even by simply creating a 3 wide covered platform with in the village, and fill that with doors will greatly increase your villager breeding rate.

Answer 2

The profession of the villagers are random but you could generate more villagers by adding lots of doors to your village so you have a better chance of gettiong a farmer. Well anyways, good luck.

Answer 3

Actually, as an observation, you can acquire farmer villagers from curing zombie villagers.

You can start to make your own village to a nearby exposed dungeon and separating those regular zombies from villager zombies.

You can use a small pond with a gate to separate each of them and kill unneeded zombies, and enjoy having your own village.

Answer 4

The occupation of each villager is completely random, with nothing to change that(except cheats). But you can look at the coat of the zombie villager that you're curing, to see if it has a brown coat, so there's a chance it could be a farmer. Or you can set up a villager breeder, you can separate the farmers from the other occupations.

Answer 5

you need to make walkways (like dirt) to every door of every house the villagers will walk on them to get to other houses, worked for my lake village. :-D