40d:Farming

Farming is the most universal source of food in Dwarf Fortress. On maps with lots of shrubs, animals or rivers, hunting, plant gathering and fishing can also produce a lot of food; however, these practices often do not scale to the level needed to feed a full-sized fortress. Farming is a highly efficient, reliable, renewable and scalable source of food. Plants grown on farms are also excellent for brewing alcohol, and may have other uses.

For underground farms, you also need to set up an irrigation scheme to deposit mud on rock, or find some soft arable soil. The starting seeds your dwarves may bring with them can only be planted underground. In the outdoors, only seeds from outdoor shrubs can be planted.

Building the farm room(s)

You cannot plant seeds on a bare rock floor; only on mud, soil, clay, peat or sand. You can get mud by using an irrigation system, but dirt and sand are available in great quantity outside the fortress (on non-mountainous maps).

Defining the farm plot

Once you have a suitable location for farming you can have your farmer(s) prepare a farm plot. That's the actual bit of soil to be tilled.

Enter the build menu and place farm plots (p). Use u and k to increase the size of the plot, and m and h to decrease it. When the plot is the right size in the right position, pressing Enter will place it. Your grower(s) will now rush in and prepare the field, clearing out rubble and other impediments when necessary.

How much farm space do you need? Surprisingly little. A 5x5 plot will provide enough food to bring you through your first winter, and even smaller fields are sufficient if you stretch out the food by brewing. If there's still rubble in the room, leave a little extra space, otherwise the farmers tend to stack the boulders under your farm room doors and cause them to get stuck ajar, which can lead to flooding if you're not careful. You can also avoid putting doors right next to the farm.

Digging out larger farm rooms than you need can be useful in other ways as well: muddied areas can spontaneously produce tower-caps (a source of wood), spider webs (a source of silk), and shrubs of the same type as your crops.

Planting

Once a farmer builds the plots, it's time to plant. Go into the plot's q menu and select the type of seed to plant. Your farmers will then take care of the rest. Note that your farmers will not work the plot the whole year without being told to do so, you have to designate a crop for each season. You can designate each season ahead of time by using a, b, c, d from the plot selection screen. You do not have to plant the same thing each season, and some plants are only available during certain seasons.

Early on, you should focus your production on edible shrubs. Plump helmets, quarry bushes, cave wheat and sweet pods can only be planted underground, and pig tails and dimple cups produce cloth and dye respectively, but pig tails may be brewed and then cooked for food.

Outside farm plots can't grow cave crops, and since you can't bring outdoor seeds with you, designate a dwarf with Herbalism to gather plants outside until you get some suitable plants and brew them to get the seeds. Make sure the outside farm plot is designated in the same biome as where the plants were gathered. One will not be able to plant outside crops on an area of loam soil, for example.

Should you wish to plant nothing, you may select z "fallow" from the farm plot menu. If you possess potash, you may fertilize the field to increase yield.

Depending on the Grower skill of the farmer who planted it and whether the plot was fertilized, a crop may bear more or less fruit, or (as is sometimes the case with unskilled growers) it may even bear no fruit at all, thus wasting the seed. A higher yield will have many benefits along the whole assembly line of further food processing: workers will always work one one "stack" at a time – if (for example) a brewer has "sweet pod [5]" to work with, he will produce "dwarven rum [25]" and somehow squeeze it all into a single barrel.

Harvesting

A few weeks after planting a seed, a crop will sprout on that spot. Crops must be harvested within another few weeks or they will wither. By default, all dwarves will harvest, including children and even nobles. This may or may not be desirable: on the one hand, it makes sure that no crops will wither; on the other, it may lead to far away dwarves interrupting their work and running a long way in order to harvest a single plant.

Harvesting plants earns dwarves experience in the "growing" skill, so do not be surprised if all your dwarves soon become "dabbling" (or better) growers. Because of that, peasants with no other occupation become farmers almost automatically. Do not be afraid that they might trample your fields: the skill is of no importance during harvest, and no matter how much skill they earn they will still only plant crops if you allow them to in their individual "labor" menu.

If you chose to turn off "All dwarves harvest" in your orders menu, only dwarves with the "Farming (Fields)" labor enabled will harvest. However, they will often choose to plant new seeds instead of reaping the existing crop, so you risk that some amount may wither. After harvesting a plant (plucking it out of the ground), dwarves will carry it to the nearest stockpile unless you have "Dwarves ignore food" set in your orders menu, in which case they will leave the plant blinking on the field. If not moved to a stockpile within a few weeks, it will wither.

Caveats (warnings)

Food hauling

If you manage to get large-scale farming up and running, you will need to employ many food haulers in order for the food produced on your farms to be edible, even if it has already been harvested. This is because in the current version of the game, items tagged for pending tasks (including Move to Stockpile and Store in Barrel) are unavailable for any other use -- such as eating. An entire fortress of dwarves can starve while they wait for somebody to move the food.

One way to deal with this problem (at least during the heavy farming/harvesting seasons) is to disable hauling of both stone and wood in the top-level orders menu. This way, most of those jobs will clear out of the job queue, and you will be left mostly with "Store in Barrel" type jobs. You can also increase the number of dedicated food haulers.

See also

• Crops
• Irrigation
• Farmers