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40d:Farming
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Farming is the most universal source of food in Dwarf Fortress. On maps with plentiful shrubs, animals or bodies of water, plant gathering, hunting or 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 some have other uses.
Finding farmland
You cannot plant seeds on a bare rock floor, only on mud or soil. The easiest way to farm, by far, is to find some soft, arable soil, which is available in great quantity outside the fortress on most maps (the notable exceptions being mountainous maps). If arable soil is unavailable, you will need to set up an irrigation scheme to deposit mud on the bare rock, which can then have farm plots placed upon it.
Aboveground or underground?
You can plant either underground or aboveground, depending on the type of plants you want to grow. The starting seeds your dwarves may bring with them can only be planted underground. If you want to farm aboveground, you will need to gather seeds from outdoor shrubs, which can then be planted.
The farm plot should be either entirely above ground or entirely subterranean. A mixed-class farm plot will allow you to choose any crop for planting, but the chosen crop will be planted only on tiles capable of growing it. Worse, planters will not skip over the infertile tiles, leaving the rest of the plot fallow whether it can support the crop or not.
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. Use u and k to increase the size of the plot, and m and h to decrease it. When the plot is sized and positioned correctly, 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 is 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 if you're not careful can lead to flooding the next time the field is irrigated. 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.
A 10x20 plot should, with several dedicated farmers, provide enough food to feed a full 200-dwarf fortress.
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, and you have to do it again after the year is over. 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 or plump helmets, although note that the seeds for the former can't be brought in your starting supplies, and the latter can only be planted underground. Quarry bushes, cave wheat and sweet pods require processing before they can be eaten, and pig tails and dimple cups produce cloth and dye respectively.
If you choose to plant shrubs, designate a dwarf with herbalism to gather plants outside until you get some suitable plants, then brew them to get the seeds. Make sure the outside farm plot is designated in the same biome that the plants were gathered from.
Should you wish to plant nothing, you can select z "fallow" from the farm plot menu. If you possess potash, you can 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. Note that each time you harvest you will get a higher yield than the amount you planted so your farming can expand as your fortress grows.
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.
Storage
It can be difficult to manage barrels and bags for storage of food and seeds; forts with limited wood can have their supply overwhelmed. Combat this with Cooking food to consolidate it into larger stacks that won't rot outside of a barrel (just need to be indoors on food stockpile)