If you read nothing else, read this.

The four most important things with farms are:

1. Never plant a field that has insufficient nutrients for that crop. A shortfall of just one point in one nutrient dramatically reduces the yield.
   
2. Complete sowing each field as quickly as possible at the beginning of March. If at all possible, aim to complete all sowing by the end of March. Each week's delay reduces the yield by 5%.
   
3. Ensure every field is harvested before the end of November, otherwise the remaining standing crop is lost. Aim to gather in all the crops by the time the snow arrives, otherwise it is progressively lost over the Winter.
   
4. If you have more than three maximum-sized fields planted with crops (total area 7500 or more), you will need a granary and/or warehouse to move harvested crops into, otherwise the farm will fill up and you won't be able to gather in any more crops from the fields.

The farming year is divided into distinct seasons. The most important date to remember is the end of February. If you do not select what crops you want to grow in each field before the end of February, the game will automatically grow whatever you grew last year without any possibility of changing it, even if the field has not yet started to be sown (there is an exception for fallow fields, which I will mention later). The other important dates are the end of May, for when you need to have started sowing any crops you want to grow that year, early August for the beginning of harvest and the end of November for making sure that all the crops are harvested.

Winter (December to February):
Nothing grows. No cows graze. The soil does not deteriorate or recover. Use this time to plan what to grow the following summer, and do not miss the cut-off date at the end of February for assigning crops to each field (if you are doing it manually, without a farm manager).

Spring (March to May):
This is the time for ploughing and sowing. It is also a period when crops grow, and the earlier a crop is sown, the longer it has to grow and the higher the yield. Any field you want to use must have a crop selected and be activated before the end of May (note: do it in this order; select the crop first, then activate the field). Fallow fields recover their nutrients during this time.

Summer (June to early August)
Crops continue to grow till mid-July, when they start to ripen. Ripening always starts in mid-July regardless of when a field was actually sown. Fallow fields recover their nutrients during this time.

Autumn (early August to November)
This is the season for harvest and gathering in. It is important that harvesting is completed before the end of November, otherwise whatever crops are still standing will be lost. Bundles of harvested crops will remain in the fields for another week till the snow covers the fields, but will then slowly start disappearing. However, labourers can continue bringing in the ever-decreasing remainder throughout the winter. Fallow fields without grazing cattle do not recover nutrients in the autumn, but fields with cattle grazing still continue their recovery. Cows are brought in at the beginning of November.

A maximum-sized field with all the nutrients the crop needs, sown right at the beginning of March using 20 labourers, and harvested and gathered in before the end of November will yield approximately 3250 of that crop, except for sunflower, which only yields about 2950. Smaller fields have smaller yields in proportion to their size. With flax, you get a bonus 10% of linseed.

Yield is affected by not having enough nutrients in the soil (this has a devastating effect), and how long the crop has to grow. The growth period is about 20 weeks from the beginning of March to mid-July, and begins when the field is fully sown and the last labourer has left the field. Any delay reduces the growing time and hence they yield by about 5% a week or 20% a month. Delays can be caused by not having enough labourers, trying to plant too many fields in a farm, the farm being a long way from people's houses, the field being a long way from the farm, and ploughing.

A "full" period of growth with no shortage of nutrients is shown by a growth bar about 2/3 of the full length. There appears to be no way of increasing this, and it does not seem to vary much from year to year. There are no bumper harvests and no crop failures.

Labourers
Sowing, harvesting and gathering in can all be done by labourers, and there is no need to employ workers for these tasks unless you want to maximize your labour force, which may be a good thing to do in the sowing season. Field work has a higher priority than most other labouring work in the village, and labourers will leave other jobs to sow, harvest and gather in. You don't need to change any settings for this to happen.

Sowing a maximum-sized field takes about 3.2 labourer-months, meaning that 20 labourers can sow a field in just under 5 days, and 6 fields can be sown before the end of March. However, to provide 20 labourers continuously, you will need about 40 unemployed villagers, since each labourer only works about half of the time.

Harvesting and gathering in the crop from a maximum-sized field takes about 7.8 labourer-months, meaning that 20 labourers can harvest and gather in a field in about 12 days, which means they can harvest and gather in about 9 fields before the end of November. Alternatively, if you have fewer fields, you can manage with fewer labourers and don't need so many unemployed villagers in the Autumn.

If you have one or more ploughs, you will need to turn on Supply for oxen, and set quantities of hay and water in Resource Supply, and I recommend you set Labourers by hand to fetch the hay and water into the farm (these are all set by default, but you might like to check it to make sure). So long as the farm has hay and water, you don't need a worker to feed the oxen.

Workers
Workers are needed for

• Ploughing. Employ one worker per plough at the beginning of March (ideally you should employ them at the end of February, to ensure they are at work at the very beginning of March). It takes about 12 days to plough a field.
  
• Threshing. Wheat, buckwheat, sunflower and flax all need to be threshed. One worker takes about a month to thresh about 700 of any crop.

When workers aren't ploughing or threshing, they will assist with sowing, harvesting and gathering in.

The rate of threshing is important, because a farm has a storage limit of 10,000. This can go from empty at the beginning of August to full in mid-September, and if crops need threshing, they cannot be moved out of the farm to create space for more crops to be brought in. If you are growing lots of crops that need threshing, you may need to employ up to three workers to thresh crops quickly enough so they can be removed from the farm, creating space for more crops to be brought in from the fields.

Farm Manager
The farm manager's only role is to manage crop rotations.

Each field has three nutrients: red, blue and green. It does not matter what these nutrients represent, but what does matter is that each crop needs a certain amount of each, listed here:
If a field has these numbers or higher for each nutrient, then you can grow the crop in the field. Additional nutrients have no effect, except that they will still be in the soil for growing crops the following year. Soil nutrient levels cannot go above 100.

Sowing a field without the right amount of nutrients has a devastating effect on yield, even with a shortfall of only 1 or 2 points in just one nutrient. A field of potatoes that had only 48 red instead of 50 produced 1788 potatoes. The same field with full nutrients planted in identical test conditions produced 3275 potatoes. That lack of 2 nutrient points resulted in a 45% reduction in yield.

Nutrient Depletion
If a crop is planted as quickly as possible at the beginning of March, each soil nutrient will be depleted as shown in the table above. Nutrients are consumed from when sowing is finished until harvest time in early August, and if you sow a crop late, then the depletion will be less. Sowing at the beginning of April, for example, rather than at the beginning of March, only depletes about 80% of the nutrients shown in the table, more or less matching the reduced yield because of the shorter growing season. However, the field still needs the full amount of nutrients shown in the table before you start sowing, even though you won't use them all. If there is any shortfall the yield will suffer, no matter how late in the Spring you plant the crop.

Nutrient Replenishment
Nutrients are replenished by

• ploughing: 15 of each nutrient added
• leaving a field fallow: 77 of each nutrient added (15 of each nutrient added per month from the beginning of March till early August)
• leaving a field fallow and grazing cattle on it: 100 of each nutrient added (15 of each nutrient added per month for as long as cattle are grazing). The number of cattle does not matter, and a single calf will replenish the same amount of nutrients as 20 cows.

Note that fields that are not activated do not replenish nutrients, nor do fields waiting to be sown.

What to do about Insufficient Nutrients
You can plough, to restore 15 of each nutrient, or you can set the field to fallow, perhaps building a new field instead, but if the shortfall is only a few points, there is a cheat:

• Before the end of February, deactivate the field. This is to prevent cows from grazing.
  
• Set the crop to Fallow.
  
• As soon March begins, activate the field. Nutrients will now replenish at 15 per month.
  
• As soon as there are enough nutrients for the crop you want to grow, deactivate the field, set the crop and then activate the field.

Sowing is the most important time of year in Ostriv. The growing season is about 20 weeks, from the beginning of March to the middle of July. If you sow a field a week late, the yield will be reduced by 5%. If you don't sow it until the beginning of April, the yield will be reduced by about 20% and if you leave it till the last minute and don't sow till the end of May, the yield will be reduced by about 65%. To maximise crop yields, you should aim to have 20 labourers working continuously at each farm from the beginning of March until all the fields are sown. To provide 20 labourers over a long period of time, you need about 40 unemployed villagers, since each labourer only works for about half of the time.

You should also limit the number of fields you sow in each farm. With 20 labourers, you can sow about 6 fields before the end of March, and this is a good compromise. If sowing continues into April, yields will be reduced by at least 20%, although the amount of work you need to put in sowing and harvesting remains exactly the same.

Ploughing takes about 12 days. If you plough every field, this means that sowing won't start till March 13th, and you'll have lost 8% of the yield before you even start to sow. On the other hand, if you have, for example, six fields, and only three of them are ploughed, then the sowers will spend about 15 days sowing the first three fields, so ploughing won't delay sowing any further - provided you have enough ploughs and workers. Ideally, you should have one plough per ploughed field, but in the scenario I have just mentioned, you could manage with just two ploughs.

You generally need to change the crop in each field every winter, otherwise you won't have enough of one or more nutrients. You can do this manually each winter, or employ a manager and save a crop rotation cycle for each field, and you can do this either from the farm building panel, or by clicking on each field.

Manual Crop Rotation
A field can be changed as soon as harvesting is finished, even if there are still bundles of crops waiting to be gathered in. Fallow fields without cows grazing can be changed as soon as harvesting starts, and fallow fields with cows can be changed as soon as the cows have been moved to the cowshed in early November. Between the beginning of December and the end of February, all fields can have their crop changed.

To change a crop, either click on the field or use the field list in the farm. Click on the crop to change it. You can see the current field nutrients (and they won't change before the field is sown), and when you click on the crop to change it, you can see the nutrient requirements for all the crops.

Using a Farm Manager
If you employ a farm manager, you can add new crops to the right, and they will be cycled through in turn, year by year. The current/next crop is highlighted (although this is a little difficult to see - the background is a little darker), and it moves to the next year as soon as harvesting is over, or for fallow fields, as soon as harvesting begins or as soon as the cows have been moved to the cowshed. In the Winter, the highlighted crop is what will be grown next year, not what was grown last year.

At the end of the cycle, it moves back to the beginning again.

You can always add more years/crops to the right (up to six years in total), and you can always change crops or delete years except for the highlighted one. You can only change the highlighted crop before the beginning of March, and you cannot delete the highlighted year at any time, although you can use the Next button to move the highlight to the next year (or, by repeated pressing, to any other year) if you do this before the beginning of March.

If you select to plough a field, the field will be ploughed every year (except in fallow years).

Working out crop rotations can be tricky, particularly if you cannot tell whether a field will be grazed by cows or not. You might, for example, think that sunflower-buckwheat-fallow is a good cycle, and it would be if you knew that cows would graze the field in the fallow year, since the buckwheat and sunflower nutrient requirements added together do not exceed 100. However, if you cannot guarantee that cows will graze, then you will be short of nutrients after the first three-year cycle, since a fallow year without cows only restores 77 of each nutrient. Alternatively, you could plough the field each year. In some ways, not using a farm manager is easier, since you don't need to work everything out in advance.

If you sack the farm manager, each field will stay locked on its current year, and you will have to change the crop manually each Winter.

The farm building panel allows you to prioritise the order in which fields get ploughed, sown and harvested - simply click on a field and drag it up or down. You can change the prioritisation at any time, even mid-way through sowing or harvest, although everyone will complete their existing task before paying any attention to the new priorities.

The game deals with each field in strict rotation, with villagers moving on to the next field only when there is nothing left for them to do in the previous field (although other villagers may still be finishing off work).

Ploughing starts immediately in early March if you have enough ploughs and workers, but if you have more fields to plough than you have ploughs (or workers to drive them) then they will be ploughed in the order you have set. In the meantime, other villagers will sow fields that don't require ploughing, again, in order. As soon as a field is ploughed, this will become the next priority for villagers if it is higher up the list than the field they are currently working on (but each villager will finish their current task first).

From this, it should be clear that your prioritisation for sowing should be those crops you need the most of, as these will have the longest growing season.

For harvesting, you might prioritise the fields in a particular order if you are desperate for one crop in particular, to make sure it gets harvested first. Apart from that, it is a good idea to set priorities so that potato and hemp fields come between crops that need threshing, as this gives the farm workers more time to thresh without the farm filling up. If, for example, the first four fields all need threshing, the farm workers might get overwhelmed, and there will be no space left in the farm for the harvest from the remaining fields.

Prioritize gathering
This is a check box in the farm building panel. What it does is change the sequence of jobs during harvest. Leave it unchecked and workers will harvest each field in turn, then gather in each field in turn (a moderate amount of gathering in is done during harvesting – if a worker happens be be returning to the farm from a field, they will carry a crop bundle – but workers won't go into a field specifically to pick up crops). With this box checked. workers will gather in the harvest as soon as the crop is cut.

If you check this box, the farm will fill up with harvested crops faster, and this risks hitting the storage limit. Unless you have a particular reason to prioritise gathering, it is better to leave this box unchecked, to give farm workers more of a chance to thresh crops, and warehouse and granary workers more of a chance to remove crops from the farm, so that more crops can be brought in.

Cattle Grazing
If you have one or more cowsheds with Use fallow field if available checked (and this always should be checked), but there are more fallow fields than there are cowsheds. then each cowshed will send cows to the field with the nearest geographical centre (not the one with the nearest entrance). If you want to make certain that a particular field will not be used for grazing, de-activate it until the cows have all gone out to some other field.