The game is based on feudalism, where a lord owns a lot of land and peasants work the land in exchange for protection.

Unless we change to a drastically different government structure this is how most farms will be run.

I think the majority of farmers, be they large or small farms will want to be independent. Lets face it, nobody wants to invest in this game only to be a serf. I think the developers should keep this in mind.

I imagine alot of people putting farms in their backyard. Alot of people already have plans to purchase 3 to 9 plots of land to dedicate to crops of some sort. Many people will want to use for alchemy purposes while others want to use for animal breeding purposes. It makes most sense for animal breeders to focus alot of their land on growing oats and wheat, whole alchemy people may focus on potatoes and carrots along with their garden thanks to the popular glotato meme. People who want to do weaving will probably focus a mojority of their crops on flax and cotton while lumberers may use their land for fruit trees and bushes. I plan to do it all so im going to have an orchard and grow 3 to 5 parcels on wheat and oat. I would like to see the best type of wood for my use, so i will do more than just apple trees

As a mayor who will be focusing on agriculture I do have a feeling about a few things relating to your questions (which are all great questions btw) and a few other opinion pieces:

• Yes I think NPCS will be the majority of farmers + a few players who like the "life skill" side of MMOs.
• I think most towns will have small farm land to "keep em going" but source the majority of their food from larger farms.

I also believe that the farmers will be the first group of people to experience heavy PvP. People sometimes call this griefing but i'd personally call it just plain PvP. So when you build your towns build it with that in mind.

Also keep in mind that if I was going to cripple a County I would first hit their food supply. Or go and talk to them and make them supply me vs them.

I feel there will be a lot of farming Rpers (me included) but I can't wait to see how it all works!.

The OP raises some interesting questions I've been pondering just for fun for quite some time myself, too.

I believe small farms will be the most numerous. Small farms will be close to settlements and work on a semi-subsitence based economy, supplying the village with the most basic of produce, which is mainly vegetables.
Small farms are a great way for players to start their personal narrative of "from rugs to richess".

Medium sized farms will also offer a mixed palette of produce but alredy start to specialise on different kinds of produce. These will be the main suppliers of settlements and industries, situated a bit away from settlements due to space requirements.

Large sized farms will be either highly specialised and/or contain a whole production chain in one place. There won't the that many large farms, though.
These will be situated inbetween towns, supplying more than one settlement with their produce.

I also like to point out that most households, including townsfolk, will most likely have their own little garden for fresh vegetables and also an animal or two for milk and meat.

Farmers will indeed be the most important social class in our feudal setting but also the most vulnerable one that need the most protection by their lords.

But that's just my opinion for the moment. :)

Rather than make a guess, I'll mention that my plan at present is to buy somewhere between 6 and 9 parcels. This will be split up for several purposes though. Some will be for planting, some will be for livestock, and 1 parcel dedicated for buildings like barns, crafting stations, worker housing, and my own villa.

As a solo mayor with other responsibilities, I expect I'll be hiring several NPC farm hands and eventually have a few family members or non-family PCs to help out. Like, maybe a player wants to manage a sheep herd in exchange for free housing and a percentage of the wool which they can use for their starting tailor business.

I am going to be very interested to see how many NPCs want to work in exchange for housing, food and a bit of profit.

While your logged off they will eat all animals and eat and sell all produce. Then they die. I imagine thats how NPCs will work lol. Just a joke i hope

Posted By markof at

And do you think the size of the farm will be linked to the type of farming product produced ? animal farming will be more on the larger size as will be grains and vegetables, orchards and vineyards will be more on the small size? or something else ?

do you think how farms organize will also have a major impact on the rest of population distribution ? like small farms will produce farming villages on a rather tight greed while large farms will on the other hand produce a lack of villages?

If we are talking about impact on population distribution / products diversity. I do not at all see a strong correlation with farm size.

A better classification will be:

1) Privately owned farms, where the farmer and the landowners are the essentially the same person.

2) Guild / organization owned farms, where profit maximization/produce or specific products as a part of production chain is a bigger drive.

3) Farms owned by nobles & aristocracy, which they aim to stabilize their domain by having a secure food source.

And in terms of NPC interaction, it seems they will be more active with type 1) & 3).

What are everyone's thoughts on co-operative and collective farming?

An agricultural cooperative, also known as a farmers' co-op, is a cooperative where farmers pool their resources in certain areas of activity.

A collective is farm or a group of farms organized as a unit and managed and worked cooperatively by a group of laborers under state supervision.

Would you consider these viable systems within certain locations and communities?

And if so, how would you organize and run them?

Nice, thank you for very interesting answers.

@kajoreh

Collective farming should not exist in CoE, at least not till we develop some other forms of political organization, with our starting one, there is no such thing as non private ownership, as nobles are both domain and private.

The co-operative farming on the other hand will totally exist, some settlements will naturally function on coop farming, others will organize guilds that will actually work as coop, the more expensive the needed infrastructures or the pooling of resources the more coop will exist.

@Thecutepig

i think there is a big difference between a farm and a garden, if lots of people will have a garden, no non farmer will have a farm.

@Roarer

quite some time ago now, i had a thread were we discussed tenant farming, i agree that in some cases we could see nobles controlling farms in order to regulate and control food production, but i think it will be rare. Not that nobles wont invest in agriculture, i for example plan on investing a lot in agriculture, but less in order to control food production or to regulate the food market than as a business, putting me more on the guild group. I might resort to taking farming control under my hands if things do not naturally turn the way i want, but before i resort to such extremities i'll have lots of avenues of incitative options to try.

i think you're right, most of the family type of farms will mostly run around self-sufficiency except if they specialize in "rare" products (fruits, flowers), butchery animals .... food conservation will be an issue so i do not see large fresh products farms except near very big settlement needing lots of food. The largest farms are going to be the ones focusing on long conservation products, maybe even big enough to include first transformation step. But i do not see large cow herds for example, too hard to kill and use/transform all the meat, unless, again, you are near a very big settlement starving for food.

Some sauces on your food for thought

Posted By markof

what do you think how farm land is going to be organized ?

I think you answered your own question here. As always in life, there is always more than one factor playing into these decisions. It wouldn't have to be or another of the examples you posed, it could be combinations of them that compound the benefits. The point I'm making is a giant swath of farm land could arise due to a lucky break in a nearby alchemy school. It could be because some noble has decided to build a new town from scratch. It could even come down the local weather.

Posted By markof

Do you think NPCs are going to be the majority of farmers (?)

IMO almost every serious household will have some kind of small scale farm. Its basically a requirement of running a family, that increases in need as your family and house grows larger. So while most players would say "no I'm not a farmer" you're still bound to find a hidden mushroom farm in their basement or a small patch of fertile ground they farm on. So I think the answer to your question is technically yes, if not just because NPCs out number players. It'll vary on biome as well. It could take a players guidance to grow crops in some locations. On top of that, NPCs might prefer the most efficient way of gathering over farming in some biomes or parcels. Honestly its really hard to discuss this in a meaningful way, as the answers can only gain accuracy if we get extra context.

Posted By markof

how to influence the organization of farms to promote one or an other of the types of farm ?

Making the seeds for a preferred crop widely available is one way to do this, but that decision also comes with its own consequences. Honestly if I were a noble who is trying to push the populace into growing a specific crop I'd try to create a Guild built on the premise of using that crop, as to maintain its value. There are lots of other tricks you can do as a noble as well... such as reducing someone's taxes or doing favours for anyone spotted growing your preferred crop.

Posted By Sagan at 04:50 AM - Tue Feb 05 2019

How many harvests we can expect to have in a year or RL week?

I suppose it could be calculated how many parcels/fields in general is required to support a hamlet(pop 10)/village (pop 25)/etc. Of course some areas produce more or have better harvests, but it would be good to have a general idea.

Has there been any word how many persons it takes to cultivate one field? If we know that we could calculate how many persons is required to support those "minimum" farms and how many can specialize in other duties.

Posted By Nahkahiiri at 08:19 AM - Tue Feb 05 2019

Has there been any word how many persons it takes to cultivate one field? If we know that we could calculate how many persons is required to support those "minimum" farms and how many can specialize in other duties.

In real life one rough rule of thumb is that you require one worker per hectare.
One hectare has 10,000 m² which translates to about 2.5 Elyrian parcels.

But I'd say it will be a bit different in CoE. I assume the amount of harvest per parcel will be rather low in the beginning.
It will also be important how many persons one farmer can support with his work. In medieval times one farmer could support 11 people. Now one farmer can support 300 people.

As an Elyrian year is 60 days if a corn field produce enough corn for 600 days of corn eating a field should be able to feed 10 characters.

Yes, yes, that is pure number game because as said you can not eat one and only one thing, and we do not know how long corn or any other food last before they start to rot.

But if we push just a little bit the numbers of Snipehunter and we add the farming promotion kits, we can end up with a farm built on two parcels of land, having three fields, one resting on grass, one growing grains and the last one growing vegetables, some sheep grazing providing meat and milk, chickens for meat and eggs and a few pigs for meat and we should have a family farm able to provide food for up to 10 characters.

Say the farm hosts 5 characters it would mean for a village to sustain itself that is 3, 2 parcels farms ( 9 fields ), are needed, even providing a little extra to store to withstand bad weather or harvest....

The questions are now,

• how many fields can that family work ? are those 2 the limit or can they add two or even more ? adding fields to each farm diminish the number of farm needed allowing for more occupations in the settlement
• with larger farms producing obvious extra food beyond the farmer's need, will food preservation be a critical issue ? implying the addition of food transformation infrastructures ? (like a smoke house, a mill, a slaughterhouse....)
• as characters are a finite resource, should any settlement build redundancy in its food production system ? say on the example we have 2 farms of 5 fields sustaining a village (9 fields needed) if for whatever reason one of those farming family is disturbed by players sparking in and not going on with the farming, the village would drop under its required food production, does that mean every settlement wisely built include one extra farm? more redundancy ?

Sure the sparking problem is not the only need for extra food production, as already mentioned, bad harvest, longest night, bad weather or rodents/insects destroying some of the stored food..... should all advocate for extra food production, food preservation/transformation and food storage to be incorporated at a settlement level, but wouldn't that mean, in the example above that the village would have 3 farms, dropping its non farming available population to 2 families ? extending those numbers beyond the village borders would bring us with a farming population of 50 to 75% of the total population ?