Whether you’re looking for something new to export or you actually care about your citizens’ diets, crops in Manor Lords are important. However, while you can build a farmhouse and field anywhere, some spots are better than others. So, let’s go over how you can maximize your yield by managing your soil’s fertility.
How to see soil fertility in Manor Lords
Seeing soil fertility is easy but a bit unintuitive in Manor Lords at the time of writing. You may have glimpsed it while building, but getting back to it might be a little out of memory.
To see your soil fertility, click on the construction tab on your quick bar. Without clicking any further, you can see a list of data views on the right-hand side of the screen. These include your soil’s suitability for different types of crops: Emmer, Flax, Barley, and Rye. They’ll each be different, but they’re generally linked. Rye is the most tolerant of poor soil quality, but you have to unlock it.
The soil quality affects how much yield you’ll get based on the size of your fields. If you don’t have good soil anywhere, you can still plant crops, but you can’t expect to get much out of them without intervention.
How to maximize soil fertility in Manor Lords
The good news is that there is a way to improve and maximize your soil fertility in Manor Lords, even if you start off with some bad ground.
First, you’ll want to set up a crop rotation on your fields. There are slots for three years, which is somewhat frustrating, but it’s workable. It might be tempting to put a different crop in each of the slots, but don’t do it. Simply rotating your crops will help preserve your soil fertility, but it will eventually deplete.
What you want to do is set one of the slots to “fallow.” This essentially means that the field isn’t used that year and is instead just left alone. While this means you won’t get any crops from it that year, it allows the soil to restore some of its fertility.
Because of this, you’ll want multiple fields working on different crops at all times. While one is fallowing, two more can be working. Then, the next year, the dormant field can move on to the next one. This means you will always have active fields while still allowing them to rest.
However, this really only slows down the depletion of the soil. If you want to actually restore it, I recommend researching the “Fertilization” skill. You gain a development point every time your town increases in level. You’ll need two points to get to fertilization.
Once you have this, you can create the upgrade a field with “Fence Up” from its properties menu. What this does is make the field serve as a pasture for sheep whenever it is set to fallow. This means you will also need to create a Sheep Farm and assign families to work there. You will also need a Livestock Trading Post in order to actually import sheep.
If you have sheep and you have a field fenced up and you find the sheep aren’t being taken to graze there, it’s probably because you built a dedicated pasture. Demolish the pasture, and the sheep should be taken to a field.
Having a field work as a pasture restores soil fertility measurably but very slowly. It may take several fallow cycles before you see meaningful change, but it’s the only way, currently, to really take terrible soil and create something liveable.
