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[celebrinborn]

For my fortress's farming needs I am making 5x5 farms. So far I have 2 farmers and 10 farm plots. I'm not sure but I think that the farmers might be having trouble keeping up with the 10 plots. Do I have too many farms? How many plots should I have per farmer? Does the crop grown make a difference? Thanks

[Dynastia]

10 5x5 plots is way too much for almost any fort, you'll get swamped in plants. I'd suggest cutting it back to two and seeing how your guys manage.

[Farmerbob]

10 5x5 plots is way too much for almost any fort, you'll get swamped in plants. I'd suggest cutting it back to two and seeing how your guys manage.

This.

One farmer will have a hard time handling 2 5x5 plots until they get significantly skilled.

If you have a specialist farmer, make sure to disable every single one of their other skills, and make sure you have a stockpile right next to the farms for them to drop harvested things into.

[Girlinhat]

5x5 = 25
25x10 = 250

1,200 ticks daily, 30 days per month, 3 months per season = 108,000 ticks
108,000 / 250 = 432
432 * 2 = 864
The farmers must work faster than 864 ticks per tile to fill up all squares.  Since a day is 1,200 ticks, that's 72% of the time spent farming.  Even giving them very short time to run between seed stockpiles and harvesting old crops, we'll call that 75%.

Have you ever known a dwarf to spend less than 25% of their time slacking off?

[nightwhips]

5x5 = 25
25x10 = 250

1,200 ticks daily, 30 days per month, 3 months per season = 108,000 ticks
108,000 / 250 = 432
432 * 2 = 864
The farmers must work faster than 864 ticks per tile to fill up all squares.  Since a day is 1,200 ticks, that's 72% of the time spent farming.  Even giving them very short time to run between seed stockpiles and harvesting old crops, we'll call that 75%.

Have you ever known a dwarf to spend less than 25% of their time slacking off?

You need more farmers, son.

[Mushroo]

It will help if you enable "all dwarfs harvest" in the (o)rders screen (on by default) and place a statue/meeting area next to your fields. Then your idlers will help with the harvest and the Planters can concentrate on planting.

Farm plot size is a personal decision and is affected by several factors including:

1. Skill of your Planters
2. Whether you plan to fertilize with potash
3. Do you have other sources of food/drink/cloth, or is farming your life-line for all these industries?
4. Are you merely accommodating the needs of your fortress, or do you want to export surplus agricultural products?

Personally, I find that a single 3x5 farm plot is sufficient for food/drink until the arrival of the first caravan. 15 tiles is an optimum size for fertilizing (4 potash per season). During that first winter, I decide what my farming goals are, and increase as necessary. If farming is a secondary industry, then 15 tiles may be permanently sufficient; in a crazy-plump-helmets-coming-out-my-ears type of fortress, I might go as large as 10x10 (100 tiles).

[AWdeV]

Why would you ever fertilize? It's hardly worth the bother and it's easier to drown in plants than it is to have too small a stock.

[TinyPirate]

Another problem with so many plants is that you will fill all available storage. I had to turn of food growing for a year one fort simply so I could free up enough containers and storage space for food. I couldn't build pots fast enough to keep up with the farmers! Lol.

[Mushroo]

Why would you ever fertilize? It's hardly worth the bother and it's easier to drown in plants than it is to have too small a stock.

Fertilizer is cheap (1 wood plus labor per 4 farm tiles) and the benefit is huge.

For example:
Without fertilizer: 8 rock nuts+8 farm plot squares+8 planting labor+8 harvesting labor+8 process plant (bag) labor+8 bags+ = 8 bags quarry bush leaf [2] + 2 cooking labors = 2 quarry bush leaf roasts [8]
With fertilizer: 2 potash+4 rock nuts+4 farm plot squares+4 planting labor+4 harvesting labor+4 process plant (bag) labor+4 bags = 4 bags quarry bush leaf [4] + 1 cooking labor = 1 quarry bush leaf roast [16]

So you see we got the same finished product output using half the space, labor, and raw materials, for the cost of 2 potash (2 wood + 2 burn wood to ash labor + 2 ash to potash labor).

Same applies to all related industries, for example if you fertilize your pig tails, you can make twice as many socks. Also fertilizer can help solve stockpile problems; if your stacks are twice as big then your stockpiles can be half the size.

[NW_Kohaku]

There is no reason to ever fertilize.  Farm plots without fertilizer are infinite resources for absolutely free.  Money for nothing, as it were.

A single 5x5 plot running quarry bushes and plump helmets with a single farmer is enough to feed 50 dwarves if you really stretch it.  I tend to run a 5x5 underground and a 5x5 aboveground field for 80 dwarves with two planters very comfortably. 

[Mushroo]

There is no reason to ever fertilize.  Farm plots without fertilizer are infinite resources for absolutely free.  Money for nothing, as it were.

A single 5x5 plot running quarry bushes and plump helmets with a single farmer is enough to feed 50 dwarves if you really stretch it.  I tend to run a 5x5 underground and a 5x5 aboveground field for 80 dwarves with two planters very comfortably.

I wouldn't say "no reason." As with all decisions Dwarf Fortress, it is a balance of available labor/resources.

Abundant wood, scarce seeds, small irrigated farm plot, legendary potash maker migrant---fertilizer to the rescue!

Lots of space, lots of seeds, lots of labor, lots of barrels/pots/bags? No reason to fertilize!

Personally I always use fertilizer in the first year because it helps grow industries when resources are scarce. For example, milled items are highly profitable, but bags are always in short supply; fertilizer means I need half as many bags to get the equal output in time for the first caravan.

A few years into the fortress, fertilizer is less important, I agree.

[NW_Kohaku]

Seeds are never scarce - you are basically only saved by the ceiling on them.  You also only need 5x10 plot spaces to feed an entire fortress (which is smaller than the workshops and stockpiles that you will need to build to capitalize off of farming, like farmer's workshops, stills, kitchens, etc.), and irrigation is unnecessary in the super-easy farming of the current versions. 

So no, you use fertilizer because you want to, not because you have to, as there is no advantage to the extra steps and resource consumption it takes to using fertilizer.  Farm plots take an incredibly limited amount of space, incredibly limited amount of labor, and produce infinite resources for absolutely no cost.

But if you want to talk about ways to make fertilizer actually useful or even necessary, there have been threads on that -
The original Improved Farming thread, which became a giant meandering mess, and
Improved Farming, Rebooted, where I reformatted the idea.

Feel free to ressurect one of those threads if you want to talk about fertilizer, there.

It's also on the devlog near the bottom (search "Farming Imrpovements") of the list as a ESV winner, although it doesn't seem as though Toady has figured out how detailed a system for fertilizer he actually wants.

[Mushroo]

I agree that embarking with 200 (the limit) of each seed you would not need fertilizer. But if you do the default Play Now embark with 5 of each seed then potash can make the difference between harvesting 5-10 of each plant or 10-20 plants in your 1st generation. Just for the cost of a few logs. In the first year of a new fortress, barrels and bags always seem to be in high demand. If I can store twice as much booze in my barrels and twice as much flour in my bags, then my woodcutters, carpenters, weavers, and clothiers will be grateful (and freed up for other tasks).

Also I admit that I really enjoy the fun of making the most valuable trade goods possible. So when my legendary grower + potash yields a stack of whip vine [9] I will mill it into whip vine flour [45] and then Forbid it. When my Cook is sufficiently Legendary, I will then un-forbid my highest-value flour/sugar/syrup/leaf stocks and make some crazy-expensive Roasts. Fertilizer plus legendary cook plus legendary grower has an amazing stacking effect; try it and see!

[MehMuffin]

Later on in my forts I like to stockpile huge amounts of potash that I'll probably never use just in case an unverifiable, unpredictable event that hasn't happened to me yet, and probably will never happen, but could potentially happen happens, and I need superboostrd farming. Also, it helps get rid of excess ash that was going to be used for soap making.

[Girlinhat]

I like to fertilize when I've got the spare labor (and let's be honest, we all have migrants).  I'll put some effort into a really good, small farm plot for textiles or such.  Not really worth it, but it's nice to think about at least.  And there's nothing like Dwarven Wine [40] barrel to cheer you up!

I usually do 2 farm plots 10x10 each.  One does edibles, the other does textiles.  Since these are above ground, they grow strawberries, prickle berries, and fisher berries, with 2 seasons on strawberries, and the textiles does alternating blade weed and rope reed.  This produces a LOT of stuff.  To compensate, I only have 1 stockpile per product, each 10x10 with max barrels.  I disable these plants in all other stockpiles.  When it overflows, I let it rot in the field or sell off some loose produce.  If I'm feeling generous, I let the macaque take some stacks

Stockpile control is the critical part though.  Keep your strawberry and prickle berry piles separate, or else you end up without any prickles!  Then "is tired of the same booze" and big issues.