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[Zaranthan]

Aagh.. farming used to be so simple, now my dwarves starve even faster than before.
Need to reread this several times before I understand the process.

It's doable, but the priorities have changed. Bring about 50 food and 80 booze, that should leave you enough time to dig out, flood, dry, build, plant, harvest, and brew a farm plot before you run out.

[MightionNY]

Once I've made an underground farm by flooding it once, will it ever dry out?

[Torgan]

Nope, the mud will stay unless you smooth the stone or build something on top of the mud then remove the building.  I tend to flood my farms again just for giggles and to see how well my farmers swim but it's not strictly necessary.

[h.scorpio]

My dwarves don't seem to be able to handle more than one farm at a time.
There are about a dozen dedicated to farmwork, most of the time there are at least 3-4 idle dwarfes among them, so availability of free workers should not be an issue.
There are also lots of spare seeds which don't get used, the dwarves especially loathe anything but Plump Helmets.

I have 4 plots of about 8x8 tiles each with varying crops and only one of them is being farmed, it always seems to be the first plot set up that gets all the attention and only Plump Helmets are being planted there (3 games in a row now).

Are my plots too big? With idle dwarves and unused seeds lying around there seems to be some kind of buggy behaviour, but is there some kind of workaround?

[TolyK]

too big. try making smaller plots

[h.scorpio]

Yep, this worked. It seems the dwarves refuse to work on another plot until the first one was completely done, which would never be the case. They even stopped working once they ran out of seeds for the first one. Also plump helmets seem to have a higher priority when it comes to planting.

[Sarudak]

This should be updated now that .19 has removed the water requirements for farming on soil.

[greycat]

I haven't learned all the changes in .19 (it's a HUGE set of changes), but I've updated the top post.  Somewhat.

[Buttery_Mess]

Don't forget that you don't have to farm on soil. You can still irrigate a patch of rock deep within the bowels of the Earth to farm on.

[hapes]

Is clay not considered soil?  I am attempting to grow some above-ground plants on the ground (which is sandy clay), and it says "No seeds available for this location".  I would presume it's due to being in the mountains?  I have above-ground seeds (17 wild strawberry seeds, 8 fisher berry seeds, etc).  I'll try over in the area where I harvested them, maybe that's it, but more detail would be nice about what constitutes a viable area for above-ground planting.

[ETA:]

I was able to make a plot that would accept plants where I gathered the original plants in the first place.  Probably is indeed the Mountains not allowing above ground farming.  A little annoying.

[Renzuko]

lol derp, yupp, you cant grow stuff on mountains -.-;; i built myself a farm on ground, not mountain level, and it let me plant stuff, now to find a good area to make my farm lol

herm...i dont know why, but randomly the plots say "cant grow things" -.-;;

[greycat]

I've added a note about biomes (clay, Mountains, etc.).  Also, bug #4164 discusses the issues with Mountain biome clay.

[atomfullerene]

I'd like to see the op topic expanded to include other agricultural pursuits...pastures, birds, & beekeeping. 

[greycat]

The wiki is better suited to explaining various related industries.  The major reason for this thread was the inundation of the forum with people who couldn't figure out how to get farming to work, particularly during the time when underground farming on soil was broken.

[Mythologique]

I am a bit confused on one thing. So, I made a cute little farm plot one level underground, channeled above it, zoned a pond, dwarves poured water down, water dried and left the tiles with "a slight dusting of mud" etc and the plots were also marked as outside but, when I tried to build a plot there it said no mud or soil is available. Any ideas?