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[lollius]

I spawned in a haunted area with lots of lakes,then I dug a cave system with like 30 or 50 10-10 farmplots
But now everything got unmeanagable ||

Can you guys pls tell me the size of a farmplot which keeps my(7) dorfs fed and drunk (you can create booze out of plump helmets right?)

ps funny!dorf means in german village lol!

[Dariush]

30 or 50 10x10 farmplots as in 100 tiles of farms, and 3000 to 5000 total? 
Weeeeeeeeell... I've seen 45 tiles sustain about 30 dwarves, so to answer you question... probably 2000 to 3300?

[lollius]

do you mean with 45 4 10/10 and 1 5/5 ?
Thx!

[Dariush]

No, I meant 5 plots, each 3x3
The list of things you could screw up:
1) You didn't bring any seeds or plump helmets
2) You cooked or brewed all your plump helmets
3) You DON'T brew any plump helmets
4) You didn't order the farms to start growing plump helmets
5) You don't have any dorfs with farming/brewing orders
6) Farm plots aren't built yet
7) You planned farm plots, but don't have access to them
You didn't irrigate the farm plots
9) Something looking suspiciously like GCS got in between your farms and your fortress
Well... that about covers it. Good luck figuring the easiest part of DF out! 

[NewSheoth]

Strange. I usually have only one, sometimes two max-sized farm plots feed my entire fortress with ease. I quickly jump to 50-70 dwarves in most cases, so I think one max-sized farm plot would be enough to feed your dwarves for a long time.

[Jake]

I find that one 3x3 plot for each crop is as much as you'll ever need unless you're challenging yourself not to import any food at all.

[Daetrin]

Too much farm plot area will actually hurt your production as dwarves spend too much time planting and not enough time harvesting or processing.

[Raufgar]

Not to mention, you'll quickly get a foodsplosion at your fort, especially if you have various food types grown. I am running on 6 plots of 5 x 5 farms, 3 for food and 3 for pig tails, and I have 120 dwarves. I have had to first expand my food stockpile twice, then add a 2nd and 3rd stockpile elsewhere, to handle the flood. My barrel production cannot keep up with the demand of storing food AND booze. Converting my pig tails into thread pulls down my FPS as every available dwarf starts hauling them.

Points to Note: (I know, I plan to follow them myself, but I'm lazy )

1) Allow your fields to go fallow during certain seasons (i.e. only allowing food to grow during Spring & Summer)
2) Cut down on the number of fields you have, since your farmers will quickly reach legendary status and will grow tons of food (5-6 of a food on each square of farm) on the same plot of land.
3) Decentralized food stockpiles
4) Make barrels and bins out of materials other than wood (if you're on a wooded area like my current fort). It has been suggested that low value metals should suffice, especially lead, it seems items stored in lead barrels or bins tend to not scatter very far if you abandon and reclaim your fort.
5) Assign only certain dwarves with the hauling job, or better yet, assign them specific hauling jobs (e.g. only hauls food, only hauls stone, etc.)

[Nameless Archon]

When establishing farming, I dig (at least) two 11x11 rooms. Into each of these, I place a set of four 2x10 farm plots, separated by a single tile. I use one set for underground farm plants, and the other is excavated to the surface and the ceiling rebuilt to support underground growing of surface plants. Typically, I end up with far more than I need because of the scale of this farming operation, so I tailor the outputs to match current demands. (Rope reeds for cloth, pods for syrup, quarry bushes for roast preparation, wheat for flour, helmets because we're talking about dwarves.)

For example, once I've run four plots of rope reeds for six-ish seasons, I've got more than enough rope reeds to process, weave and sew into cloth items, so I switch the farm to producing sun berries, or longland grass, or fisher berries, etc. If I find I've got too much in my plant stockpiles, I shut down farming production, switch dedicated planters to processors/brewers/cooks, brew/cook/process down the remaining plant stockpiles. The net result is a couple thousand prepared meals and servings of booze, many rows of bins full of cloth, emergency food stores full of syrup and flour that I haven't tapped, an empty plant stockpile, and farm plots waiting for me to convert them back to use.

When I did this on my last farm, I had a thousand servings of dwarven syrup, two-thousand servings of booze (mostly sunshine), and nearly two-thousand prepared meals. This is enough to keep 250 dwarves fed for a year, and boozed for half a year, before we consider syrup/flour stockpiles or additional food/booze production during that timeframe. I had only 58 dwarves when I cut off production and assigned them to 'useful' tasks. This production was managed with four growers, only one of whom began with any significant skill.

My general recommendation is to note that dwarves need 2 meals and 4 drinks per season. Once farming stabilizes (eg, around your first wave of migrants) try to keep a year's supply stockpiled, so that you have time to start production back up (plant-harvest-brew, at least a season's worth of delay) without crashing. Setting aside some dwarven syrup and flour (plant extract stockpile, kitchen set NOT to cook) will ensure that you have ample supplies of food backlogged even once your plants are dealt with. If you opt for the "feast-or-famine" method of farming, figure out what you want your farmers doing in the off season - I usually have mine get to dabbling in weaponsmithing/armorsmithing, and then spend their time handling furnace operation, pump operation, wood burning, sand collection, etc.

[NewSheoth]

Nice, thanks for the pointers everyone! I didn't bother with advanced farming techniques, just dug out a room for a farm and assigned plump helmets to it. Now I will reconsider my farming.

[lastrix]

small note to all:
don't build huge food stockpile, it's better to make stockpile for prepeared food (no barrels ), booze and liquids (except lye), fat and your meat with plants and flours, better make more categorized stockpiles, so you won't need to stop production, but planters work would go to trash, at least this technique is failsafe.

[Nameless Archon]

don't build huge food stockpile, it's better to make stockpile for prepeared food (no barrels ), booze and liquids (except lye), fat and your meat with plants and flours, better make more categorized stockpiles, so you won't need to stop production, but planters work would go to trash, at least this technique is failsafe.

Categorized stockpiles (for food or anthing else) are good, but allowing your planters to keep running while they're not harvesting (because your stockpiles are full/missing) is just throwing away seeds. Better to set them to go fallow than let them churn your stockpile of seeds into rotten plants.

Seeds aren't infinite - there's a cap of 200 seeds per crop. Four 2x10 plots can strip a full stockpile of one crop to zero seeds remaining in under three seasons. If you're not going to mind the shop, close it down.

[NewSheoth]

don't build huge food stockpile, it's better to make stockpile for prepeared food (no barrels ), booze and liquids (except lye), fat and your meat with plants and flours, better make more categorized stockpiles, so you won't need to stop production, but planters work would go to trash, at least this technique is failsafe.

Categorized stockpiles (for food or anthing else) are good, but allowing your planters to keep running while they're not harvesting (because your stockpiles are full/missing) is just throwing away seeds. Better to set them to go fallow than let them churn your stockpile of seeds into rotten plants.

Seeds aren't infinite - there's a cap of 200 seeds per crop. Four 2x10 plots can strip a full stockpile of one crop to zero seeds remaining in under three seasons. If you're not going to mind the shop, close it down.

Maaan, are you a farmer god or something? I would've spent weeks figuring that out! Thanks again!

[Nameless Archon]

Maaan, are you a farmer god or something? I would've spent weeks figuring that out! Thanks again!

Not really - I've never really (nor do I intend to) sat down and figured out how many tiles of farm plot are required to produce food for X dwarves, given Y growers at Z skill, with W walking distance, and P stockpile space available. The truth is, you really don't need to. The answer to how much food and drink a given dwarf needs is 2 meals and four drinks per season, according to the wiki, and I've never gone wrong by making sure I have more than that amount - provided that you check to make sure you're not running dry as your population expands.

My first few forts were full of starving, booze-less dwarves who wrestled goblin ambushes with teeth and beards, and seized caravans to get at their booze stockpiles. They were trainwrecks, and when I scrapped them, I knew what I was doing wrong and how to fix it. My forts now deal with foodsplosions, not hunger-induced tantrum spirals. The former are much easier to deal with than the latter!

If you have questions, ask. If you want advice, ask. If you want to learn at your own pace, I strongly recommend the wiki. (I always keep it running in another window, so I can pull up answers as I play.) In any case, you'll either learn what you need to keep a fortress running, or you'll quit playing.

[Uzu Bash]

It has been suggested that low value metals should suffice, especially lead,

Oh no...that's the weightiest material for them to haul. And the only ore that makes it also stretches out your gold with electrum, so it's not exactly low value. Aluminum would be ideal, if you can find enough in your embark, but anything other than lead would be a better choice.