Farm Planner
The answer
Formula
One farmhouse = 3 families + 2 oxen ≈ 3–3.5 morgen worked; ideal field 0.5–0.7 morgen.
Farmland in Manor Lords is measured in morgen, a medieval unit the game borrows for field area. Almost everyone plans it by eye. A field that looks reasonable can be quietly losing you a third of its yield, and you will not find out until the harvest comes in short.
The calculator above works from one number: your total farmland. From it come three answers. How many farmhouses that land needs, how many families and oxen those farmhouses consume, and how many separate fields you should draw.
The ratio the tool is built on
One farmhouse staffed with three families and two oxen comfortably works about 3–3.5 morgen. That is roughly one morgen of worked field per family, which is the figure to carry in your head when you are placing land rather than sitting at a calculator. Push past it and the farmhouse cannot get everything plowed, sown and harvested inside the season. The land is not wasted, but a share of the crop on it never gets collected.
Why the field count matters as much as the area
The tool divides your land into fields of roughly 0.6 morgen, and that subdivision is doing real work. Keep each field to 0.5–0.7 morgen. People cannot work a field while an ox is plowing it, and sowing waits for the entire parcel to reach 100% plowed. One large field forces your labour and your oxen to queue behind each other. Several small fields let them run in parallel.
Total yield across the same area is identical either way, so splitting costs you nothing. Two smaller effects push the same way. Oxen waste the most time turning at row ends on an oversized field, and harvesters carry crops to the field's centre. A narrow field beats a wide one on both counts.
What the calculator deliberately does not model
Three things move real yield that no field-area figure can capture. Fertility pools are the big one. Wheat and rye draw from the same pool, as do oats and barley, and pairing either couple in one rotation craters the second crop. Rotate across pools instead (wheat–barley, rye–flax). Running three different crops removes the need for a fallow year.
Work areas are the second. If you run more than one farmhouse, restrict each one's area explicitly. Left unrestricted, every family drifts to the same corner of the map and the outer fields miss harvest altogether. Your numbers will read like a yield problem. The cause is the work area.
Pollination and meadow are the third. Five apiaries give +10% farm yields at +2% each, pay back inside the first year at 50g apiece, and also boost vegetable gardens and orchards. A region's meadow percentage lifts fields, gardens, orchards and apiaries alike. Felling forest to create meadow is therefore a yield decision, not just a timber one.
One last staffing trap: never assign families working vegetable plots or orchards to a farmhouse. They share the same harvest season, so those families compete for their own hands at exactly the wrong moment.
