Manor Lords Farming Guide: Winter and Spring Crops, Fertilizer and Crop Rotation

What changed for farming in 0.8.117

Older farming guides were written for a game where you sowed everything in autumn and could switch crop rotation off. That no longer holds:

• Two crop seasons. Wheat and rye are winter crops. You can still sow them in spring for a faster harvest, but the yield is lower. Flax, barley and oats can only be sown in spring.
• Rotation cannot be turned off. Every field follows a rotation, and the field window shows a timeline of its tasks for the next 12 months.
• Slower fallow recovery. Fallow fields regain fertility much more slowly than before, and crops grow 2.4% slower. Most crop growth and most fallow recovery now happen towards the end of the year.
• Fertilizer. A new building, the Dunghill, turns animal dung into fertilizer (details below).
• Crops left after October no longer force the field into rotation. They die slowly and lose yield, which leaves you time to save the harvest.
• Plowing fallow fields can happen in spring, summer and autumn, at the lowest work priority.

Which crops share fertility

Crop	Season	Shares fertility with	What it becomes
Wheat	Winter (spring possible, lower yield)	Rye	Threshed at the farmhouse, milled into flour at the windmill, baked into bread
Rye	Winter (spring possible, lower yield)	Wheat	Flour and bread, like wheat
Barley	Spring only	Oats	Malt at the Malthouse, then ale at a brewery for taverns
Oats	Spring only	Barley	Food and animal feed
Flax	Spring only	Its own fertility	Linen at the weaver, then clothes at the tailor

Because wheat and rye draw on the same fertility, rotating wheat into rye does not rest the soil. A field rests when it is fallow or when it grows a crop from a different group. The 0.8.117 fertility overlay now groups crops that share fertility, so you can check this on the map.

Rye got stronger. Its fertility bonus went up from ×1.5 to ×1.75 and its yield by 7%, and the bakery now prefers rye when wheat fertility is below 60%. On tired soil, rye is the safer bread grain.

How crop rotation works now

Rotation moves each field to its next crop during autumn. According to the patch notes, it happens:

1. on 1 September for fields with nothing to harvest (including fallow fields);
2. right after the harvest for fields that were harvested;
3. on 1 November for fields whose crops died before anyone harvested them.

A field that has a crop selected but nothing planted yet counts as fallow and regains fertility. So a field waiting for spring sowing is not wasted time.

How to get and use fertilizer

1. Keep animals on pastures. Pasture animals produce dung, and the amount depends on the species.
2. Build a Dunghill and assign families to it. These Dung Collectors gather the dung and turn it into fertilizer. Dung and fertilizer can only be stored at the Dunghill.
3. In summer, farmhouse workers spread fertilizer on fallow fields. This raises the field’s maximum fertility for just over two years.

Because fallow alone now recovers so slowly, fertilizer is how you keep a field producing well year after year. Raiders no longer steal dung or fertilizer.

Field size and layout

• Keep fields small to medium. Guides agree on roughly 0.5 to 1 morgen per field early on; oxen can handle somewhat larger fields.
• Big fields do not give more grain for the same area, but oxen and farmers lose time turning and carrying the harvest.
• Put the farmhouse and some housing close to the fields so workers spend less time walking.
• Upgrade the farmhouse for oxen as soon as you can: oxen plow, which saves your families a lot of work.

A simple plan for a new town

1. Lay out three fields per farmhouse, each in a different state: a winter grain (wheat or rye), a spring crop from another group (barley or flax), and one fallow field.
2. Let rotation move them forward each autumn, and check the 12-month timeline in the field window.
3. Get pasture animals and a Dunghill early, so you have fertilizer for the fallow field each summer.
4. When wheat fertility drops, switch that field to rye.
5. Harvest before the end of October; after that crops start to die.

More Manor Lords

For what players and critics think of the game, read our Manor Lords review. Everything we have on the game is on the Manor Lords page, and more strategy help is in Guides & Tips.

Sources

• Steam news: Version 0.8.117 gets promoted to the default branch
• Steam news: Beta bugfixes (Version 0.8.117) and beta notes for 0.8.110
• Simulation Daily: Manor Lords Version 0.8.117
• GameLog News: Manor Lords 0.8.117 farming guide
• Goranked: Manor Lords update adds dung collection and seasonal crops
• Manor Lords Guide: Farming
• Manor Lords Wiki (Hooded Horse): Farmhouse, Malthouse
• VideoGamer: Manor Lords farming guide

Last checked against sources: 11 November 2026.