Farthest Frontier crop rotation guide

A good Farthest Frontier crop rotation does four things at once: grows the food or flax you actually need, keeps the field's fertility from sliding, keeps crops out of the season that kills them, and spaces out crops that share diseases. This guide uses the community wiki's crop table, which is marked as updated for version 1.1.0, and the rotation examples from its farming article. Plug any rotation into the food calculator to see its food and fertility numbers.

The twelve crops at a glance

Crop	Output per tile	Fertility per planting	Days (plant + grow + harvest)	Lost to frost / heat / drought
Peas	6 beans	+1	91	0 / 75% / 50%
Beans	8 beans	+1	125	80% / 0 / 30%
Turnip	5 roots	-3	81	0 / 35% / 40%
Carrot	8 roots	-3	98	0 / 50% / 80%
Cabbage	14 greens	-4	125	0 / 0 / 40%
Leek	17 greens	-6	158	0 / 0 / 60%
Buckwheat	6 grain	-1	100	80% / 0 / 80%
Rye	14 grain	-6	158	0 / 0 / 0
Wheat	16 grain	-8	158	20% / 0 / 40%
Hay	8 hay	-1	173	0 / 0 / 0
Flax	6 flax	-5	135	0 / 0 / 0
Clover	nothing usable	+3	94	0 / 0 / 0

Output is per tile at 100% fertility before any other modifier, so a 12x12 field of wheat is 16 x 144 = 2,304 grain at nominal. Farmers do no field work in the three winter months, which leaves roughly April to December for planting and harvest. Two long crops (158 days each) cannot share a year; a short crop like peas, turnips or clover can share a year with almost anything.

Step 1: keep fertility level

Every crop except peas, beans and clover takes fertility out. Clover puts 3 points back, peas and beans 1, a load of compost 6 regardless of field size, and grazing livestock up to 9 a year (20 cows from a Large Barn), 7 (24 chickens) or 4 (10 goats). All of those gains are multiplied by the field's Environment Fertility Factor (EFF), which is fixed for that patch of land. Losses are not: wheat takes 8 points on any soil. Researching Sustainable Farming cuts losses to 75% (back to 100% if you also run the Over Seeding policy).

So the wiki's net change per three-year cycle is: (sum of positive crops + 6 per compost load) x EFF - (sum of negative crops) x 0.75 with Sustainable Farming. Two examples on a field with 90% EFF:

• Beans, wheat, clover: (1 + 3) x 0.9 - 8 = -4.4 without the tech, -2.4 with it.
• Same rotation plus one compost load per cycle: (4 + 6) x 0.9 - 8 = +1.0, or +3.0 with Sustainable Farming.

The wiki's advice is to push a new field to 95% fertility or more as fast as you can while still feeding the town, then run a rotation that is neutral over the cycle. On Arid Highlands, where EFF rarely gets above 40%, clover gives only 1.2 points and positive rotations are hard to build at all. On Idyllic Valley 100% EFF land is easy to find, and most other maps have areas at 85% or more.

Step 2: match crops to the season

Frost hits every non-summer month that drops below 0°C, heat stress every non-winter month above 32°C, and drought usually lands in June or July. Turnips, carrots and peas dislike heat, so put them at the very start or very end of the year. Beans, buckwheat and wheat dislike frost, so center them on summer. Rye, hay, flax and clover shrug off all three, which is why rye is the safe grain on harsh maps.

Step 3: space out crops that share diseases

Diseases roll every time a vulnerable crop is planted, grow each time another vulnerable crop goes in, and fade each time something immune is planted. The wiki's rule: between two crops from the same group, plant at least two crops from other groups (clover counts, and the count wraps from year 3 back to year 1).

• Turnip and cabbage
• Peas, beans, buckwheat and carrot
• Wheat, buckwheat and carrot
• Flax with flax; leeks with leeks

Two groups need three crops in between: peas, beans and buckwheat (Stem Rot), and wheat and rye (Wheat Root Knot). The worst diseases are Wheat Rust and Rye Rust, which take up to 90% of the crop at full strength and spread up to 300 m, so do not run every neighbouring field on the same grain in the same year.

Rotations that work

These are the wiki's own examples, read from its rotation screenshots, with fertility worked out from the 1.1.0 table at 100% EFF (no compost):

Use	Year 1	Year 2	Year 3	Fertility per cycle (no tech / Sustainable Farming)
Preparing a new field	maintenance, clover, maintenance	clover, maintenance, clover	clover, maintenance, clover	+15 / +15
Early flax	peas, clover, turnip	flax, peas	turnip, clover, clover	0 / +2.75
Early hay and roots	clover, beans	hay, clover	carrot, turnip	0 / +1.75
Late flax and rye	peas, clover, turnip	flax, clover	clover, rye	-4 / -0.5
Late food	peas, clover, turnip	leek, clover	clover, wheat	-7 / -2.75
Late mixed	clover, beans	rye, clover	carrot, flax	-7 / -3.5

The early rotations hold or build fertility once you have Sustainable Farming. The late ones lean on compost: one load (+6 at 100% EFF) every cycle or two keeps "late food" level with the tech. Field maintenance once per rotation keeps weeds near zero; alternatively, crops with weed suppression adding up to about 15 per rotation do the same job (buckwheat alone is -10, clover -8).

Field size and farmers

Fields run from 5x5 to 12x12. Opening one is expensive: the wiki's labor table gives 1,152 work for 5x5, 2,352 for 10x5 and 6,864 for 12x12, so open fields a few years before you need them and park them on clover until then. Since the compost change in the 1.0 patches, small and large fields are equal for fertility (compost is +6 per load either way, it just costs compost equal to the field's area) and roughly equal for disease. Small fields let you fine-tune how much of each crop you grow; big ones are less clicking. A common start is three small fields running the same rotation offset by a year (ABC, BCA, CAB), which evens out both the harvest and the farmer workload.

A 12x12 field takes up to 7 farmers, and the game assigns half the maximum by default. Farmers work as one pool across all fields. If you never see late-harvest warnings, try fewer; if crops are rotting, add more. Farming starts to matter at around 100 villagers, when foraging, hunting and fishing stop keeping up, and that is also when flax for clothing becomes pressing.