Growing Crops
Growing crops and making full use of your village’s agricultural land is your main job as shoya. Although you have other things that you can produce and other things to worry about, your village will not prosper without solid agriculture.
The main crop at your disposal is rice, which can be grown alongside grain, millet, soy beans, cotton and other crops, depending on where your village is located. Rice is your highest yielding staple food, and is also the form in which taxes are paid. Without enough rice to pay your taxes you will soon learn all about what the local governor’s displeasure entails! Grain is also a valuable crop, and has the advantage that it can be grown in both spring and summer, unlike rice, which can only be grown during summer. A good rule of thumb for the village, at least until you are producing good surpluses, is that grain and millet are grown to feed the people, and rice is grown to pay your tax.
So, your task each growing season is to decide how much of each field type is dedicated to each of the crops that can be grown in it. This will be limited by the space and number of workers you have available. Each type of crop likes different weather conditions, has a different yield and needs different number of workers. If you are growing cash crops, you will also need to think about their current market worth, and maintaining the soil’s quality is always a consideration. Always trying to pull the most you can from the ground is a recipe for long term disaster, as the soil becomes more and more depleted.
Watching the weather is vital, of course. Your advisor will give you tips, but there is no substitute for learning the relationships between different crop yields and weather conditions for yourself. The conditions during the harvesting season have a small impact on yields as well, so it is always good to hedge your bets with a variety of crops in any given season. This also helps to protect against the possibility of crop disease. Grain and rice are also subdivided into three varieties each, each of which has its own properties in terms of yields, hardiness and disease resistance.
Each shoya has their own policies and techniques for allocating crops, and you will have to experiment to find which strategies work for you and your village. Different crops have different advantages and disadvantages and suit different locations to different extents, so there is no one “good” strategy. These tips will help to get you going:
- Always grow a variety of different crops across the your fields. Don’t rely on the weather staying as it is during the harvesting season; it could be more or less favourable, so always hedge your bets.
- It’s good to mix in some cash crops with your staples, but if you do, make sure that it makes financial sense to do so. Most cash crops are relatively low yielding, so this may mean that in some weather conditions or in some field types, you actually get a better return from growing and selling staples.
- The villagers will be healthier if they have a varied diet. Experiment with whether it works better for you to grow as much of this variation as you can or to concentrate on a few crops and buy in other food stuffs.
- Remember to leave some land fallow and to clear new fields as often as you can.
- If the weather is especially bad or the governor is making demands on you, pay extra attention to the weather and your crop varieties. Careful tweaking will almost certainly reward you. Always keep an eye on your yields per tan for each crop when you make changes.
- Test new crops as they become available and add them to your mix, but don’t get too carried away! Just because a crop is new does not necessarily mean it is better for your village.
- As your village grows and becomes more secure, you can pay more attention to cash crops, but always make sure that the villagers have enough to eat, especially during harsh times!
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