TL:DR

If a lot of reading is not your thing, and you just want some quick advice on how food production and getting food on the market works in Manor Lords since the latest patch, I recommend you just watch this comprehensive video made by Youtuber Tacticat, one of my main sources of information:


I can also warmly recommend his channel as a treasure trove for working strategies on how to beat every game in every difficulty in Manor Lords.

This guide will start with some basic information about food production, then get into a showcase town as a working example for how to get food variety in the second section, and then dive a little deeper into the ins and outs of farming, gardening and orchardry. Now on to....

Food Production Basics



1. Less is more

I know that Youtube is full of videos about giant cities with extreme populations in Manor Lords, but those are done mostly by streamers with extremely advanced gaming pcs. Most of us casual players do not have the hardware to support such gigantic cities, and most of the bugs that plague this game occur when you reach higher population counts.

It is also much easier to feed a town with a smaller population, as it is much easier to feed a tier 2 village and keep all the people in there happy, than it is with a tier 3 town.

The sweet spot lies somewhere between the 300-500 population mark. That is when you have more workers than you need and still have no trouble using those workers to make enough food variety to keep your town happy.

2. Variety is key

If you have 100 families in your town, you will need to produce at least 100 food per month to feed them all. Better yet more than that, or you won't be able to build up a comfortable surplus worth a few months of food.

Now if you only have one single food source like berries or fish, you need to get 100 of those per month, or your people will starve.

Once you introduce a second food source like meat, you only need to gather 50 of each food source per month to meet the same requirements.

Introduce a third food source like vegetables from your backyard gardens, and now you only need 34 of each per month.

A fourth food source like eggs, now you only need 25 of each per month. Of course, in the case of eggs, that means you will have to build 25 burgages with chicken coops in their backyards, because 1 chicken coop = 1 unit of eggs per month.

The important thing is: The higher your food variety, the easier it is to supply your town with enough to eat.

3. How to get food on the market

While in previous game versions, every food production building such as the hunter's camp and the forager's hut could open their own market stalls, this is no longer the case in the current version of the game.

Whilst your settlers are absolutely able to eat the food directly from the granary if needed, their approval ratings will only improve if you build a market and have food and other goods such as leather and firewood delivered to said market.

In the current version of the game, this can only be done by granary and storehouse workers. These are the only ones allowed to open market stalls, and the number of granary and storehouse workers decides whether your markets are sufficiently supplied or not.

The additional tools for customizing your marketplaces that this latest patch has introduced provide us with the possibiity of having multiple specialized marketplaces all around our region.

For example, you could have orchard and vegetable garden burgage plots with their families all employed in apiaries built around a central square with a well, a granary and a marketplace, and both the granary and the marketplace specialized into only accepting honey, apples and vegetables for maximum efficiency.

Like Youtuber Tacticat does in his so-called "Marlon Brawndo" design:

This was a low fertility region with rich clay deposit and rich animal deposit in the previous build of the game, version 0.8004.

I developed orchardry, rye cultivation, heavy plow, backyard bakeries, charcoal burning and deep mines.

Apples
You can see the 4 giant orchards I built on the northern part of town. They are all roughly 6 corpse pits in size, which is 1,5 morgen each. Double housed burgage plots upgraded to maximum have the necessary pantry size to harvest the immense yields per year. You don't even need 4 of those for a population of 300-500. 1 or 2 would be enough.

This is the way I built them:
(Design invented by forum user "Fortigan")

Vegetables
You can also see the amount and size of my vegetable plots, which is probably overkill, but provide me with a constant giant surplus of food that I can even constantly export. I just made them the length of 2-3 corpse pits and slightly less than a tavern in width.

FYI: You do not NEED to use the corpse pit as measurement. You can also roughly eyeball it. Just keep in mind the overall size difference between orchards and vegetable gardens. Giant vegetable gardens become inefficient because they need much more work than orchards.

Berries
The small berry deposit is foraged by 4 families in 4 different forager huts. Due to their limited pantry size, it makes sense to build more huts so they can pick berries constantly during the spring and early summer when they have their growing season. They will pick up to 440 berries per year. This would be significantly less if I had only 1 forager hut with 4 families.

If you had a large berry deposit, you could forage it with 8 families in 4 forager huts for up to 880 berries per year.

Bread
In my example town, I have had enough rye fertility to place 39 fields. Due to the limited movement options of oxen pulling a heavy plow, I have made all my fields long and narrow strips of roughly the width of 1 malt house and the overall size of 0.5 to 0.8 morgen. This ensures that the 8 oxen and 16 families divided across my 4 farm houses can quickly plow them to completion, before plowing season is over.

If you make your fields too wide or too big overall, your oxen will not be able to finish ploughing them before the season is over, and thus they won't yield anything.

In this example, I was only growing rye, so 13 of my 39 fields were set to "rye-fallow-fallow" in the crop rotation menu, while the second set of 13 fields were set to "fallow-rye-fallow" and the third set of 13 was set to "fallow-fallow-rye".

One fully staffed windmill and 1 double housed level 3 burgage plot with a backyard bakery and 4 families working full time as bakers has been enough to make hundreds of rye breads in surplus.

Communal ovens work, too, but not as well for larger populations. They are half as efficient as backyard bakeries (which have a doubled production rate, meaning 1 flour gets turned into 4 bread in a bakery, whereas 1 flour gets turned into 2 bread in a communal oven).

Second example town with fish instead of berries and rich salt instead of clay:



In this town I developed orchardry, honeymaking, trapping, advanced skinning, charcoal burning and deep mining. 1 fishing hut with 3 families and 4 hunters in 4 hunters camps + 12 burgage plots with pigstys and 2 butchers were enough to provide fish, meat and sausages as major food sources.

The eggs come from 18 burgage plots with chicken coops, the honey from 8 apiaries, the immense surplus of vegetables from four orchard plots and 4 garden plots, each the size of 0.75 morgen.

The bread comes from 15 wheat fields of 0.5-0.8 morgen size on yellow (+) to light green (++) fertile land, 1 windmill and 3 communal ovens with 1 family each. I even grew my own barley on yellow (+) to light orange (-) fertility.

Fish
A small fish deposit starts at around 350 fish. It respawns half of its current population every month during spawning season, which is 3 months long. One fishing pond has 11 places where fishers can go fishing. So a maximum of 11 fishers can be fishing the same pond at the same time. In my experience, you need much fewer than that.

1-2 fishing huts full of people should be sufficient. 1 if you have a small fishing deposit and 2 if you have a large one.

This was a small fishing pond, and I researched advanced fishing in order to double its fish population. I also set the fish reserve that should be left untouched to roughly two thirds of the total number, so that respawning of fish during spawning season would be optimized.

But in this example, I have only 1 fishing hut going. Which is enough for my needs. I don't intend to grow this town beyond a population of 500, and I don't recommend anybody else exceed that number per village, since it becomes a logistical nightmare to supply such a large town.

Honey
Since consumption of food items has been equalized in this patch, it is much easier to build up a surplus of honey than it ever was before. Villagers seemed to have quite the sweet tooth in previous game versions.

8 apiaries with 1 family each, built directly next to a dedicated "honey only!" granary with 3 granary workers slowly builds up a massive honey surplus over time, since honey cannot spoil. I even export the stuff.

Meat
There's two methods of making meat a major food source in Manor Lords. Either you have a rich animal deposit and such infertile land that you do not intend to farm at all anyway. Then you can put development points into "Trapping" and "Advanced Skinning" (as I did here) and activate the "Hunting Grounds" policy once your manor is standing. Then you can hunt the large deer herd with four hunting camps and build a handful of pigstys and goat sheds in your backyards to supplement that for maximum annual meat yields.

OR: If you want to farm, but you also need meat to be one of your major food sources, you can put 1 point into sheepbreeding. Buy an initial batch of 20-30 sheep as early as possible, build enough pastures to house about 150-200 sheep and 50 lambs, and once they have reached maximum population, build a butcher backyard extension and set it to slaughter every lamb that exceeds a number of 50 and every adult sheep that exceeds a number of 150 (this is also a useful number for fertilizing your crops)

Even without advanced skinning, this should yield enough meat annually that you will build up a nice surplus.

Sausages
IF you have a high annual yield of meat AND also a deep mine with an endless salt deposit (or a strong economy that allows you to constantly import small amounts of salt), you can build a (second) butcher that is dedicated to transforming surplus meat into sausages. They will spoil at a much slower rate than meat and should build up to a good surplus, too... I've tested it, and it works.

Eggs
The more diversified your food sources are, the higher the chances get that even your eggs (which also have one of the highest spoilage rates in the game) might build up to a decently sized surplus, simply because there is so much variety that eggs do not get consumed as much as they get produced. In my experience, you need to have most of your smaller burgage plots have chicken coops to reach that point. 1 chicken coop produces 12 eggs per year, regardless of how big the backyard extension is and how many families live on that lot. In the last version of the game, eggs were always a minor food source. That has since changed, and a mere dozen burgages with chicken coops can lead to a large surplus.

1. Berries from forager huts

A non-rich berry deposit has a maximum capacity of 64 berries and gets a total of 11 regrowth spurts during the berry picking season. Each of those growing spurts is worth 40 berries each, which means you can harvest a total of 440 berries (and maybe some extra) from a non-rich berry deposit if you employ enough berry pickers.

You need at least 4 forager huts with 1 family each per berry deposit, because they have small pantries, and the foragers stop berry picking if their pantry storage gets full. So it is prudent to have a dedicated granary nearby with an attached little market that specializes in berries and maybe 1 or 2 other food groups you collect from nearby. 4 families in 4 forager huts usually work efficiently.

A rich berry deposit has a maximum capacity of 128 berries and also gets 11 regrowth spurts during season, but those are worth 80 berries each, so you'll need 6 families in 4 forager huts to get the annual maximum yield of 880 berries out of those bushes before the season ends.

The development point for "forestry" sadly does not increase the regrowth spurts but only the max capacity. It is therefore not worth taking at this moment, hopefully that gets reworked at some point in a future update.


2. Fish from fishing ponds

Instead of trying to explain how fishing works, I will just leave a link to another guide made here on steam, done by another user who has done extensive research and found out everything there is to know about fishing ponds and how to utilize them in the game:
https://steamproxy.net/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3328797056&tscn=1736003710

I highly recommend you check it out!

If that is too much reading for you, I suggest you build 2 fishing huts per pond. Employ 5 families for maximum yield during March, April and May (spawning season). Set fishing limits as follows:
Regular pond: 235
Regular pond + Advanced Fishing: 370
Rich pond: 370
Rich pond + Advanced fishing: 580

Outside of spawning season, you should reduce the families in the fishing huts to minimize spoilage of overstocked fish. The Advanced Fishing development also reduces spoilage.


3. Meat from wild animals

A regular animal herd can give you 40 meat per year. You can hunt it with 2 families in 2 hunting camps. Use 1 family per hunting camp due to the camp's small pantry size! Set the hunting limit to half the maximum population. Also be aware that the hunters stop hunting when their common storage is full of hides. If that happens before you can spare a family to assign to a storehouse or tannery, you might want to have a spare hunting camp that the hunters can use until you can take care of the hides.

With the development points "Trapping" and "Advanced Skinning" you can double your meat production to about 80 a year on a regular animal herd.

A rich deer herd yields up to 100 a year if you hunt it with 4 families in 4 hunting camps. Don't forget to set the hunting limit to 20 instead of the default 10.

If you hunt a rich deer herd with the manor's Hunting Grounds policy activated, which will reduce crop farming yields by half but increase the spawn rate of deer, you can increase your meat production from hunting camps up to 240 per year.

Add to that the "Trapping" and "Advanced Skinning" perk, and you can increase that up to 450 meat per year. At that point you might want to be on the lookout for salt in order to make sausage from your meat, which will reduce spoilage and add another food source to your repertoire.

With "Trapping" enabled, you can also build hunting camps away from the deer herd, limit their work area to their immediate surroundings, and they will gather meat from traps only. There's no limit to how many camps do just the trapping.


4. Meat from pigstys

A normal pigsty gives a passive yield of 2 meat every 150 days. This doubles to 4 meat every 150 days with "Advanced Skinning". Many players misunderstand this to mean that pigstys are not worth it. But in combination with "Advanced Skinning", they are a great addition to your hunters working a rich hunting ground. For a 400-500 pop town at level 3 housing, you need 1 rich hunting ground as well as "Advanced Skinning" and roughly 12-15 burgage plots with pigstys, and you should thus always maintain a surplus of a few hundred units of meat, even without using the manor's "Hunting Grounds" policy. But if you're not intent on farming, you might as well activate that, too. Can't hurt.


5. Sheepbreeding & butchering

This is one of two ways to have meat as a major food source, even if you still want to farm for bread. Either you use a rich animal deposit + advanced skinning + a dozen or so pigstys to keep meat on the table (for a population up to 500 at level 3 housing), or you go into sheepbreeding.

This makes the "hunting grounds" policy unnecessary and only requires some initial investment for your first 3-10 sheep, and enough pasture space so they can grow their population until they reach a constant number of around 30 sheep. This is the point at which the breeding rate caps out at 2 lambs per 11 days. If you set your butcher's sheep reserve to 30 and the lamb reserve to none, he will slaughter 2 lambs every 11 days. 1 lamb gives 2 meat. So without Advanced Skinning, your herd of 30 sheep generates 132 meat and 66 hides per year. If you take Advanced Skinning, you double the meat production to 264 meat per year from those sheep alone.

Now, if you also want to use your sheep for fertilization, you will need many more than 30. Don't start building giant pastures, though: Numerous smaller pastures are better than fewer bigger pastures in that they can hold a denser population of sheep overall. And you'll only need those pastures as long as your fields are not fenced up. Your meat production will still stay the same if you simply set the reserve limit for lambs to 0.

As much larger sheep populations do not give a larger yield, this does not scale well for towns with much larger populations. Which is why I keep recommending to keep your towns smaller in size.


6. Eggs from chicken coops

Eggs are simple. One chicken coop produces 1 unit of eggs per month, no matter how big the backyard, no matter how many families live on the plot. This also might make them seem not worth it, but building chicken coops has become much cheaper in the latest update (15 silver and a few planks as opposed to 25 silver before), and due to food now being truly consumed evenly, the more food groups you have, the higher the probability that you'll be building up a surplus of eggs.

I suggest you make most of your smaller burgage plots that do not need to have workshops or pigstys in their backyards into chicken coops. This requires no labour at all from the residents (although you see them occasionally feeding the chickens), which frees them up to do other jobs you might have, but still produces another food group.

7. Sausages from the butcher's shop

In order to make sausages, you need three things: A steady and relatively high surplus of meat, a steady flow of salt either from imports or a deep salt mine, and a butcher's shop. That is a backyard extension that has two purposes: Either slaughtering excess sheep and making meat out of them, or making sausages out of meat and salt. 1 meat + 1 salt = 2 sausages.

The only thing you need to do is set your butcher's production limits to a fair amount for both meat reserve and overall desired amount of sausages, and the bloody work can begin.


8. Honey from apiaries

Honey is also pretty straightforward. But often misunderstood due to a wrong tooltip text in the game's development skilltree. The description of the honeymaking development says something about a limit of 2 apiaries per region. This is a mistranslation and needs to be removed, but hasn't yet been corrected. What the description was meant to say is that there is a limit of 2 units of honey per day at maximum per region. Which means 60 honey per month, 720 honey per year.

Honey also does barely spoil at all. It pretty much only spoils when being left out in the open or a pantry. In order to reach the maximum yield, you need a lot more than 2 apiaries per region, and you can and should absolutely build more than two.

For a 300-500 pop town I have found that a group of 8 - 12 apiaries are enough to steadily build up an ever growing surplus of honey. Apiaries are not yet completely programmed correctly, however. They have slots for multiple families, but testing has found out that as of right now (betaversion 0.8017), only the first family put into an apiary does actually do any work. All others are wasted workforce, since the code that would increase production per additional family does not yet work correctly for apiaries.

Since apiaries have such small pantries that easily fill up to the brim and prevent further production, it is also absolutely necessary to have a granary nearby, preferrably one that concentrates mostly on honey and maybe 1 or 2 more food groups, not more, so that the pantries get emptied regularly and frequently.


9. Bread & beer from farming

Farming is one of the most misunderstood mechanics in the game, and many complaints from players who are confused about how they'd expert it to work vs how it actually works are seen on the forums on a daily basis.

As of this latest patch, a communal oven turns 1 unit of flour into 2 bread, and a backyard bakery has double that output.

Which means that farming actually now can be done on high and low fertility soil as well:



Those are the estimated yields of 1 morgen barley fields on yellow (+) and light orange (-) fertility soil with 35% fertility overall. Not too shabby for a low fertility region. And while the trading post might sometimes need to import barley up to a limit of 80 or so units, most of the time in the year the annual harvest is enough for maltmaking.

Even in low fertility regions there are often patches of light green (++) soil for wheat, which give up to 70% fertility. One farm with a total of 15 fields, 5 fields of 1 morgen per year, can easily be plowed by 8 families.

1 morgen should be your absolute maximum size per field, and if you intend to use oxen, you might want to make those fields even smaller. Oxen with heavy ploughs have a very particular way of moving that works best on fields that are not much wider than a house, long and rectangular in shape, and 0.5-0.8 morgen in size overall.

Generally, having more smaller fields can sometimes be more effective than having fewer larger fields, because larger fields take longer to plough, and a field that is not completely ploughed by the end of the season will have either no yield at all in the following year or an abysmally low yield compared to what would be possible.

At the end of a season, what would you rather have? Three 2-morgen-fields all partially plowed and giving like 2-9 yield estimates for next year, or 12 x 0.5-morgen-fields, 4 of which have been completely plowed before the end of the season and will yield enough grain to make a couple hundred units of bread?

In my experience, a wheat farm without heavy plough can work an area of 9-12 fields of up to 1 morgen each, one third of those per year. These fields can be irregular in shape, that does not matter for hand-ploughing. Crop rotation should look like this for each third of those fields:


If you use the "sheepbreeding" and "fertilization" developments to send sheep onto fallow fields to restore their fertility much faster, you can also have two different(!) crops following one year after another, with the third year being fallow.

If you use heavy plow, you can have 12 to 15 fields of 0.5-0.8 morgen per farm and need only 4 families, since the oxen will each efficiently plough fields of such size. Just remember to make them narrow, long and rectangular.

Beware of droughts! Dry seasons can occur in the summer, often in August. There is no in game notification for them, but if you have a keen eye, you can easily spot them. The usually green grass turns brown, and fishing ponds shrink to a puddle:



If you zoom in, you can hear crickets chirping.

A drought will dramatically reduce your annual yield of field crops and will also temporarily increase spoilage for all your stored food items.

The only way to counter droughts is to either manually force early harvests to save as much of your crops as you can, or to take the "irrigation" development from the skilltree. Otherwise you will lose most of one year's field crops harvest. However, this does not at the moment affect apples or vegetables.



10. Vegetables and Apples from gardens and orchards:

Those two food groups work so similarly that I can summarize them in one chapter. Both burgage plot extensions essentially produce about 90 units of food per 0.5 morgen of pure backyard size.

While you can absolutely make your orchards 1.0-1.5 morgen (or 4-6 corpse pits) in size, since they just need to be planted once and then harvested each year and otherwise be left alone, your veggie gardens need a lot more tending to like tilling the earth, sowing the plants, harvesting and then replanting... so it is best to keep your garden sizes between 0.5-0.8 morgen. (2-3 corpse pits).

Make those burgage plots always double housed, as they will need the additional residents for working the big backyards. When it comes to upgrading to level 3, these burgage plots should be your priority, as their immense yields are otherwise hampered by too small a pantry size.

Gardens and orchards should be the first burgages you invest into, since gardens need 3 years to grow to full maturity and efficiency, and orchards need 4 years to reach their maximum yield. They will start producing smaller quantities of food somewhat earlier, though.

There are many ways to build garden and orchard plots in the game. From simple to complicated, from "good enough" to "highly optimized and efficient". Some are more aesthetically pleasing or historically accurate than others.

1. The simple backyard garden: long and narrow, less efficient, but good enough.

Example:

9 corpse pits are surrounded with a road, then they get deleted, the space within the road enclosure gets used to make a row of houses, but instead of making single houses, we click on the "-" button until only four or five plots remain:



This way the housing footprint is minimal, most of the backyard is garden area, and it is quick and easy to set up. After a while, one can simply eyeball it and does not need to rely on corpse pits as a unit of measurement any more. These plots won't be maximized in efficiency, but they will yield much more than they consume, and thus accumulate a good profit in vegetable surplus each year.

For orchards, this can be much bigger. One single orchard can be up to 6 corpse pit footprints, surrounded by a road, and then filled out like this:



One or two such orchards are enough for a town of up to 500 people.

2. Fortigan's design:


This is basically how you do it. For orchards, a backyard as big as this is not a problem. They can be even bigger, though that is not necessary. For a vegetable garden made in this design, I recommend half that backyard area, so 2 instead of 4 corpse pits in size.



The result would then look somewhat like this:



Those smaller ones yield 90+ food units per year while the resident families only consume 24.

3. Tacticat's designs

"The Bender & Imperial:"


Tacticat's designs are optimized not necessarily for good looks, but for minimum walking distances from the houses to the farthest point of the gardens, since those walking distances are where the inefficiencies in vegetable plots can occur.

Here's how to set those up:


"The Brawndo":



Tacticat's original "Brawndo" design combines 4 orchards or 4 vegetable gardens with a dedicated granary and specialized marketplace. It is also octagonal in shape. I like rounded edges more, so I made this variant out of it for my own use:



I find that one of those designs provides more than enough veggies and apples for a 300-500 pop town. With excess to spare and potentially export. 360 veggies and apples per year if you make it 50/50 like I did in the pictures. 720 per year if you make one design completely for either vegetables or apples.

Here's a video where he describes how exactly to build them:


And here's an upgraded version of this design with space for up to 8 apiaries as well: