Soil, Water and Light: the Cultivation of Crops

Comrades, before the forge and the press there is the field. Every worker of the Commonwealth eats, and a collective farm that feeds a hundred is worth more than a hundred gardens that feed one each. This lecture teaches how crops grow, and how to make them grow well.

Preparing the soil

Till dirt or grass with a hoe to make farmland. Farmland needs water to stay moist: it is hydrated when there is water within four blocks horizontally, on the same level or one block higher. One water block in the middle of a nine-by-nine plot waters all of it. Hydrated farmland is darker; crops on it grow faster.

Farmland turns back into dirt when it is trampled, by you jumping or falling on it or by animals, and dry farmland with nothing planted on it slowly reverts. Walk your fields on paths, and keep animals out behind fences.

Light

Crops need light of level 9 or more to grow, and in real darkness they will not even survive. In the open the sun does this by day. Under a roof, in a greenhouse or an underground farm, light the field with torches, lanterns or glowstone. A well-lit field also keeps hostile creatures away: since the caves and cliffs update they spawn only in complete darkness.

The crops

• Wheat: seeds come from breaking tall grass. Gives wheat (bread, animal feed, hay) and seeds to replant.
• Carrots and potatoes: plant the vegetable itself. Found in village farms, and now and then dropped by zombies. A few potatoes come up poisonous; do not eat those.
• Beetroot: seeds from village farms and chests. Beetroot makes soup and red dye.
• Pumpkins and melons: the seed grows into a stem, and the fruit appears on a free block of dirt or grass beside it. Leave that block empty. Harvest the fruit, never the stem, and it grows again.
• Sugar cane: on dirt, grass or sand directly beside water. Harvest the upper parts and leave the bottom block to regrow. Paper for books, sugar for cake.
• Cocoa beans grow on jungle logs and sweet berries on bushes, both in good light; nether wart grows on soul sand in any light and in any world.

Growing faster

Crops grow at random moments, a little at a time, which is why a field seems to ripen by itself while you work elsewhere. You can help:

• Hydrate every block.
• Plant in rows, alternating kinds (a row of wheat, a row of carrots), rather than one great square of a single crop: crops of one kind crowded on all sides grow more slowly.
• Use bone meal. It advances a crop by some growth stages at once. Bone meal is crafted from bones (three from each), or made in a composter: put in seeds, leaves, spare crops and other plant matter, and when it is full it gives bone meal. The composter turns the waste of the harvest into the next harvest.

Harvesting and replanting

Break a crop when it is fully grown: ripe wheat is golden, ripe carrots and potatoes show their tops, ripe beetroot shows red. An unripe crop gives only its seed. Replant at once, so the field never lies idle. A hoe with the Fortune enchantment brings a larger harvest.

Farming at scale

When the colony grows, farming grows with it:

• Villager farmers tend fields in villages, and MineColonies farmers work fields laid out from their hut. My colleague the Professor of Architecture explains the huts (/cw lecture architecture 1).
• With Create, a mechanical harvester carried along a field by a moving contraption harvests ripe crops and leaves them planted; a mechanical plough tills. The Professor of Engineering will show you the machines (/cw lecture engineering 1).

Food for the plan

The plan may set targets for bread, potatoes or other food, and deliveries to the common stores (/cw deliver) count towards them. The State Bank values a loaf of bread at 1.5 contribution units, a baked potato at twice a raw one, and cooked beef at twice raw beef: the labour of the kitchen counts.

My second lecture treats animals, cooking and which foods feed a worker best: /cw lecture agronomy 2. Questions: /cw ask professor-agronomy <question>.