Fertility and fertilization are important mechanics in Manor Lords. When you place a field down to service as farmland, you will naturally eat into the natural fertility of that patch of land. Without clever planning and management, your farmland may become barren and dead, leading to an empire of ruin in the future. If you want to avoid social collapse, then you need to take a look at fertility and manage it appropriately.

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Managing fertility in Manor Lords enables a healthy farming community. One that can keep your population and industry thriving.

How Fertility Works¶

Fertility in Manor Lords works by giving you a percentage of how much fertility remains in the land. Consider it like a health bar if you will. When that fertility drops to 0, you can no longer grow a crop. You can see the fertility percentage by clicking on a field, selecting a crop from the drop-down menu, and looking for its percentage.

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Fertility is essentially a health bar of a farm and what type of crops it can grow. You need to manage it if you intend to survive.

Luckily for you, each field has flexibility for a different type of crop as fertility is not a broad stroke. If you hit 0 on a crop type, chances are the field has fertility left for another type of crop.

If you’re desperate for fertility, then Rye is an extremely durable crop to grow. Rye is capable of growing in even the most barren of lands, but it does require going deep into the farming development tree to unlock it. It’s an option if you want to run large-scale bread farms, and use Rye grain to turn into bread and feed your population.

Increasing Fertility¶

If you want to avoid completely annihilating a field’s fertility levels, then you need to fallow your fields every other year. Fallowing fields will gradually raise the fertility of all crops over the season it is set to fallow. Make sure to turn on crop rotation to ensure you can get the crops you need across a two-year period, then set a fallow in the rotation to ensure that a field can recover somewhat. You may need to fallow it for a two-year period if you’re only a using specific farm to grow one crop.

You can further improve this with certain research like the Fertilization development, which enables you to pasture fields for sheep to graze while they are fallowed. This greatly increases fertility recovery over the traditional fallow season. You will need to get sheep from the livestock trading post and upgrade each farm to enable them to become pastures during fallow field seasons. That way, you can put your sheep to pasture on the fields and greatly improve their fertility. A 2.0 Morgan farm can handle around 50-100 pastured livestock to improve a field’s fertilization recovery rapidly.

With that said, you now know how the fertility styles work in Manor Lords.