Farming skill is gained by working with crops. Planting, tending and harvesting.

Crops must be planted on relatively flat land. If the slope is too steep you will get this message.

The ground is not flat enough for crops to grow. You need to flatten it first.

How to determine if slope is low enough:

1. Find the highest slope corner(s).
2. Subtract the highest corner(s) value(s) from the lowest corner(s) value(s), then add the differences up.
3. If the total of the difference exceeds 16 for any corner(s) you won't be able to plant on the tile.

Sowing can only be done on cultivated land. Dirt, in other words. It cannot be rock, paved, gravel or packed dirt.

Sowing a tile requires one seed.

Sowing is best done with a satchel on your toolbelt. Add seeds in the satchel and you can press the toolbelt number (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) to select the satchel and activate a seed, then right click a tile to sow. Here is a hover bind for faster sowing.

bind "act 153 hover"

See the Plant Growth page for growth stages.

A rake is used for tending crops, which removes weed and straightens the plants.

Tending crops gives you skill gain and increases yield of your crops when you go to harvest them. Here is a hover bind for tending.

bind space "act 151 hover"

Harvesting of crops can be done on a large cart or wagon. If you expand your large cart (96 cast) or wagon (37 cast) to hold a food storage bin, you will have plenty of storage for crops as you harvest.

Here is a hover bind for harvesting.

bind space "act 152 hover"

While you can set up a bind to harvest an area (like tending), it will quickly become unmanageable as your inventory will fill before you get a chance to offload your crops into a container in your cart. Here is the bind if you want it.

bind space "act 152 area"

Yield of crops is based on farming skill, going up as you progress. In the case of grains which require a scythe, the tool may be a factor, I don't know.

You can increase yield of crops by placing beehives at regular intervals in your crop fields. Once the beehives are active (have bees) they will increase yield. Beehive influence is a radius of tiles based on quality of the beehive.

How to get bees to moved to your beehive:

1. Make a beehive and improve it up as high as you can (quality = radius of influence).
2. Add sugar (or honey) to your beehive and place it near a wild beehive or a noisy crafted beehive.
3. Wait for a queen to move into the hive. It will be animated and have bees flying around it. This can take awhile.
4. Craft a bee smoker and light it so you don't get stung interacting with the beehive. Load the active beehive into your cart or wagon and unload it in your crop field.
5. Reap the benefits of a beehive. Yield will be increased greatly.

Tips:

• If a beehive is off deed you need to keep it repaired or it will eventually decay away.
• An active beehive does not require further interaction after it has a bee colony.
  
• Occasionally a beehive will become noisy indicating that it has a queen that can move to a new beehive. Use this to populate more beehives. Place an empty beehive with some sugar near the noisy beehive. Once populated, move it where you want it using the bee smoker.

You can also attach a gather rune to a scythe to increase the quality of the harvested grains. This would not work with other crops as no tool is used in harvesting other crops.

Crates will do in a pinch but will fill quickly.

The best storage for raw food items and seeds is a food storage bin. It can hold 16k volume which is huge since most raw foods are low volume. You can also expand a food storage bin.

Note that you cannot put non-food crop items and seeds in a food storage bin. For example, wemp and cotton are not food crops and should be stored in a bulk container like the bulk storage bin or bulk container unit (four bulk storage bins in one).

Public crop fields can be found around the maps. These fields are free to use. Public crop fields are a great way to gain skill in farming as the fields tend to be very large and often left untended.

It is an unspoken rule that if a crop field is not on a settlement it is considered public use. It is considered proper etiquette to replant what you harvest whether on public lands or settlement crop fields.