ince you are unlikely to attract many people to your city without food, farming should be your top priority at the start of a new assignment (unless Rome is providing food for the province, which you will be told in the Assignment Briefing).

Not all land is fertile enough for farming. You can spot farmland by its yellow tufts in amongst more normal terrain; on the overview map (on your Control Panel) the fertile land is also yellow. You can build a farm anywhere there is space for it, so long as at least one square of it covers fertile land. This applies to all farms, including pig farms.

Some provinces have more farmland than others, but few have so much that you don't need to use it carefully. Treat farmland with respect, and don't build non-farm structures on it unless you really need to.

Wheat farms are twice as productive as the other food types. That is, a wheat farm will usually produce a cartload of food twice as quickly as any other farm. I say usually, since the cooler climate of some Northern provinces does not allow such generous yields.

Farms need employees to work, and road access. They will operate less efficiently if they have less staff than they need, and they won't operate at all with no staff. Once a farm starts operating, you will see its fields growing crops or raising animals. Once the crop is fully grown and ripe, the farm harvests it and puts the produce into a cart, which carries it off to a granary or warehouse.

A farm cannot harvest its crops until the empty cart has returned from its last trip, since it has nowhere to store the harvested crops. This means that your farm production will fall if carts frequently have to make long journeys, and this could mean that you end up having to build more farms than you really need. Planning where to build warehouses and granaries becomes very important.

Food farms always send their produce to a granary, if they can. If there is no working granary with any space, though, the farm's cart takes the goods to a warehouse instead. If there is no working warehouse with space either, the full cart of fresh food waits outside the farm until destination for its produce opens up.

No province enjoys the ideal climate for raising all four food types, so you probably will not be able to grow all of your population's food needs. Citizens don't consider that to be a good excuse for restricting their diets. Therefore, you will very probably have to import one or more types of food if you are to enable your citizens to reach higher levels of housing.