Barren Land: Upgrade the town center to tier 4 while never building crop fields on vanquisher difficulty.
Will arborist buildings (with trees) and/or upgraded forager shacks prevent this achievement from popping?
No, it’s just crop fields that affect it. You can have arborists and foragers. In fact you’ll probably need a lot of upgraded foragers to keep your town fed until you get the achievement. I think I had 22 in the end growing berries, greens and nuts. 
If you think about it you’d realise that you couldn’t do the achievement if arborists and foragers counted since you’d have nothing except meat and a few beans and grain from traders now and then so couldn’t provide the variety of foods needed to get to t4.
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Thank you so much. I’ve been manually redirecting the working zone of my foragers several times each year but realized, there are still some things I need that I don’t want to buy in the trade center only when they randomly appear. The upgraded foragers can make so many things, when they aren’t locked out due to the map type. I’m not sure yet what I can grow in the arid desert as I have been reluctant to upgrade them until I got this answer. I built a barn but realized I can’t feed the cow over the winter. I don’t think the forager can make anything for it though so I’ll probably just scrap that building. Thought I might need milk and cheese for the diverse food types though.
Just to be clear, I’m working several achievements for this map. The lack of fertile soil in the Arid Highlands made sense to try for Barren Land while also working Jewel in the Desert.
Barren Land: Upgrade the town center to tier 4 while never building crop fields on vanquisher difficulty.
Jewel in the Desert: Reach 500 population in the Arid Highlands in Non-pacifist vanquisher difficulty.
Also trying to get in this map:
There can only be 500: Survive to 500 population without building a single defensive wall or gate on non-pacifist vanquisher difficulty.
Elite Squad: Defeat all raider camps on the map on non-pacifist vanquisher difficulty without training a tier 2 or cavalry units.
Stocks only go up: Earn 1,000,000 gold ingots in total on non-pacifist vanquisher difficulty.
Vanquished raider menace/scourge/hoard: Defeat 2000/5000/10,000 raiders on non-pacifist vanquisher difficulty.
Vengeful Vanquisher: Survive for 10 consecutive years on non-pacifist vanquisher difficulty while the Ark of the Vengeful Dead is active within your temple.
Upgraded foragers are locked though.
If you map doesn’t support herbs for example then the forager can’t grow them.
Only way you could do the barn is by buying/ordering grain from a trader. They don’t do hay or root veggies so grain is your only option and you probably want that for the bakeries for bread which is another food variety.
I’m going back to the 1950’s here but every yard was sized for the home growing of vegetables. I learned to hate choko. We had some citrus trees and bananas, a small plot for lettuces and potato, and it might sound cruel today but using the scraps for chicken and guinea pig meant meat for the kids, then supermarkets came and the plots, and animals, were allowed to die off. Would a 4x4 shelter be capable of having a supplementary food supply? These would have to be obtained from the Markets by the occupants.
Well, I only just realized I still need to upgrade the town hall one more time before I can even think about upgrading the foragers. My experience in the previous map was that the upgraded forager cannot produce nearly as much as what a standard forager can gather on the map. This needs to change, either by increasing what they can produce, or allowing them to gather from around their work area on the map like they did at level 1 and then when there is nothing left to gather, they tend to their own crops. It seems the only time I might upgrade them is if I built them with the intent of being upgraded right from the beginning, but then man power is also an issue. They just don’t produce much for one person compared to the level 1 version.
Devs are looking into the forager.
While my current map does have a fair amount of willow, herbs and medicinal roots it doesn’t have much in the way of green, nuts, berries, so being able to grow these in upgraded foragers does help me. It also allows me to take greens out of my crop fields and have more root vegetables which can then be preserved along with berries and fruit.
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Barren Land and Jewel in the Desert can definitely be done together. I think the only reason I didn’t get Elite Squad too with that town was that I forgot I wasn’t allowed to train T2 infantry along with the no cavalry. I used a lot of forager gardens before they were nerfed, while also advocating for them to be nerfed because it worked so well, but it turns out that livestock won’t starve to death over the winter if they have good enough fodder the rest of the year, so I did a fair amount of that, too. (You can also buy them grain from the trader, but it turns out that’s not strictly necessary.)
Ah yes, I noticed small numbers of livestock seemed to do okay through the winter. I wasn’t sure about large amounts though. I’ve been trying to make more fertile ground for trees to grow for my foresters. It’s too bad you can’t specify the arborist can’t receive compost, or to be able to spread it in an area when you have no farms.
I’ve been working on this achievement in my current game on an Arid Highland map. A large number of hunters are keeping my pop fed, while I build up livestock to support larger pop. Still on Tier 2 Town Center. Arborists provide a second food type, and milk for a third. I was surprised that livestock placed on land with decent fodder value don’t need food to survive winter. The health drops during winter months, but they recover. I have not imported a lot of food from traders. Collecting the ores/resources on the map provide a good number of jobs for villagers that would otherwise be farmers, which are great resources for trade. This achievement has been lots of fun to pursue!
I’m getting there. Just completed the Elite Squad achievement as I upgraded to TH3 so now I can train better troops when I need to. I had to put in a special request for the clay because it just wasn’t coming for several years and I was ready to upgrade the TH and start on my forager upgrades. I found using the hills to be very helpful in dispatching with bandit camps using archers. This might be an exploit but you can find the max distance they are willing to chase you and move back and forth within their patrol circle to keep them from returning to the camp, so as to take them out away from their camp. They do repair their buildings so you don’t want to just go in with a few troops and let them die trying to do some damage to whittle them away, because it just won’t work.