Hello,
I like how my farmers make food, and everyone has food. This is good. Great even 
.
For three months of the year however, the farmers are twiddling their thumbs because there is frost and they cant do any farming. To use this manpower, you have to manually reduce the workercount on a field to zero, so the farmers become laborers.
Then you have to quickly send them all back into the field at the end of the winter period.
It would be most convenient if the field could have an active toggle, like most other production buildings. That way you could just toggle a field OFF and 8 or 16 or 20-something farmers instantly become laborers. And in spring, one press of a button sends your preferred number of famers back into the field.
Some game-years, I find myself manually clicking 100+ farmers into laborers and back again.
3 Likes
I use to go into Pop and reduce the number to zero just after harvest but it took too long to get them back into the fields just before planting so I gave up.
1 Like
I have often wanted this too, but the farmers do have the task of occasionally harvesting from bee hives. In the personnel menu (P key) you can uncheck the automatic assignment from the top left and while holding Ctrl, click on a minus key next to the farm population. This will set the number to minimum (0). Ctrl + click on the plus sets it to maximum (the number you set from each farm field). You cannot use Ctrl + click on the assignment figures in each farm field however. Only from the personnel menu.
Regardless of if you leave them as farmers or turn them in to laborers, they will scatter about all over the place and will not preemptively head back to the farm near the end of winter. Even pushing your plantings to later in the spring won’t make them head back early. They just continue to wonder about until the scheduled time comes for them to work. This has been a design flaw I have wanted fixed for a long time. You can manually select each farmer using the magnifying glass in the people menu next to farmers. Each time you click on it you will hop to the next farmer in the set. With one selected, give it an instruction to head to the farm while the game is paused. Cycle through each farmer in this way and they will all begin heading to the farm when you want them too. Then watch the field you selected them to go to and when any of them start to wonder off before planting season, pause it and group select them all to give them a new move order back onto the field before they scatter off too much to do that. Others that are taking a longer walk will need more time to catch up anyway.
I have often wondered if cycling them back and forth as laborers would cause tools to get lost so as soon as you can afford to leave them as farmers, maybe do that or just don’t cycle as many of them over.
3 Likes