Farming Simulator 22 is quite the bugbear for players to learn. With over 400 tools, dozens of mods and so much farming to do, there’s no real easy way to learn how to start. But it’s actually fairly simple to understand once someone points you in the right direction. The fieldwork is at the top of the list of things you need to have a handle on to make your farm successful. Without a solid base of crops, you won’t be able to feed animals or make enough money to keep the lights on. That’s why this guide for FS22 is so important, as it’s the most common question I see new players have. Getting the proper field prep in Farming Simulator 22 in order is very confusing. And frankly, the in-game tutorials need some serious improvement.
After you’ve bought your first piece of land, it’s time to decide what to do with it. The crop you choose to grow will vary based on your current season, provided you have seasonal growing turned on in the game settings. There’s a basic order to planting crops that you have to do for each field, and the order is usually the same. However, you can choose to skip a step if you can’t afford it. The downside to skipping parts of the process is that you will lose out on bonus yield to a crop. So liming and fertilizing, though very expensive and time-consuming, are very important. You always want to start by prepping the soil first, then paying attention to the field status readout in the bottom right of your screen. If you missed a step, this UI element will clue you in.
You may see “Needs Lime” or “Fertilizer 50%” pop up once in a while, this is your cue to get things right for planting. The basic idea is that every field exists in a certain state depending on the field prep in Farming Simulator 22 that’s been done to it. Players who only plow and then skip right to planting seeds are missing some steps in between—you don’t want to do this. If you want to succeed, you need all the yield bonuses you can get. The basic breakdown for yield improvements is like this:
| TOOL | PLOW STATE | FERT STATE | YIELD BONUS |
| Plow | Yes | No | 15% |
| Subsoiler | Yes | No | 0% |
| Fertilizer (2 Max) | No | Yes | 45% |
| Cultivator | No | No | 0% |
| Weeder | No | No | 20% |
| Lime (Every 3 Harvests) | No | No | 15% |
| Soft Roller | No | No | 2.5% |
| Mulcher (After Harvest) | No | No | 2.5% |
| Bees (2 Max+Sunflowers) | No | No | 5% |
The key with managing your fields in this game is getting the proper state on each section of your farm while maximizing yield. In the early game, you can simply focus on plowing, lime and weeding until you build up your cash reserve a bit. With a bit of extra cash on hand, lease some new tools to handle fertilizing, cultivation and eventually other methods as well. Ideally, you want to be doing every step listed above during each field’s planting period each season. So for a basic start, just work your way down the list above, adding steps as you can afford to.
In the table above, we ignored the basic tools that you don’t have to use like stone pickers. You will want to use stone picking if you have that turned on, as the small and large stones that can be pulled up by using the subsoiler and other tools can damage your implements. The settings you use in-game will also determine what order you do things in. You can turn off the need for stone picking, liming, periodic plowing and more. This will allow for a much less realistic but faster farming experience in FS22.
One special note to keep in mind about bees, is that they work as long as you have a valid field on the map. They range across the whole map, looking for the following fields: sunflower, oil seed and potato. Place your beehives nearby to these fields and they should give a small yield bonus to all of your crops.
You definitely don’t have to do all of these, just do as many as you feel comfortable doing. In total, you can go over 200% yield if you do them all, but that’s going to take a long time. You could speed this all up using the Courseplay mod, which makes the AI workers much more predictable and useful than their base game counterparts. However, that’s only for PC and Mac players. There are plenty of other mods, and we’re even working on a guide to help you learn the basics of using Courseplay, so be on the lookout for that!
And if you want more help learning the ropes in this complex sim, we’ve got more guides for that. We’ve made helpful tips and guides on cows, pigs, chickens and more for new and old players alike. So once you have your fields up and running, consider expanding that agriculture empire.
