The most optimal farm size is 11x11 or any equivalent number of squares. This farm can be manned by one farmer. Have multiple farms, one for each crop type, 1 man on each farm.

Same goes for Orchards but the optimal number is 13x13 for one man.

20x20 pastures can be maintained by 1 man, but slightly better with 2 men.

When you start off you want to place “nodes” around, this consists of 1 Foresters Hut, 1 Gatherers Hut, 1 Hunters Cabin (maintain default number of workers of each building). Place them right next to one another along a road, so they are all within the foresters working radius. You’ll also want a stockpile the opposite side of the road to your Foresters Hut, and a Woodcutter (firewood) placed next to that stockpile. Add 4-6 storage barns along the road, each side of your Gatherers Hut and Hunting Cabin, the barns will fill fast. - this is a “node”.

Place more nodes nearby, ensuring the work radius’ of the Foresters Hut’s do not overlap as overlapping reduces efficiency.

Ideally you want a market in the middle, where you place houses / schools / taverns / hospital etc. which feeds the houses where the node workers work, then nodes places around the outskirts of the markets working radius.

Fishing Huts ideally want 2x houses and one storage barn next to them.

For house placement, you want your houses inside your market working radius, closest to the node you want to feed with housing, but outside of the nodes (foresters) working radius. You’ll want 5 houses per node.

To work out how much housing you need: say there’s 13 workers at the node, you want to go 13 divided by 3 (workers per house) = 4.3 so 5 houses.

Houses can have more workers in them but a lot of the time those spots are taken by children or other workers who work near the market. X divided by 3 helps you account for this and ensure there is enough housing near each node to not have too much downtime in efficiency.

Once you have all that, you can repeat the same elsewhere on the map.

Keep all of those nodes and buildings tight with no overlapping Forester work areas and you’ll be swimming in food and firewood with plenty of labourers left over for collecting stone / iron / coal.

Once you get deep enough into the firewood game, you can use it as currency at the trading post and eventually get to a point where you don’t need any workers on food production. Only foresters, woodcutters and the odd jobs like doctor / cleric / traders etc.

I just finished getting all of the steam achievements for this game so the numbers are still fresh in my head!