How could you maximize food production with magic items and spells over a long period of time?

Question

As a player over a period of in-game years, what magic items and spells would allow me to create as much food as possible for a large town (~1000 people) assuming most of them are farmers/could help, and space is not a concern. The town is being created with this goal in mind, so this can be factored in (eg. circular fields for the effects of plant growth).

This is not including spells that are very small individual buffs (Haste, Enlarge/Reduce, etc). They do not need to be explicit about food/farming, something like the Decanter of Endless Water would also work. Lower magic is preferred (1st-5th level spells), but higher-level options are also good to know.

This question has a broader application than this related question that is only about the plant growth spell's applicability.

Answer 1

Farming is work! Using magic can do a lot to improve efficiency, much like industrialization can in non-magical ways. I've divided the most relevant spells I could think of into some broad categories of farm work:

Field and Equipment Preparation

Fabricate (4th level spell)

• Create tools and equipment
• In some cases harvest and process in one step

Move Earth (6th level spell)

• Prepare soil (includes tilling, plowing, mixing to evenly distribute nutrients)

• Prepare high-labor growing areas (like rice paddies) more easily

Stone Shape (4th level spell)

• Equipment production, especially precise irrigation systems

Create Food and Water (3rd level spell)

• Easily produce water for irrigation

• Create fertilizer precursor material, possibly with precise chemical characteristics

Create or Destroy Water (1st level spell)

• Create large volumes of water alone

Levitate (2nd level spell)

• Lift large weights for loading and transport

• Move water into a position for passive irrigation systems

• Potential power generation, with some other setup

Field Work

Guidance (Cantrip)

• Better execution of all tasks (may be awkward to scale)

Speak with Animals (1sts level spell)

• Recruit special-task employees

• Dissuade or redirect pests

Conjure Animals (3rd level spell)

• More workers, suitable to a variety of tasks

Conjure Elemental (5th level spell, Earth elemental specifically)

• Helpful for dealing efficiently with burrowing pests like voles or gophers

Unseen Servant (1st level spell, ritual)

• General-purpose workers

Animate Objects (5th level spell)

• Workers, especially for specialty tasks (think magical machinery)

• Workers, especially for finely detailed tasks (workers can be tiny)

Alter Self (2nd level spell)

• Always have the ideal physical form and scale for field tasks

Freedom of Movement (4th level spell)

• Easier to move through the fields, which may be very helpful with certain crops

Druidcraft (Cantrip)

• Potentially a quick, effective method of harvesting crops (very crop-dependent)

Growing Conditions

Dancing Lights/Light/Continual Flame/Daylight (Various spell levels)

• Provides light, which can supplement light on days with poor weather or extend light during non-ideal growing seasons
• Unclear if the light is useful for plants, though Daylight likely is

Plant Growth (3rd level spell)

• Doubles harvest

Control Winds (5th level spell)

• Seed/pollen dispersal

• Strengthen stalks of some crops

• Dissuade or redirect some pests, particularly flying insects

Control Weather (8th level spell)

• Enforce ideal growing conditions for crops

• Can customize weather within 5-mile blocks for crops with different needs

• Can extend the conditions of crops' ideal growing season indefinitely

Answer 2

The 'easiest' way to do so would be to create a magic item based on the GoodBerry spell. this spell creates from nothing 10 berries that can sustain a creature for a day. Creating a magic item that casts this spell an unlimited amount of time. In that way, for the cost of one magic item you can create enough food for 144,400 people a day. Even with some inefficiencies (berries must be consumed in 24 hours) you can still feed a lot of people.

We can even make some adjustments to reduce the rarity of the item, such as making it gigantic (e.g. a Goodberry Fountain that can't realistically be moved from the middle of the town). I can't find a good source on figuring out rarity of new magic items, but what this has going for it is that it is a first level spell effect.

If we were to go by 3.5 rules, which did thoroughly codify things pretty well, we end up with a cost of about 2000gp (equivalent to a +1 weapon). There's already an example of this item, the Sustaining Spoon, which costs 5400gp, but which only feeds four people. 3.5 had some notoriously broken magic item pricing. In my opinion, this item would end up being an uncommon magic item. It is 'powerful' but it isn't particularly useful to a player, especially if you made it immovable.

If you are wanting food for export, then you're probably better off using the GoodBerry Fountain to feed your people and using the farmland for cash crops.