Farming broken - farmers will not harvest fully grown food

Other behavior with the farm inside village boundary is that they harvest and stop back and forth instead of harvesting until full before sharing potato or carrot with the hungry villagers.

To add to this, if you give villagers potatos, they will trade them like normal, but if they harvest the potatos themselves, they will not trade them.

the only thing i have my farmers grow is potatoes... rofl. but ive had no issues from 1.10 upto 1.11.4. but im running winmob... so this may be an ios issue. all the more reason it should be fixed.

Still no comment by the owners that be on this one... potato farming on iOS is non existent. They may plant them if they can be bothered but they will not harvest them.

Not sure yet because still testing, but beetroot farmers used to throw away excess seed as well therefore not filling their inventory seems not now. Shame.

Thank you for your report!
We're actually already tracking this issue at MCPE-47166, so we will resolve and link this ticket as a duplicate.

If you would like to add a vote and any extra information to the main ticket it would be appreciated.

Reopened because this report describes at least one independent issue not covered in MCPE-47166.

Re comment above on beetroot farmers. They used to throw excess seed away to the hungry villager but now seem to harvest and plant beautifully, even if no space in their inventory, leaving all excess beetroot and seeds lying around on the ground. Shame the carrot and potato farmers don't do this because one could use the minecart underneath the soil trick to collect the harvest like you used to be able to do for wheat farmers if you filled all their stacks with seed.

I also thought that perhaps my method for throwing food to a hungry villager was at fault and perhaps they got full themselves. However a change to a newly bred, starving, villager would not inspire the lazy potato/carrot farmers.

Farmers will also stare longingly at seed in the next field, rather than do their job, even if the seed is the other side of an opaque block. Surely this isn't right either?

Earlier, this ticket was closed as a duplicate of MCPE-47166, which reports that a farmer who is holding 4 or more bread does not harvest any crops. That issue could be involved in some of these issues, but I started by assuming it isn't.

Villager behaviors have changed since this report was created, and comments have added additional symptoms in 1.11, so I decided to assess which issues are still current. Here's the list of what I found:

1. Farmers share a few potatoes at first but then stop. This is different from how they work with carrots.

2. Farmers only harvest occasionally and only a small amount.

3. Farmers don't harvest potatoes at all.

4. Farmers will share potatoes they're given, but not those they harvest themselves.

5. Farmers no longer drop excess seeds on the ground. (I was a little confused whether this was meant as an issue or just an observation.)

6. Farmers stare at seeds in fields they can't get to, and at seeds they can't even see through opaque blocks.

These issues fall into two groups: Farming and Sharing. Although they're mutually dependent behaviors, these are very different game mechanics and I will treat them separately.

Issue #1: Farmers share a few potatoes at first but then stop. This is different from how they work with carrots
Farmers share carrots and potatoes differently because they have different thresholds defined for them in the vanilla behavior pack. The threshold, called "surplus_amount", is only 4 for carrots but 24 for potatoes. When a peasant villager (which includes farmers) has more than surplus_amount of a food item, it will offer some of what is has to a villager it encounters while strolling randomly. The behavior pack also defines a limit, called "want_amount", that specifies how many of each kind of food a villager wants to have. The donor villager will only drop, at most, enough food to let the receiving villager reach its want_amount. Together, these parameters determine how often and how much food a farmer will share. Since the threshold is much lower for carrots, the farmer will be willing to give carrots even when it only has a few, which it can quickly replenish, whereas it needs to have quite a lot of potatoes before it offers any, and then it takes correspondingly longer to replenish its own supply. (It might seem as if the way carrots work is better and should be implemented for potatoes, but see MCPE-32627 for a problem it causes.)

That leaves the question of why it completely stops sharing. At this time, I don't believe it actually does stop. When I experiment with this, if I give a bunch of potatoes to a farmer who seems to have stopped, it shares them as it ought to. That tells me that the apparent unwillingness to share is a consequence of the real problem, which is unwillingness to harvest. For that, see issue #3.

These behavior pack parameters have been unchanged since at least 1.1 (the earliest release I have a behavior pack for). However, it may be that the new villagers use them differently than the old ones did, and this could cause the reported issue. But at this time, issue #3 is causing at least some part of this problem, so we'll need to see whether the problem persists after that one is fixed.

Issue #2: Farmers only harvest occasionally and only a small amount
That farmers only harvest occasionally is part of the new villager behavior. Harvesting is an activity that farmers perform as part of their work schedule. During their work hours (5000-8000 ticks and 10000-11000 ticks), they alternate between "working" (standing at their job site) and a cooldown period during which they perform their other assignments, including harvesting and sowing, taking a random stroll, and exploring the village's outskirts. On average, the "working" periods last about 25 seconds while the cooldowns last about 20, not enough time to harvest and sow an entire crop field. So this behavior is intentional. I don't see it as being an issue, as long as they keep doing it often enough to keep the village fed. Feel free to comment with a rebuttal if you disagree.

Issue #3: Farmers don't harvest potatoes at all
This just isn't true as a general statement. They may not harvest potatoes in some situations, but to report it as a bug we need to tell the developers what some of those situations are.

So I did some experiments and found one. In a world with a farmer and a butcher, both with empty inventories, I planted 8 potato plants. After they matured, the farmer only harvested 6 plants, collecting 12 potatoes, and then stopped harvesting. I tried again without the butcher, This time the farmer harvested 6 plants and stopped, but a short time later it harvested 2 more plants. Checking, I found it again had 12 potatoes. So it appears that a farmer will stop harvesting potatoes when it has 12. Its surplus_amount is 24, so this means that a farmer cannot harvest enough potatoes to enable it share them with any villagers. This definitely seems like a bug.

Issue #4: Farmers will share potatoes they're given, but not those they harvest themselves
This is a corollary to #3. Since they only harvest 12, which is not enough to reach their surplus_amount, they will not share them. Likewise, they will not share the next 12 you give them, but any you give them after that will allow them to share. It's a not difference between potatoes you've given them versus those they harvest themselves, though, so this issue is a red herring.

Issue #5: Farmers no longer drop excess seeds on the ground
I don't think they ever did. I think what you observed was a farmer sharing surplus seeds with another villager, a peasant. Like non-peasants, peasant villagers share bread, carrots, potatoes, and beetroot, but unlike non-peasants they can also share wheat seeds and beetroot seeds. This seems to be a holdover from the old villagers, where all peasants wore brown coats and shared farming behaviors with farmers, but since non-farmer peasants don't sow or harvest any more, its modern purpose is questionable. The only reason I can think for this behavior to still exist is to serve as a seed reservoir in case the crops and farmers are all destroyed (for instance, by a series of unfortunate events, like a raid followed by a zombie siege and players plundering their crops). If they can make a baby and it grows up to become a farmer, the other peasants will share their seeds with it and the village will have a chance to revive.

Issue #6: Farmers stare at seeds in fields they can't get to, and at seeds they can't even see through opaque blocks
Farmers don't claim individual plots. Even in old converted villages, where if they don't have a composter farmers treat farmland as their job site, a farmer considers it his job to farm every farmland block in the village. In fact, the seeds aren't even part of what you saw. A farmer (or any other peasant) will pick up seeds it happens to walk close to, but it doesn't go searching for them. So I'm pretty sure what you saw was a farmer trying to sow or harvest in the field the seeds were in.

With respect to being able to see its target farmland through an opaque block, I believe that works as intended. If a farmer couldn't detect a field lying on the other side of a building, it might take a long time for it to wander somewhere where it could see it, and then it wouldn't be able to see the fields on the side it came from any more. This would tend to leave some farmland underutilized, so you'd need more farmland to maintain the same food supply.

In summary, the only clear issue I can identify on this ticket that is still an issue in 1.11 is #3. I will update the description field and attach a test world for the developers. If anyone thinks my explanations for the other issues are incomplete or wrong, I invite you to comment and I'll reconsider.

Well that explains some of the behaviours. Thank you.

#1 Carrot farmers also stop now. Not as bad a potato farmers but not as good as the excellent beetroot farmers so what is the difference in threshold with beetroot as nothing seems to stop them doing their job? Also, once a villager has its want_amount how often does this change i.e. Once full, always full or does the want_amount change over time? Is this functioning properly? What are the want_amounts for each veg type, including beetroot?

Being iOS I don't have access to all the trickery for me to check inventories etc. I can only refer back to games that I have played where once I had three farms where the carrot and beetroot farmers did well, even finding beetroot seeds in the collection chests but few, if any, potatoes (first pillager update)

That has since moved on to the last three farms (since deleted unfortunately) where I had to harvest the fields for the carrots and potatoes and let the farmers re-sow (albeit slowly) while the beetroot farmers carried on doing his job but.... once full, leaves all harvested beetroot and seed on the ground, which is far better than just standing around looking vacant or staring at seeds out of sight and out of reach.

I will try to recreate to post screen shots.

#2 I appreciate working hours, too short for farmers in my view as they seem to spend too much time standing at their stations rather than working, but I think my main concern is the difference between the veg type farmers in ability to harvest and share food.

#3 and #4 nothing to add at the moment, agreed.

#5 as I said in #1 I will try to recreate a beetroot farm because the game I have just deleted, unfortunately, had beetroot seed and beetroots dropped all over the place therefore I disagree with this one but changes in the last release may have altered the behaviour. It may take me a few days though...

#6 absolutely right... except. The game will slow right down when there is unfarmed land and the farmers are trying to get it farmed. I have complained about this on another ticket before and will try and find it. When a farmer is standing right next to land that needs sowing or harvesting it seems a bit illogical for it to fixate on land it cannot get to when it should be farming the nearest and most easily accessible land. To me, this is a bug in the mechanics. I will try and get a shot of a farmer standing in a field ready to be harvested but all it does is stand, staring at opaque blocks at a beetroot seed the other side of a wall.

MCPE-45595 the ticket where I noted the lag caused by farmland.

Note: The average durations I stated above for farmers "working" versus doing other things are double the correct values. They should be 12.5 and 10 seconds, respectively.

The sharing parameters don't change. What's supposed to happen is that villagers consume or give away food, which puts them below their want_amount again, and then the farmer can give them more food if it has any. The only time villagers actually consume food, as far as I know, is when they make babies, but there could be other ways (e.g. maybe to regenerate health?).

Here are the actual sharing parameters from the vanilla behavior pack:
Peasant:

Non-Peasant:

As you can see, the parameters are always the same for potatoes and beetroot. Carrots are the same as those two except that for peasants, the surplus_amount is 4 instead of 24. (This is reported as a bug in MCPE-32627.)

Now for the important news: I hadn't previously tested a beetroot farm because it was the one crop you said worked perfectly. Now I have, and it changes everything! I think I'm on the same page with you, finally. I have uploaded my test world so you can experiment with it yourself. With it, you can easily compare how harvesting and sharing differ for different kinds of crops. (Unfortunately, as you're on iOS you don't have access to a third-party tool to let you examine the villagers' inventories.)

What I see now is that a farmer's harvesting behavior is different for each kind of crop. Earlier I was assuming that wheat was different because of the MCPE-47166 bug and carrots were different as a consequence of MCPE-32627, so that left only potatoes for this report.

Now I'm rethinking that. It looks like harvesting behavior has separate logic for each kind of crop and seed, and some of them don't work well while others don't work well in combination with each other. Even beetroots are a problem, despite how convenient their harvesting behavior is for automated farming, because it will allow a farmer to fill its inventory with beetroot and its seeds, leaving no room for other crops or bread.

The inconsistencies don't seem to make sense and interact with food sharing in a way that prevents not only automated farming but efficient supply of food in natural villages. So it might be better for us to look at combining all these harvesting issues into a single ticket. I'll be discussing this with @unknown and will update later.

I had completed some testing for you before I saw this post (took me most of the day - I have housework to do!) but thought I would still post to give you more evidence. Thank you for the data, I will study that now.

Farming experiment

1 Set up 3 farms (carrot, beetroot and potato) by giving each spawned farmer 1 stack of the relevant veg. 2 villagers were also spawned and placed such that 2 of the farmers could feed them.

Each farmer harvested the fully grown veg and sowed veg until the field was full.

Result - carrot and beetroot farmers fed the villagers they had access to. However, the carrot farmer only harvested a small part of the field in, what looked like, an arc from the villager.

The beetroot farmer harvested its whole field.

Potato farmer did absolutely nothing. Wandered about but neither harvested nor fed a villager.

2 Added 2 more villagers to give the carrot and potato farmers additional opportunities to feed. The carrot farmer farmed slightly more of its field nearer to the new villager. Potato farmer did nothing.

Overall result was that the beetroot farmer threw away almost twice as much as the carrot farmer (plus 32 seeds) but the potato farmer produced nothing.

3 Removed the hungry villagers and let the farmers carry on.

Beetroot farmer continued to harvest his whole field leaving any excess seeds and beetroot on the field. Carrot farmer stopped harvesting and both the carrot farmer and the potato farmer just became fixated with the seeds in the next field. They slept but missed out working at their station - they just stood transfixed.

4 Added a wheat farmer who sowed its entire field and kept on farming just like the beetroot farmer. I probably should have left this phase continue for longer, on reflection, to see what happened when the wheat farmer's inventory was full.

5 Added newly spawned hungry villagers.

The wheat farmer immediately deposited 56 bread but then slowed right down no longer harvesting the whole of the field. Deposited just a few more loaves and 1 and a bit stacks of seed.

Carrot farmer started harvesting and feeding but in low amounts.

Potato farmer did absolutely nothing.

Beetroot farmer just continued correctly harvesting and feeding the villagers.

6 Removed the hungry villagers. All stopped working except the beetroot farmer.

Conclusion

Clearly different veg farmers work in different ways. Can it be fixed so that they all behave like the beetroot farmer because automatic farming is a thing of the past?

I no longer grow veg for trading. Once the farmers have got to the stage of trading melons and pumpkins I no longer grow any veg at all as the return are no good.

Looking at the figures, and remembering how many seeds the beetroot farmer used to throw away, I think there is a problem with the discarding of beetroot seeds whereas the wheat farmer seed discard seems to be working although bread discards may not be. i.e. More wheat seeds discards than bread (I appreciate bread takes up 3 wheat) and not a comparable amount of beetroot seeds are discarded compared with the veg itself. Many more wheat seeds discarded than beetroot seeds which is odd given the beetroot farmer had been farming for far longer than the wheat farmer had.

I'm still digesting the earlier comment. It looks like we are drawing the same conclusions, except about wheat, and I'll have to study that some more.

What's happening with the "discards" of seeds is probably being complicated by your other villagers. Non-peasants will just ignore them, since they don't accept seeds or beetroot seeds in their inventories. Peasants, on the other hand, will pick them up if they come within 3 blocks of them.

That's actually one of the flaws I see in this whole scheme of harvesting and sharing. A farmer will harvest beetroot and its seeds and share it with all villagers. Peasants want 60 beetroot and 64 beetroot seeds, and non-peasants want 60 beetroot (no seeds), so the farmer won't exceed those limits. However, because it drops the overflow on the ground, the peasants will still pick it up if they get close to it, so they wind up with way more than they want in their inventories. Once both the farmer and all the peasant villagers are chock full, the rest will just stay on the ground and despawn.

Checked the wiki and there is no mention of peasant vs non-peasant so I assume you mean a villager with a trade vs those without? For info all my experiments were done with Fletchers as the hungry villager therefore classed as non-peasants? Re seeds then, and as wheat and beetroot seeds are wanted in the same quantities, my observation is that wheat seeds are given far more freely than beetroot seeds - and I think we agree on all the rest. Note the farming arc of the carrot farmer though - why? (Rhetorical!) I shall leave it with the experts now as I think we have covered almost every aspect of the discrepancies in farming mechanics at the moment and I look forward to the redesign/fix.

Sorry, I thought I had listed who were peasants earlier, but it must have been on the other ticket. Peasants include farmers, shepherds, fletchers, fishermen, nitwits, and unemployed villagers (those with no trade). Except for the new nitwits and unemployed, those are the villagers who used to wear the brown coats and do farming duties. They no longer farm (except the farmer, of course) but still pick up and share wheat seeds and beetroot seeds, which non-peasants want nothing to do with.

I understand now why you have different results for bread, wheat, and wheat seeds. You used a fletcher (a peasant) where I used a butcher (a non-peasant). Non-peasants don't accept seeds or wheat, and there's a small detail about the behavior pack that I didn't mention but that could explain why the farmer doesn't share bread with them. I'll look into that.

The arc is probably just an artifact of how your test setup was arranged. Part of it would be that after a farmer harvests one crop, it looks for another within about 2 or 3 blocks before it looks anywhere else, so it tends to harvest in patches.

Thanks for working with me to nail down these details! Unfortunately, I can't promise you they'll redesign it to make farmers drop crops other than beetroot, or even that it'll still drop beetroot after the fix. But I imagine they'll at least make it so you can trap a hungry villager behind a hopper and let the farmer feed the hopper instead of the villager, and that it'll work for all kinds of food. (Just make sure the villager is a peasant, if you want to collect wheat/seeds/beetroot seeds.)

Always happy to help.. so I did have a peasant, who likes seeds, so it should have lots of beetroot and wheat seeds. Plus, if the rules are that it would take wheat why was only bread thrown to the fletcher - unless the fletcher was not being treated as a peasant. Sorry I missed your peasant/non-peasant text.

Re the arc and the carrot farmer then shouldn't the beetroot farmer have done the same thing and it doesn't explain the fixation with seeds, to the exclusion of farming etc, either? That really is an issue but it does confirm that farming mechanics need a bit of sorting out.

I think I'll try with with different trades to see if there is any change in behaviour in being fed. Bet you there will be and not along the peasant/non-peasant definition.. gives me something to do...

The questions are for you to ponder on. I don't necessarily need a reply because I don't want to take up valuable time and I will report back on different hunger rates for different trades over the next few days.

The bit about the behavior pack that I didn't mention is that wheat has an additional parameter: It's marked to be converted to bread when sharing, so it's normal that bread was thrown to the fletcher and not wheat. This parameter is present for wheat generally, including for non-peasants, who wouldn't accept uncrafted wheat in any event. Peasants would accept uncrafted wheat, but the behavior pack forces it to be crafted so it can't be shared. Peasants can still pick it up off the ground, though.

Re the arc, does it cause some kind of problem? I haven't actually thought much about it because I'm only looking for problems that need to be fixed, and I haven't recognized this as one. The carrot and beetroot want_amounts are very different, which affects how much of each is harvested at a time, so I wouldn't expect carrot and beetroot farmers to harvest exactly alike.

I'm not sure what you mean by "fixation with seeds to the exclusion of farming". Are you saying they get stuck that way and never go back to farming? I thought it was temporary, which would be normal, so I haven't tested it yet. Maybe I'd better.

I'm having a very busy day, so it might be tomorrow before I get back to this.

Re fixation. Yes they stop farming and they will not go to their workstation but they will sleep. A few other tickets mention this because even normal villages will just stand and stare at food they cannot reach. Definitely needs someone to test this out properly.

Re arc. If the farming is going to be so restricted it is definitely goodbye to any form of automatic farming because the returns would be so low for any useful trades for emeralds - unless you have about 5 or more hungry villagers for 1 carrot farmer for a field of quite a small size that I have tested.

As we know already, potato farming is definitely broken because they flatly refuse to harvest in a fully grown field and will not give anything away, and the wheat farmer stops quite soon as well - I presume when its inventory is full, so broken as well.

Automatic farming is really only for beetroot, but not beetroot seeds, at the moment.

I did try testing which villagers are given which foods but had to give up because of the above so a thorough waste of time.

What I did try was to create a huge field with the 4 types of veg farmers in each corner just to test how far they would farm away from their work station. Carrot, wheat and potato harvested anything that grew for replanting and kept on going as long as there was empty farmland.

Interestingly, the beetroot farmer stayed within a reasonable radius of the workstation - regardless of empty farmland and very reminiscent of the old farming radius for farmers, and also came to the point of harvesting and leaving beetroot and seeds on the ground. Correct in my view - others wrong/faulty.

You say that crop yield/farming radius will be managed, because we agree that it isn't at the moment, by the want and surplus values but why has this been implemented?

The only benefit I can see is that some villagers can now collect seed but if automatic farming is essentially removed because of poor crop yields due to want/surplus values etc. then what would be the point of going to the bother of setting up automatic collection for a few seeds and veg? Far easier and quicker to farm it yourself in that case.

So, it will be interesting to see what the fix finally looks like. Automatic farming completely gone or not....?

May I suggest someone also looks at MCPE-36495. The harvesting aspect of MCPE-42549 was ignored (difficult when there are multiple faults logged on a single ticket - a bad habit I have too!) This shows that farming mechanics have been buggy for sometime and an update to MCPE-47936 suggests that it just isn't an iOS issue.

Please comment about that on MCPE-36495.

I think I've finished testing now. Almost all the issues are consequences of the logic used for harvesting. Specifically,

• A farmer will not harvest any crops if it has any of the following in its inventory:

• 3 or more bread

• 12 or more carrots

• 12 or more potatoes

• Otherwise, a farmer will harvest wheat or beetroots infinitely. If its inventory is full, it will drop the crop and/or seeds on the ground.

I can't be sure, but it looks to me like the intent was to make the farmer harvest just enough to feed one villager at a time. The problem with harvesting a whole field at a time is that the nearest villagers would get plenty to eat, but the farther ones might not. Harvesting in small batches seems like it would spread the food around more evenly. But they didn't implement it quite right.

I know your main focus is on making automated farms viable again. I can't promise it'll be fixed in a way that's optimal for automated farms, but in my experience Mojang doesn't intentionally break farms unless they feel they have to for a good reason, such as maintaining game balance or avoiding giving too big a shortcut to new players.

I'm still not sure I understand what the "arc" issue is, but I feel like it must be a consequence of the harvesting logic. If a farmer is only harvesting enough to replace what it just gave a villager, there's no reason for it to walk very far. The problem isn't where it goes, it's how little it tries to harvest, isn't it?

The issue of farmers focusing on seeds they can't reach to the exclusion of harvesting mature crops is separate, and I think we'll probably use this ticket to track it. What the farmer is doing is intended, but it shouldn't go on forever and I expect it shouldn't be causing so much lag. I'll need to do some more testing before I can properly describe it. I should be ready in a few days.

I have finished studying the problem with focusing on seeds. It's not only seeds, it's any item the villager can put into its inventory.

Picking up food items and seeds it finds lying on the ground is not part of the harvesting and sowing behavior. Instead, this is the same behavior all villagers exhibit of picking up dropped items they need. However, this is a relatively high priority AI goal that can block lower-priority goals, including harvesting and sowing.

There is also a more serious consequence. A villager can detect dropped items up to 3 blocks away, even through opaque blocks, and it will target them even if it can't find a path to reach them. When this happens, the villager will stand still and attempt to find a path persistently until the item despawns or a still higher priority goal interrupts it, possibly as a result of a schedule change. Pathfinding consumes a relatively large amount of processor time, so this can cause lag on less powerful devices.

Re arc, or part of the circle, implies that the carrot farmer will harvest around the hungry villager only and I suppose now because it will only harvest so little at a time then of course the harvested area would be the shortest distance around the villager hence a circle.

This makes sense if the whole idea of farming now means that their sole purpose is just to feed villagers but why on earth would Mojang want to break every single automatic farm out there in Minecraft land?

Also, as we know, the wheat farmer will stop harvesting because he probably has more that 3 bread in his inventory, the potato farmer won't do anything, the carrot farmer is probably working to the new rules that means automatic farming is extinct and the beetroot farmer does his thing but... the other main difference, shown in my second experiment, is that the beetroot farmer will only farm within a certain radius of his workstation. All the others will continue planting but won't harvest.

So when you say they didn't implement it properly.....

As far as pathfinding is concerned, trying to get to out of reach empty farmland definitely causes lag but staring at seed they cannot reach doesn't seem to. I really appreciate you investigating that.

However, I expect that very few players would be even bothered if the villagers fed themselves, or the mechanism behind it, because you would usually set up trading halls and if you need more villagers you harvest the village food yourself and just throw it at them. Anything else going on in the background in the village has little effect on the player - just the removal of automatic farming.

Thank you

Don't give up hoping for a return of automated farms. There's no reason to think at this point that they were broken deliberately.

What you're seeing from the beetroot farmer is probably working as intended, and would work the same way with the same farmer and field if it were planted with wheat. There's nothing special about beetroots or distance from a composter in the game's logic, it's just a consequence of the farmer's limited detection range and the limited time available during the sowing/harvesting part of its work cycle. You'd also see this for carrots and potatoes if it didn't stop harvesting them completely (and you probably will see it if they fix that problem the way I imagine they will).

It looks like we still have conflicting results to explain, regarding the lag with unreachable farmland. I test on my PC, which doesn't usually have a lag problem so I can't reproduce that part. In addition, in my experiments with unreachable farmland the farmer simply ignored it completely, so I was going to write it off as an issue. Is that something you can reproduce in 1.11.4? If so, does it only happen when he has nowhere else that needs sowing or harvesting? Exactly how does he behave? Perhaps if you could reproduce it in a simple flat world with mob spawning turned off, you could describe how to build that world so I could reproduce it too.
 

Mod Auldrick.
I am on win 10 bedrock and on the new 1,12 update, I have built a farm with an extra villager in the middle, farm is split into 2 so the middle villager can have food thrown to him from both farms, Both farms are within 1 chunk. One has a farmer bed and composter who does potatoes, the other has a farmer composter bed and does carrots
i also filled the farmers inv with the crop they are harvesting ( about 9 stacks of each crop per farmer_ but not the middle villager.) perhaps filling their inv was a mistake

the 2 farms are separated by a solid wall except for where the middle guy is, a 3 x 3 dug out bit where he stand in middle surrounded by fence with hoppers beneath him,
Currently the carrot side is working fine. the thrown items end up in a chest but after an initial start the potato farmer stopped farming tho the carrot farmer still farms and throws carrots.
It seems to me the mechanics for potatoes and carrots should be the same but arent .

I have ended up trying an extra composter in each farm to see if that helped and since removed.
I have also harvested some of the potatoes to see if that gets him operational again, he replanted potatoes and threw a few potatoes to the middle guy but not more, I am waiting to see what happens when the new crop is fully grown

of interest is the potato farmer trades beetroot and the carrot farmer carrots, not that I think it makes any difference. I have not traded with them so may try removing composter of the potato farmer to see if I can get him trading potatoes

in my village nearby ( about 100 blocks away from memory) there is 3 farmers with a tiny plot with wheat and potatoes as this is what they trade) and they refuse to harvest it, I assume this is because they have fed all the other villagers there and no beds available for breeding

I am in a jungle biome.

ok potato farmer hasnt harvested, carrot farm part is still working with items getting to the chest below, still no potatoes there. I am going to try continuously harvest the potatoes til he runs out of inv items to see if that helps.
It would be helpful to be able to see their inventories.
I would provide a copy of my world if i knew where to upload it for you or developers to look at but it seems a common problem so they probably have other world copies already
currentlu in creative and peaceful while building farm, am about to change to survival and easy mode