Fields in the Trees
Animals like eskee and treepigs are farmed on “veldbranches” - branches that have been ringed around with thorn hedges or fencing to prevent the animals from moving off them. To keep animals from jumping away some branches are shortened and others removed giving trees used for livestock farming a distinctive look.
Treetop Harvest
Most crops are the fruits on the trees themselves, so farming is a multi-generational enterprise among the shorter lived species as a large tree may take 20 years to even begin bearing fruit in useful quantities and twice as long to bring in full harvests.
Key staples include breadfruit, chestnuts and acorns, from which a form of dense, nutty bread is made. The Sweet Oak is particularly important in temperate climates as (partly through nature, and partly through selective breeding) its acorns are large and contain little tannin so require little processing beyond milling to produce usable flour. Pruned properly a mature Sweet Oak can provide bread for a family for a year - and their home might also be built within its branches.
Fruit and nut trees are grown everywhere, appropriate to the climate zone, and leafy crops may be harvested from the trees themselves when young and fresh during the warming, or from carefully cultivated parasitic plants growing on the branches.
Many fungi are grown in this way, too. The delicate fronds of some epiphytes, their roots dangling in the air, form a particular speciality, most notably in tropical regions.
In order to deliver expensive tropical delicacies to the tables of the rich in cooler regions some smaller fruit trees are even grown in troughs of soil held in the boughs of larger trees, carefully sheltered and warmed during smallsun.
Farmers must be expert rope workers, too.
Family Farms and Larger Businesses
Farming ranges from subsistence family farms, through the mixed farming enterprises common in villages and around towns (these are by far the most common) to a few larger enterprises specialising in growing a single crop for the markets of larger cities.
Eleath is a verdant world with good natural resources and where careful husbandry and household management is applied it produces varieties of delicious, seasonal produce to last comfortably through the long season of smallsun.