You immediately notice something is strange when you break through the foresting towns. Normally, fields are supposed to lie fallow in rotations, in a patchwork pattern depending on which farmers owned what fields. Most of these towns seemed to follow this rule - however, you notice a few villages seem to have planted everything with a plant that sprouted green shoots. If this was a royal or a noble decree, you could understand a full planting, damn whether the land was supposed to be fallow or not - but it wasn't uniform, and in places you could tell that the peasants had uprooted whatever they had planted to allow the soil to lay fallow. The count was enforcing the adoption of a new crop? Fascinating. You filed that away for later.
