Much depends on two things: the speed at which you are playing the game and how many villagers you have. One villager can comfortably serve as farmer during the early stages of the game (up to about 20) but you will need more as the population increases. The crops appear about every two hours if you are playing at 2X speed, and correspondingly slower if you are on a slower speed. That is usually enough time for a single farmer to clear the field but if you notice there are still a lot of crops left towards the time when another crop is due you might want to put other villagers on harvesting to make sure none of the crops are "wasted".
The more villagers there are on research the more the tech points are accumulated. There is no limit. However, it also depends a lot on the experience of the villagers: a trainee earns far less tech points per completed science task than a master. Also, it depends on the tech level, with those on L3 science earning far more a "turn" than when the village was at L1.
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To err is human; to arr is pirate.