Minecraft server villager-harvest-radius setting?

So farmer villagers on my server won't harvest crops unless a player is very close to them. Does anyone know of a server setting, vanilla or Spigot (both 1.11.2), that changes how close you have to be to a villager for them to harvest crops?

Solution 1:

This cannot be prevented in vanilla Minecraft without using cheats. The farmers won't farm because the chunk is unloaded. Unless you use a chunk loader or move the villager to the spawn chunks, you can't make them farm without a nearby player.

/forceload command

As of version 1.13.1, this is possible using the /forceload command. Run the following command to add an area of chunks to be force-loaded:

/forceload add <x1> <z1> <x2> <z2>

The X and Z positions are not block positions but rather chunk positions.