Trivia / Silver Spoon

• Creator's Oddball: Most of Hiromu Arakawa's works are fantasy series with high stakes involved (like Fullmetal Alchemist and her manga adaptation of The Heroic Legend of Arslan), but Silver Spoon is a Slice of Life series that takes place in contemporary Japan and has no fantastic elements at all. According to Arakawa, this was intentional, since she wanted to challenge herself by making a more realistic series.
• Schedule Slip: A lot, mostly due to various personal complications for Arakawa such as giving birth and having to care for a sickly relative. Tellingly, despite running in a weekly magazine instead of a monthly one like Fullmetal Alchemist, the series only put out 15 volumes over the course of about a decade, 12 less than FMA did in the roughly same amount of time.
• Reality Subtext: One of the chapters had a cow giving birth around the time when Hiromu Arakawa had a child. Her author avatar is a cow with glasses.
• Write What You Know: The mangaka, Hiromu Arakawa, was born and raised on a dairy farm in Hokkaido. She also attended an agricultural school much like the one where the series takes place.