Question Crops not growing although players are relatively close (and view distance is high)

[Primeltoaster]

Hey, not sure whether this is a paper-related issue but I hoped somebody knew something to help me out either way. I googled for a while but only found people complaining that crops don't grow when players are far away. The problem on our server is that they're not growing when we're pretty close actually. So they did grow all the time while we were building the part around the farm (first screenshot, Chunk -5 4 7) and also in another building quite close (Chunk -2 4 -1). Now ever since we moved a bit further away to build this big tree trunk (second screenshot, Chunk 6 4 0), the crops simply don't grow or they do so very slowly (we're usually on the server for a couple of hours but the crops don't even grow enough to be harvested once in that time). The building you can see on the second screenshot is right behind the farm. Since I found many forum posts where people said the problem is the view distance, we set both view and simulation distance to 32, which (weirdly) didn't change anything. I hope somebody can help!