Foreword: I am asking this question primarily to decide if a nocturnal race makes sense for my purposes before I develop them in too great a depth. This means I do not have much detail to provide on their biology or culture, just a basic outline. Hopefully it's enough.
Permanent settlements are dependent on sustained agriculture. A sapient extraterrestrial nocturnal race are omnivorous and capable of tool use, and are already at what we would call an early Neolithic level of technology - i.e. they have blades, art and clothing (or their equivalents), but no domesticated animals. They are not cave-dwellers. They wake at dusk and go to sleep with the dawn on their world, which has a day-night cycle and an axial tilt similar to Earth's, and perhaps several small natural satellites. They are not necessarily humanoid, and likely resemble a non-primate clade.
How does a population of this race come to develop agriculture on a scale that can sustain a permanent settlement and thus lead to civilization? Chiefly what I'm asking is, if you're asleep during the day, how do you manage crops, take care of them, and guard them from intruding diurnal animals, among other things, well enough to settle down? Would they have large farms of grass/grain crops like we do, or would they need to farm something more unusual? (Again, they don't dwell in caves, so I don't think they would farm cave-dwelling life like bioluminescent fungi.) Or to put it another way, are there any standard and necessary agricultural processes that are particularly difficult to accomplish at night? I would prefer that their agriculture take a form recognizable to us as agriculture (you see their farm and think "farm"), but only if it's justifiable.
(There's no need to address the domestication of animal livestock for the moment, but it's welcome if you do. Assume their livestock could be either diurnal or nocturnal, probably something they would already be hunting, or it could be for non-food products.)
Edit, promoted from comment: The reason I think developing agriculture at night would be a problem is that I feel that being awake during the day would give one a better chance of coming to understand what kind of nutrition and resources plant crops demand. It would take a lot of work staying up past one's bedtime to determine how to lay out fields for the best sunlight and such, which I feel would be too much fine detail for a population on the initial cusp of agriculture to accomplish or to have a sense for.
