Crop and Tree Profits Calculated
I’ve received some questions and comments that have made me feel as if I am not explaining the calculations I use to determine the profits of crops and trees in Farm Town properly. First off, as some of you may already be aware, I offer a spreadsheet for sale that calculates a lot of the information I talk about regarding Farm Town in my blog posts. If you are interested in learning more, a description is available here: http://male.themodernhippy.com/games/farm-town-spreadsheet-v20-excel/. This spreadsheet is not protected and does not have any of the formulas hidden. This means that you can clearly see the math behind my calculations, and edit them to your liking. You can even take it a step further and perform your own calculations by making additions to the spreadsheet. At any rate, I use this spreadsheet to determine the profits that are obtainable via each specific crop and tree on an hourly basis.
The Farm Town Spreadsheets Calculations
We’ll begin with Crops. The calculations are really quite simple. At the beginning, I determine the actual cost to plant the crop. The actual cost to plant a crop in Farm Town is the crop’s price, plus the cost to plow the field (20 coins). So, lets work with the Potato crop as an example. The crop itself is 40 coins, adding the cost to plow of 20 coins, leaves us with a total cost of 60 to plant 1 crop of Potatoes. Now we need to know the amount of money we’ll get from selling our harvest. In Farm Town, you get more money for allowing others to harvest your crops and trees. For this reason, I use what is referred to as the ‘hired harvest’ sale price for determining profits. The amount of money Tom, the Farm Town marketplace sales dude, will give you 119 coins for selling 1 crop of Potatoes that were harvested by another person. Now, take profit from selling the crop (119) and subtract the cost of (60) and you will come up with a result of 59 coins. This number represents your total profit from purchasing the crop. However, in order to compare this crop to all the others you need to divide the profit by the harvest time. Because grapes are 4 hour crops, you cannot use the days number to calculate this crop easily. And, one day in Farm Town is 20 hours, which means crops with a 1 day harvest time take 20 hours, 2 day harvest time take 40… and so on. So now we dividing the profit (59) by the harvest time in hours (20) and arrive at our Profit / Hour for Potatoes of 2.95. This represents the number of coins that you will earn per hour with planting 1 crop of Potatoes. Now you have a good number to work with to compare all of the crops to one another.
Trees
The method in calculating the profit per hour for trees in Farm Town is a little different, and even easier than that of crops. For trees that you do not purchase yourself (received as gifts from Farm Town friends) all you need to do is take the hired harvest sale price and divide it by the harvest time in hours. If we take the Coconut tree (best income) we have a hired harvest sale price of 101 coins and a harvest time of 5 days (100 hours). Performing the calculation shows us that 1.01 is the income per hour from owning a coconut tree. If you decide to purchase a tree (not the best idea) the calculation would be different yet again. Because you do not purchase a tree each time you harvest it as you do with crops, the price only has to be deducted once. What I do is divide the cost by the hired harvest payout to determine the number of harvest cycles that will have to take place before I recoup my initial investment. After that, the income is pure profit and can be calculated using the formula above. For example, Apple trees cost 400 coins and have a hired harvest sale price of 46 coins. Dividing the cost (400) by the income (46) shows us that it will take 8.70 (rounded) cycles to earn back our 400 coin investment. At which time, the trees income per hour will be 0.77 coins.
What does this mean and how can it help me?
This means I just outlined how to determine the best values for all of the crops and trees in Farm Town. All you need to do is perform these calculations for each crop and tree and you will be in the know. Don’t want to do that, that’s ok. I already have.. my spreadsheet contains all of the calculations already done. Not interested? Well, if I gave all of the information away, no one would want to buy the spreadsheet. However, I’m not going to leave you empty handed. As mentioned before…
BEST INVESTMENTS
Crops:
Grapes
Trees:
Coconut Tree
Although Grapes are tedious to plow, plant and then harvest every 4 hours, they are by far the best money earning crop available. And on that note, they are the best XP earning crop as well. However, I mentioned this fact already in an earlier post… and I can’t leave you without some updated information.
The next best crop for those of you not able / willing to be on every 4 hours for Grapes, is Onions.
But, Grapes only sell for 67 coins, and Pumpkins sell for 475.. you must be wrong.
Sorry Mr. Negative pants… make sure to keep in mind that just because 1 crop sells for more than another doesn’t take into account all of the necessary information. If a crop takes 5 days (100 hours) to harvest then that block of your farm will be busy for that length of time and unusable for another crop. So if you have a crop that takes 4 hours, such as Grapes, you could then plant 25 crops of Grapes in the same amount of time it takes for 1 instance of Pumpkins to be ready for harvest. Doing the math tells you that the number of Grapes that can be planted (25) multiplied by the income for harvesting each plot (67) leaves us with a total of 1,675 coins in the same amount of time you would have earned 475 coins had you planted Pumpkins. Using the profit rather than the sales price for both of these crops shows a better comparison. Pumpkins earn a profit of 255 coins after the costs to plant 1 crop are deducted. Grapes equal 675 coins profit after deducting their planting costs for 25 crops. This is still a dramatic difference!
I hope this information reaches you all well, and happy Farming!
In my next Farm Town post I hope to cover the specifics of maximizing your income with limited funds, or if you have a limited space to work with (small farm). I also hope to identify some other areas that I may have missed talking about in order to help keep all of my readers informed.
Please leave a comment and let me know what you think of this post. Also, feel free to ask any questions, or tell me what you would like me to talk about on my next post!
View my other Farm Town posts.
