Farm Town Economics

My kids and I have been enjoying building our farms on Farm Town together. Of course we all started out will very small farms and very few coins. So we had a discussion about how to use the coins that we had to our best advantage. In other words, to give us the highest return on our investment. I made up an Excel spreadsheet with the cost of each available crop, the prices that the crops could be sold, and the ROI for each crop. We could then plant our crops knowing that we were either planting the crop that would yield the most money for our investment, or a crop that simply looked cool and that we wanted to plant.

In Farm Town you can get hired to work on other people's farms. I acquired a buddy, named Michael, who I began to trade harvests with--I would harvest his crops, then hire him, in return, to harvest mine. I noticed that he always planted cabbage while I was planting strawberries. Now at first that didn't make sense to me because strawberries have an ROI of 2.83 whereas cabbage has an ROI of only 2.38...clearly you would make A LOT more money planting strawberries rather than cabbage!

Then all of a sudden I remembered something that I couldn't belive, afterwards, that I had forgotten...once our farms had grown to the extent that acreage was more of a limitation than coinage the economics of what crop to plant changed. Now it wasn't a matter of getting the biggest return for each coin spent, but the biggest return for each plot planted.

So the next step for me was to explain to the kids the different strategies for maximizing our returns. I don't think I delivered my revelation very smoothly, but after a couple tries Tyler began to grasp the concept. He got out a piece of scratch paper and began writing out some scenarios until he was able to explain it even better than me.

Thank you Farm Town for yet another revelation!