How to Become a Master Farmtown Farmer

Farmtown lets you take control of your very own ranch, grow crops, herd animals, grow beautiful fruit gardens, and most importantly, make cash and buy buildings, fences and more to make your farm the envy of all your Farmtown neighbors.

This guide details the best money making strategies, and how to quickly unlock the different items available in the game. Read on to become a Farmtown expert!

Making money
There are several ways to make money in Farmtown, but the best strategy is to plant crops and sell them at the marketplace. To plant crops you have to plow your field then buy seeds from the shop. The basics of farming are explained in the tutorial in the game when you sign up for Farmtown.

After you've cleared the first tutorial missions and have successfully sold you first crop, it's time to start making money. You will make the most money if you plant grapes, grapes are available as you start the game, the seeds cost only 20 coins and they sell for 56 coins at the Farmtown marketplace. While 56 coins is by far the lowest sales price of any of the crops, the real benefit of planting grapes is in the extremely fast turnaround of these crops. Grapes will be ripe to harvest in 4 hours, which means you could plant and harvest grapes up to six times a day (if you can handle going on Farmtown every 4 hours...), at a profit of 36 coins it is possible to make a net profit of 216 coins a day off one patch of grapes.

No other crop comes close to this kind of return, the second best option at the start is potato which costs 40 coins and sells for 99 coins. This gives a net profit of 59 coins, but potatoes can only be harvested once a day. In comparison to the other crops that become available later in the game, 59 coins profit a day for the potato is still among the highest returns you will get on any crop. So, when you consider the profit potential of the grapes compared to any other crop, for pure money making strategies, planting and harvesting grapes as often as you can is by far the best strategy.

Another great benefit of growing grapes in Farmtown is that it allows you to level up very fast. You will get experience points every time you plow a field or plant a seed. And with the extremely fast turnaround of the grapes, you'll be doing a lot of plowing and seeding, letting you race through the levels early on and unlocking items that you can buy.

Of course, there are a couple of downsides to being a grape farmer. To get the maximum benefits of the fast growth of the grapes you have to do a lot of work, plowing, seeding and harvesting an entire Farmtown farm every four hours is a lot of work. With the great profit potential of the grapes, you don't need to harvest it constantly though, even if you just grow two batches of grapes a day, the profits from grapes will exceed any other crop you can plant.

The main problem with grape growing is that in the same way that grapes grow fast, they also go bad very fast. So you have to plan ahead, and know that you will be able to log back on to Facebook four hours after you plant the grapes. You have less than an hour to get your grapes harvested after they are ripe before they go bad.

If the pressures of grape farming proves to be too much, you can make good profits from potatoes and even better; cabbages when they become available. If you can wait for a few days before you cash in, the 3 days to wait for sunflowers will pay off with a high return, and the peas will also provide over 60 coins per day profit making them very attractive. The downside again is that especially for the peas, it will take a while to unlock them.

Of course, no matter what crop you decide to grow, when it is time to harvest, make sure you hire someone to do it for you. Not only does it give one of the massive hordes of unemployed that always hang around the marketplace a chance to make some extra cash, you will make more money of of your harvest as well. To hire someone to work on your farm, either go to a friends farm and click on their character, or go to the marketplace, you will always find people there looking for work.

Gaining experience
Farmtown has a level system where you have access to different items and crops based on your experience level, to increase your level you need to ear experience points. There are many different ways to gain experience, some are related to the day to day upkeep of your farm, but the most efficient ways to gain experience is actually to buy items for your farm.

Plowing and seeding earns you experience, 1 xp for plowing, 2 for planting a seed. This kind of daily routine will eventually help you gain enough experience, but a much faster way of gaining experience is to purchase items from the shop. Depending on the price of the item, you gain lot's of experience from placing large items. For example, if you buy the 30 000 coin silo, you will gain 302 xp and the added benefit of making your farm more beautiful.

However, the most efficient way of buying experience points this way is not to buy the most expensive items you can, but to buy hay bales. The hay bales cost 50 coins and gives 5 xp for each one you place on your farm. So, you essentially gain 1 xp for every 10 coins you spend on hay bales. This is the highest return of any item or action in the game. So for fast leveling, filling your farm up with hay bales is the fastest and cheapest way to do it. Of course, a farm full of hay bales might not be the dream farm you wanted to build, so you can either delete the hay bales you don't want, or give them as gifts to lucky friends, or if you have achieved the popular neighbor award, you can sell them back to the shop (at a pretty hefty loss).

Tricks
By default, Farmtown lays out your plowed fields with a narrow strip of land open between each square. This makes it easy for your farmer to get around and tend to his crops, but it also wastes a lot of your space. To use the entire area of your farm for crops, go to the game settings (the little spanner icon at the top right) and check the 'remove space between fields' option. You will now be able to plow fields that are right next to each other and plant more crops in the same space. Many people also think that plowing the fields in this way makes the crops and fields look more like a real farm.

In the market place, make yourself stand out from the crowd looking for work by climbing on top of the barrels on the cart in the foreground. If you walk up behind the cart, and continue to walk up to the barrel in the front, you'll be standing on top of the cart instead of being hidden behind it.

You can just give one gift a day in Farmtown, but it is possible to cheat this feature. If you are using Firefox, right click on the 'Send Gifts' tab at the top of the game window, and choose 'open link in new tab' from the menu that appears, you can repeat this as many times as you like. Go back to the first tab and click the 'Proceed to send' button. Without doing anything else, go through every one of the tabs you've opened and repeat this step. You now go back to the first tab again, and select the friends you want to send gifts too. Do not confirm that you want to send the gift, instead go through each of the tabs again, and select exactly the same friends in each window. The final step is to go back to the first tab again, and go through every single tab and confirm the gift in each one. This way you can send almost unlimited gifts to your friends (make sure you give them horses, they sell for 60 coins each).

You can design patterns or write words on your fields by planting different kinds of crops. Try spelling out a greeting to your visitors, or draw a smiley face in the middle of your fields for a fun way to customize your farm. If you want something less perishable, you can use hay bales to write words and greetings as well.
The stone fence and the hedge are excellent items to use if you want to create illusions of layers on your farm, you could make it look like your farm house is sitting on the top of a hill, or use the hedges to create rice terraces for example. Use your creativity to come up with cool and unique designs for your farm!

By following these simple tips, you will be on your way to creating your dream farm on Farmtown in no time.