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When farming to make money, you will naturally want to sell the best-quality crops every season.
Although planting and caring for crops can be enjoyable, producing the best crops requires hard work. This is where the crop grading system comes into play.
With three crop grades determined by seed quality, fertilizing, watering, and other factors, it can be difficult to make sure everything goes well.
However, this guide will explain how to easily improve your crop quality.
What Is Crop Grade?
When you grow any crop and care for it until harvest, you will notice that each crop has a letter grade next to its name.
This letter reflects the quality of the crop itself, indicating how well it has grown.
This is influenced by fertilizer use, whether the crop is watered regularly, and the quality of the seed that was planted.
By default, planted crops will almost always produce Grade B harvests. These crops are ideal for use in cooking recipes and as gifts because their selling price is much lower.
Each increase in letter grade raises the selling price by 30 G.
For example, here I planted a Sweet Potato and applied fertilizer every day. As a result, its selling price will be slightly higher.
- Grade B Sweet Potato sells for 180 G.
- Grade A Sweet Potato sells for 210 G.
- Grade S Sweet Potato has the highest selling price at 240 G.
If you want to save crops for cooking or gifts, it is better to keep Grade B crops and sell the higher-quality harvests to earn more money.
Use Fertilizer to Improve Crop Quality
If selling crops is your main way of making money, you should try using fertilizer to improve Grade B crops to Grade S.
Using fertilizer regularly throughout the growing process can affect the quality of the crop once it is fully grown. Fertilizer can be purchased from Vesta Farm for 20 G each.
Each plot requires one fertilizer to cover the entire crop. You can fertilize each plot twice per day.
Just like when planting seeds, you can hold the button to charge and spread fertilizer over a 3×3 area at once. The more fertilizer you apply before harvest, the better the result.
Each crop has a different growth time, so the amount of fertilizer you can apply and the amount required varies greatly from one crop to another.
Well-fertilized crops will look different from crops that have not been fertilized.
The most noticeable difference is the deeper, darker color of their leaves, even before they begin flowering and producing fruit.
Once a crop reaches the maximum quality (S), it can no longer be fertilized. You only need to wait for it to produce its harvest and then collect it.
Making Your Own Seeds Using High-Quality Crops
This is one method I often use to produce my own seeds from high-quality crops.
The process is quite simple. You only need to have a Seed Maker. This machine can be purchased through the Ledger or obtained for free through the Daryl Seed Maker event.
Once you have a Seed Maker, start by planting a crop seed. Then, apply fertilizer regularly until the crop grows well.
When harvest time arrives and the crop produces a Grade S fruit or vegetable, place it in the Seed Maker. Wait a few days for it to be turned into high-quality seeds.
You will receive two seeds from one harvested crop. You can plant those seeds and repeat this process to multiply your supply of high-quality seeds.
Hybrid Crops
If you have created hybrid crops with Vinnie at Takakura’s house starting in Year 2, you may already know about the various benefits these unique crops provide.
Vinnie can also produce high-quality seeds. By giving him a high-quality crop, you can obtain a seed of that quality to plant again.
In addition, you can combine an Upseed Flower, which can be obtained during Winter, with a crop. As a result, Vinnie will produce a Grade S seed.
Fruit Trees Are More Difficult to Upgrade
Because they have a relatively long growth period compared to regular crops, fruit trees are known to be more difficult to upgrade using fertilizer.
It takes around 30 bags of fertilizer to increase a fruit tree by one grade (from B to A).
Therefore, if you plant a Grade B seed and want to obtain Grade S fruit, you will need 60 bags of fertilizer before harvest time.
This is easier to accomplish if you plant fruit trees well in advance. By default, fruit trees require one season to grow and another season to flower before you can harvest them.
By planting a fruit tree earlier and giving it an additional season to grow before flowering, you can fertilize it for an extra ten days. This means you can increase the fruit quality by one grade.
For more details, see our guide on fruit trees, where we explain the system in greater detail.
