Farming is a net-loss venture for the first tiers. Anything you produce will sell for less money than it cost to produce it. Many players are very vocal about how farming is useless and does not produce anything worthwhile or make any money.This is true until you reach tier 3 and can produce Sweet Galenas Pipeweed. Even then, producing it is a bit of a gamble, as you inevitably produce more poor plants than fair plants, resulting in a surplus of seed and not enough pipeweed to make a profit.This changes when you reach mastery level of tier 3, and can use Soil of Rivendell to force critical success. At that point, as long as you can maintain your seed supply, it’s easy to grow enough pipeweed to turn a steady profit. Since the pipeweed you produce is going to be sold to a vendor, the price is steady and the only variable is the number and type of plants produced. Since you can force critical success, you are able to skew the odds to the point where you can predict how much profit you will make from each farm.It cost me about 250 silver to reach tier 3 mastery. You won’t need all that up front, as you will be producing/selling your produce as you go. Since you are selling at a loss however you will inevitably need to add more money as you go to keep things rolling. I estimate the 250 as the sum total I had to pay out of pocket overall. I didn’t watch it that closely though, so the exact amount may be more or less, particularly since the production rates are variable.When you hit tier 3 and start work towards tier 3 mastery, make Sweet Galenas Pipeweed exclusively as your sole produce. This will ensure you build up a good stock of seed to use once you hit mastery, and the fair plants you produce will give you better income than producing other items.Once you hit mastery, you should have enough seed saved up to be able to start making farms with critical success via Soil of Rivendell. This will allow you to start turning a profit, though it’s important to maintain a stock of seed as you go.The numbers.These calculations are based on growing and harvesting 25 farms. I did larger batches as well, and actually had slightly better results, but the math is very basic at the 25 point, so I will use it for our reference.Soil of Rivendell makes an automatic critical success when growing a farm. A critical success will produce fewer (if any) poor plants, and will often produce a much greater number of fair plants than normal. This uses 3 Soil of Rivendell per farm. Poor plants produce seed, fair plants produce pipeweed.By using 54 Soil of Rivendell, in our 25 farm batch, we will make 18 farms with critical successes, and 7 non-critical farms. This will allow us to grow our seed stock slightly with each batch.Costs for 25 farms:25 Water for Farming @ .48 each =1250 Fertilizer @ .80 each = 4054 soil @1.28 each = 69.12----------------------------------------------Total cost: 121.12 for 25 farms.1 Fair plant produces 4 pipeweed. 10 pipeweed sells for 6.10We thus need to produce *at least* 50 fair plants just to break even.50 plants=200 pipeweed=122 silverWe also want to not lose any seed. That is, we want to produce at least as many seeds as we used to create the farms. If we have to start buying seed, this will get prohibitively expensive. It would be even better if we grow our seed stock slightly. We don’t want to concentrate too much on creating seed though, as we won’t be selling seed. Pipeweed is where we make our money.Farms use 6 seed each. Poor plants produce 3 seeds each.So 25 farms will consume 150 seed. We must thus produce 50 poor plants to “break even” and not wind up with a net loss on seed.The good news is that this is working quite well. In the numerous batches I ran, I was seeing an average of 3.8 fine plants per farm and 2.36 poor plants per farm. These numbers went up slightly as I made larger batches of farms and thus increased the sample size.For example my first batch produced 95 fair plants, or 380 pipeweed. This sells for 231.80, a profit of 110.68. This batch also produced 59 poor plants, or 177 seed; enough to produce 29.5 farms, a growth of 4.9 farms worth of seed. These results were similar the next three times I did batches like this.Growing and harvesting 25 farms took me 18 minutes, while I was chatting with friends.Producing seed and pipeweed took about 40 minutes, but could be done almost completely unattended. (queue up the batch and let it go.) I watched TV while this ran, and just checked back to make sure my bags did not get overfull or my tools get too damaged to use. This is not botting or macro playing; it’s queuing up long craft queues using the regular interface and just letting the game grind through them.110 Silver/hour is not a bad rate, but it’s a fantastic rate when you consider it was actually only about 20 minutes of actual effort. Even more so when you consider that is all profit. The only cost not shown here is repair of the farming tools when they wear down, but using bronze tools I’d generally not need to repair them even after a full batch of farming/producing. When I did, the cost was minimal; a few silver.I still need to investigate the use of farm tools better than the bronze ones I was using. I believe repair costs on them will be much higher, but I’m curious what the effect of the better tools will be. If they are able to produce or harvest farms faster, that may be useful. Alternatively if they produce a greater number of crops it may be possible to reduce the number of Soil of Rivendell used.
(sorry, closet to horse we have 
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)Get quest.. Oh what's that? I need to head BACK to The Shire 
Back on 
... Get to the top of Weather-top only to find Basil surrounded by 3 Red-to-me Birds hovering over it.. 
Actually, I saw this a little earlier, and worked on a possible logo:
Gotta get in at LEAST 1 more run today.I sent a little gift to a couple of my raid bruthas from last night.
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