Planting and caring for crops is so easy that it’s almost impossible not to turn a profit – as long as you don’t choose one of these crops. After a fair bit of experimentation and analysis, I’ve found the five worst crops from all seasons that nobody should bother growing for profit. Growing these crops will make a dent in your finances, time, and mental health, only to profoundly disappoint you when it’s finally time to sell – so it’s worth staying away from them!
5. Blue Jazz
Selling price: 50g I love the wide variety of beautiful pixel-art flowers you can forage and grow in Stardew Valley – but when it comes to profit, they’re reliably underwhelming. Take the Blue Jazz, for example. It’s a beautiful blue Spring flower, for sure, but after buying the seed at Pierre’s for 30g and tending to your sapling for seven days, you can only sell the flower for 50g – leaving you with 20g profit. With those numbers, you’ll be making more money just going out to pick things up from the ground around town and selling them. Grow this only if there’s no other option but to file for bankruptcy.
4. Tulips
Selling price: 30g Another spring flower that’s doing you more harm than good is the Tulip. You might have heard of the Dutch Tulip mania from the mid-1630s and wanted to replicate it in Pelican Town, but I’m afraid you’ve chosen the wrong town to sell Tulips. After all, the excess money left in your pocket after caring six whole days for a growing Tulip is a measly 10g. You’d have to fill the entire arable land in your farm with Tulips to make a living. The Tulip has one saving grace compared to the Blue Jazz, and that’s Evelyn Mulliner. This adorable old lady loves these flowers, and making her happy is worth more than money. Still, terrible investment.
3. Unmilled Rice
Selling price: 30g How about a crop that leaves you in the red? Cultivating Rice might sound delightful to Asiaphiles and anyone who loves rice pudding, but it’s a lot more hard work than you think – and a lot more than it’s worth. To start, you need to buy Rice Shoots, which you can buy for 40g a piece at Pierre’s. Once on the ground, it’ll take around seven days before you can harvest your Unmilled Rice. Unmilled Rice only sells for 30g, effectively causing a 10g loss per Rice Shoot. This can be reasonably improved by taking your product to the Mill to make it into regular rice you can cook with, but it takes time and occupies a crafter that could be making sugar or something else.
2. Fiber
Selling price: 1g Now, why on Earth would you farm Fiber? Did you not get enough from cleaning up the weeds on your farm? Were there no weeds out in the wild for you to collect? You can even head down into the mines if you want to find weeds growing freely. Dedicating time and effort to getting Fiber is just… sad. You would be better off planting the Mixed Seeds directly instead of combining them with Clay and Sap to make the Fiber Seeds.
1. Sunflowers
Selling price: 80g The Sunflower is one of the prettiest flowers in the game, but it’s the worst crop you can grow. Sunflower seeds are among the most expensive, costing 200g at Pierre’s and 125g at JojaMart. It’s actually the only seed you can buy cheaper at the evil corporate supermarket, which is suspicious, to say the least. After eight days of hard work under the hot Summer sun, you can harvest your Sunflower, which sells for a whopping… 80g. That’s right, you stand to lose 120g per flower – because we don’t condone JojaMart purchases here. The silver lining is that you’ll get extra seeds from every Sunflower. This makes it easier to scale your operation without reinvesting, and eventually, you’ll turn a profit. It’s a lot of wasted effort when you could just grow tasty Melons for a healthy profit of 170g.
