Farmville animals
Farmville animals: cute but not very productive
A lot has happened since my last post. I have a lot to thank to Lisa Chan, Zynga’s blogger, who featured it.
I’ll cover the impact it had in my personal life in a later post. Today, let’s figure out the economics of animals on Farmville.
Are they there just to look pretty? Should I sell them, ignore them, buy more?
We’ll work with the same assumptions we used for the treeconomics:
- Investment period and residual value: the animal is sold for its residual value after 90 days.
- Discount rate: to simplify I’ll do a comparison of investments.
- Available investments: at this point only the cow, chicken and sheep are available to purchase.
First we’ll compare the animals among themselves to see which one has the highest daily revenue:
| Cost | Revenue/Harvest | Days to Harvest | Daily Revenue | Daily Rev/ Invested $ | Days to Payback | ||
| Sheep | $700.0 | $28.0 | 3 | $9.33 | 1.33% | 75 | |
| Chicken | $400.0 | $8.0 | 1 | $8.00 | 2.00% | 50 | |
| Cow | $300.0 | $6.0 | 1 | $6.00 | 2.00% | 50 |
Not surprisingly the sheep wins. On “bang per buck” (or ROI) both the chicken and cow look better though.
Let’s compare a 90 day investment in a square full of sheeps with some crops and trees. Don’t let cartoon logic fool you, you can actually fit 16 sheeps or chicken in a single Farmville square. Only 4 cows though.
| Daily Profit | Total Profit | Initial investment | Residual Value | Profit | |
| Date tree square | $368.0 | $33,120.0 | $12,800.0 | $640.0 | $20,960.0 |
| Tomatoes | $174.0 | $15,660.0 | $15,660.0 | ||
| Raspberries | $132.0 | $11,880.0 | $11,880.0 | ||
| Chicken square | $128.0 | $11,520.0 | $6,400.0 | $320.0 | $5,440.0 |
| Sheep square | $149.3 | $13,440.0 | $11,200.0 | $560.0 | $2,800.0 |
| Cow square | $24.0 | $2,160.0 | $1,200.0 | $60.0 | $1,020.0 |
It seems that animals are not a great investment. It turns out that the best among them is a chicken square, given that the cost is much lower than a sheep square. However, it is still lower than, for example, pineapples.
Animals in Farmville will earn you badges but won’t make you rich. They also make a beautiful gift for your friends.
Pablo Paniagua - Blog 
excellent x
I’m kind of glad to know that animals aren’t great for “investment” purposes. I have too much fun watching them and having my Avatar pet them. The way they jump and exude hearts is just too cute. It makes me smile.
Hi-I don’t really know about blogs, but I found this useful. Could you pass a question along for me? I can’t seem to get the correct username and password to ask a question another way.
Between level 30 and 31 I earned only 2 Farm Cash, which seems way too little! Is my program broken?
not anymore
adopt calfs put them in 4×4 square = 1280 daily much more than any crop.
i have more than 100 calfs on my farm
u cud also use goose for this purpose gives same returns
I like cows because I can put them in a barn and from then on they are 0 maint except for one click a day to harvest. Not only that, they can generate occasional fertilizer bonuses. I’d hate to have to click on 16 of anything crammed in a small square. Now, can I have a second chicken coop? Or a third? the little creatures are running all over the place. Which by the way, in a study on economics, you would also need to consider the value of possible ribbon awards per category of animal, tree, fruit, egg collecting etc… and … to be real accurate, you have to get into XP points earned as they have value as well.
[…] Panaguia has written two posts in a row breaking down the economics of planting different trees and raising various animals on […]
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