Talk:Farm (3.5e Equipment)

If an acre cost 100 gp, it wouldn't pay for itself for 23.44 years, and that's if we operate with no costs. I'm researching this for 5e, Aug. 5, 2020

SHORT ANSWER: IT'S ONLY 5 GP PER ACRE. A "farm" is usually 120 acres, 20 people (4 families), and worth 600 gold.

according to this page, if a farm that is worth 13, 500 gp (100gp per acre, 120 acres, and a 1500 gp house) and makes about 8 bushels/acre/annum = 960 bushels, which weigh 57,000 lbs and is the same in cp per annum in income if wheat.

    ( 576 gp divided by 120 acres is 4.8 gp/acre/year not including costs.)

Therefore 13,500 divided by 576 gp/annum = 23.44 years to amount to that value, before costs. I agree with some one else that said value should be what you can get back in 5 years. And at least 2 DM's can't see asking for much more than 2k gp for a farm for the player's sake. The value estimated at 100 gp or even 50 gp per acre doesn't make sense in D&D and again even in real life we're having trouble figuring out how a farm even produced enough food for the people on it. Well... for the sake of D&D i'm going to try and make sense of it.

I won't go into the difference between an old acre and a new acre. Perhaps most of the references i read were old acres and this page describes larger, new acres, such as a horse could live on one new acre of pasture, but probably not an old acre. I don't care but that's a disclaimer.

When describing an acre production, sources use the term bushel, which is 60 lbs of wheat, and different weight for different crop. In D&D, 1 lbs of grain is worth 1 cp. Various (more than one) sources on the internet suggest 3 acres to sustain a person or 14-24 bushels. Not 24 cp per year. Not 1 acre per person. Ye olde document says a horse needs 1 to 2 acres of pasture. None of the information saves us from guess work. Let's go with 20 bushels.

20 bushels x 60 lbs/bushel = 1200 lbs of grain. That's 1200 cp worth or 12 gp per year.

A loaf of bread is sold for 2 cp in D&D. Somewhere it says that we can equate daily sustenance to one loaf of bread (2cp). The average weight of a loaf is 1 pound. Surely if we used 2cp of grain we should get more than 2cp for selling a loaf of bread. Anyway... if it takes 2 lbs of grain to make 1 lbs of bread then a person eats 600 breads, or 1.6 breads a day. However that's not important to this article.

12 gp /year x 5 members = 60 gp / year in family food value.

We could farm something like barley for a bit more income but i think wheat is fine as a baseline. Wheat, barley, and rye made up 78 percent of crops in ye olde Angevin England... and toss in some snow peas.

A farm is (don't ask me why) about 4 households on 120 acres (. All of it is run by a lord so go and make deals with lords instead of farmers. Half the acres have to be fallow or used for something else, however, the original information has (i think) taken this into account and we can rule that 120 acres can produce 8 bushels per acre on average, as a whole farm.

Side note: if a farming revolution has occurred then 8 bushels goes up to 24 post 1800's (something i read i don't know where), and again higher post WW2 i guess. I"m not reading into this further but you can google Agricultural Revolutions if you're curious. There are 4 or 5 of them.

Mathaddict on WorldBuilder says "Throughout D&D systems, land was valued at the profit it could produce in a 5 year period. Typically farmland is valued at 50 gp/acre, meadow land is similar. So 2500 acres x 50 gp / 5 years is 25,000 gp/year or 68.5 gp/day.

(note that this is the profit and it's assumed that the upkeep costs are built into the evaluation of the profit)".

1. figuring out production for 120 acres;

    - if 1 acre produces 8 bushels. Yield is 960 bushels x 60 = 57,000 lbs of grain, or 576 gp in income.

2. Costs. (using D&D)

    - 5 people, poor living conditions. 60 gp food cost. Labor and lifestyle, 2cp per person = 10 cp/day x 365 = 3650 + 6000 = 9650 cp/family/year
    - 9650 / family. x 4 (family per farm) = 38,600 cp in poor living costs.  
    - 1/3rd of the yield has to be sown for next years crop. (an average) so that's 192 gp worth. 
    - taxes were only 2 shilling per hide, 24 pence. That might be 24 cp /household. However, i feel safer going with the 10 percent rule, which was reinforced by wiki as well, barring an exception that stated something like 'except the time they needed 25 percent to pay for king richard's ransom'. I believe 10 percent is calculated after costs (also b/c it's more in kind with the recorded amounts that read as very slim). The church even nowadays repeats the old saying of 10 percent.

       So 576 (in gp)(total income)- 192 (resown) = 384 - 386 (living cost for 20 people) = -2  gp per year. stumped even before taxes. This is my 3rd time going over the numbers.

sigh, earlier i had a different equation based on people eating 1.6 cp a day instead of 3.28 or so. which would have read... " 576 (in gp)(total income)- 192 (resown) = 384 - 263 (rounded living cost for 20 people) = 121 - 12.1 (10% tax) = 108.9 gp profit/year"

cost summary : (left blank)

108.9 x 5 (years) = 544.5 per farm = only 4.54 gp per acre value (rounded to the hundredth)

.0024863 gp produced by each acre a day.

I'm going to stick with the math that gives some profit for the sake of relieving myself of this project. Also, hopefully i've over estimated the costs and under estimated the income based on the type of yield. The bushel yield average is accurate. The farm size is accurate, the family number is accurate. Also you can, if lucky, sow one quarter of the wheat grain for the same crop instead of one third, and if conditions are very good it produces 5 times the crop sown.

for D&D purposes might as well round that off to 5 gp per acre. A "farm" is usually 120 acres and worth 600 gold. It is true, as stated somewhere in a reference i read, that farmers or their lords or whoever, are extremely adverse to selling their land as the farmers would not want to move and change their lives. And you don't buy a farm exactly if it's on a lord's land, you are leased the land? I don't know much about that stuff.

My reason for looking things up was for the D&D spell Plant Growth, using the long cast which yields "double". Therefore the yield would be double (1152) minus costs (467.1) = 684.9 - 10 percent for m'lord = -68.49 = 616.41. I might want to sell them the idea of splitting it 50/50. We get 308.205, which when divided by a household (15.41 gp /person) is.. only 4 more copper per person per day, which isn't much but it almost doubles their lifestyle expenses. A druid can cover 5 farms if they surround him (600 acres), i'll estimate 2 farms per cast b/c of spreading out. Possibly 8 casts a day for a 10th level druid. That's 16 farms x 308.205 = 4,931.28 gold per year for a long day's work for a 10th level druid. Could do worse. (13.51 gp/day) but stealing from the undead is still more lucrative. --—Preceding unsigned comment added by OpticSeagull (talk • contribs) at

Conclusion: This is all useless.

I realized too late that none of this is fun for the player, and every internet chat discussion is about how DM's can be anal with their players so they don't make too much money. It's all shit. Really when a player, who is a one in a million hero, and has a magical connection and higher level than 99 percent of everybody, wants to do something, a DM should make it something that pays off for the player, regardless of when poeple harvest. A regular game of D&D happens within just a few months let alone years of downtime. If the spell is in the book to be fun and useful to Druids, first of all its not game breaking, and on top of that player's should be rewarded for their enterprises and so on.

Many commenters on other sites have gotten several observation mixed up anyway and no one seems to know what it should be. An ad hoc reward should be given , and it should be somewhat substantial and not punished for its ingenuity. If an acre is worth 100 gp, it should reward the player its value within a few sessions. DM's should be able to realize you can't buy everything with money, and it's ok to have players that have some (who will undoubtedly buy more land). --—Preceding unsigned comment added by 108.162.219.91 (talk • contribs) at

First off, thank you for chiming in here on the article. Your math and everything (while a bit much for me to take in easily), was thoroughly an entertaining read and nice look into the whole beast of a problem it is to make an article like this. I read it out loud (except the formulas) to our gaming group and we all enjoyed it. Wanted to let you know it didn't go unnoticed. Oh, and after leaving a comment, you can sign it automatically by typing four tildes in a row, it generates into your username or IP if not logged in.--Ganteka Future (talk) 06:36, 8 August 2020 (UTC)

Also, as a note that changes almost none of this, the long cast on Plant Growth is 8 hours, making the 8 casts in a day a very long day indeed. No big deal to just make that a week instead, though. --Undead_Knave (talk) 16:58, 9 August 2020 (UTC)