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  • Crop Grades, Explained: What They Are And How To Change Them
  • Use Fertilizer To Increase Crop Quality
  • Better Crops Make Better Seeds
  • Fruit Trees Are Tougher To Increase

When you’re farming crops for a living in Story of Seasons: A Wonderful Life, you’ll want to be selling the very best of the best from your harvests each season. And while planting and maintaining crops is one thing, it’ll take quite a lot of work to make the very best crops, and that’s where the crop grading system in A Wonderful Life comes into play.

RELATED: Story Of Seasons: A Wonderful Life - Complete Farming Guide

With three tiers of crops dictated by seed quality, fertilization, watering, and more, it can be complicated to keep everything straight! Our guide will explain crop grades and teach you to grow better crops.

Crop Grades, Explained: What They Are And How To Change Them

What Are Crop Grades?

In Story of Seasons: A Wonderful Life, when you plant any crop and grow it to a successful harvest, you'll notice that each plant has a letter grade besides its name.

This letter is reflective of the grade of that crop, which means how well-grown it is. This is influenced by fertilizer use, whether the plant was regularly watered, and can also be swayed by the grade of the seed that's planted.

For more info on making second-generation seeds, check out our Hybrid Crop guide.

By default, plants grown without interference will almost always result in B-grade crops, which are ideal for use in recipes and gifting, but that fetch a much lower price when sold.

Each letter grade increases a crop's sale price by 30g.

Using Sweet Potatoes as an example, by using fertilizer, you can influence its sale price.

  • B-Grade harvests will sell for 180g each.
  • A-Grade crops sell for 210g a piece.
  • And finally, S-Grade crops catch the highest price at 240g each.

If you're saving crops for cooking or gifting, it's therefore best to save B-Grade crops and sell higher-grade crops to earn the most money.

Recipes are seldom impacted by the quality of goods, but not always! Check out our cooking guide for more info on that.

Use Fertilizer To Increase Crop Quality

If selling crops is your main method of making money in A Wonderful Life, then you'll be interested to manually boost the grade your crops get with a little extra work.

By using fertilizer with regularity throughout the growing process, you can influence the grade of the crop when it's done growing. Fertilizer can be purchased from Vesta's Farm for a low 20g per package.

Each square requires one package to cover the entire plant, and you can fertilize each square twice per day. Like seeds, you can hold the button to charge your throw, covering a 3x3 area at once this way if you're fertilizing several plots at once.

The more fertilizer you use before harvest, the better. Each crop has a different growth time (which we've detailed in our crops guide), so the number of fertilizers you can use and how many each needs varies greatly from crop to crop.

Well-fertilized plants are visibly different from unfertilized crops, often with a richer, darker color even before flowering and fruiting that lets you know your progress.

In general, more is better when it comes to using fertilizer to increase the quality of your crops in A Wonderful Life.

RELATED: Story Of Seasons: A Wonderful Life - How To Make Money

Better Crops Make Better Seeds

If you've been making hybrid crops with Vinnie over at Takakura's House beginning in Year Two, then you'll likely know about the array of benefits you can get with the unique crops in Story of Seasons: A Wonderful Life.

However, Vinnie can also make quality seeds. By feeding Vinnie a higher-quality crop, you'll often receive seeds of that quality to replant.

Additionally, with an Upseed Flower foraged in the Winter, you can feed the flower to Vinnie with a crop, and he'll spit out S-Grade seeds.

Also, when putting higher-level crops into the Seed Maker, you can then get two seeds of that level from one crop, doubling your planting power with each harvest.

The Seed Maker is available from the Ledger. For more info, check out our guide to the farm buildings in A Wonderful Life!

Fruit Trees Are Tougher To Increase

Because they have a relatively long growing period in comparison to regular crops, fruit trees are notoriously more difficult to boost with fertilizer.

It takes roughly 30 bags of fertilizer to boost a fruit tree by one grade. Therefore, if you planted B-grade seeds and are aiming for S-grade fruit, you'll need 60 bags of fertilizer before it's time to harvest.

It's easier to do this if you plant your fruit trees well in advance. By default, they need a season to grow, and then a season to flower before you can harvest, but they'll stay dormant when not in season.

By planting fruit trees earlier and giving them an extra season to grow before flowering, you buy yourself ten extra days to use fertilizer, resulting in 20 extra bags of fertilizer on the trees before they're ready to harvest.

RELATED: Story Of Seasons: A Wonderful Life - Crop Price List Guide