Games / Harvest
🚜 Harvest
Farm one growing season, one week at a time. Choose what to sow across your fields, lock in prices with futures, and weather drought, frost and blight — and learn first-hand why diversifying and hedging beat betting the whole farm on a single crop.
Harvest
Run a farm through one growing season with $8,000 in the bank. Choose what to plant, lock in prices with futures, and weather drought, frost and blight — and learn why diversifying and hedging beat betting the farm on one crop.
It'll go on the barn.
The finance behind the fun
Harvest is a simulation, but every figure uses the same exact arithmetic that powers our calculators, so the numbers behave the way a real farm's would.
- Diversification: spreading across crops with independent risks lowers the swing in your income without lowering its average — the single most reliable idea in investing, and it works the same on a farm or in a portfolio.
- Hedging with futures:locking a price trades away upside for certainty. It's insurance, and like all insurance it's worth most when you genuinely can't afford the bad outcome.
- Margins: what you keep is the sale price minus seed, upkeep and price impact — not the headline. Work a margin out with our margin calculator.
- Price swings & compounding: volatile prices and a flooded market both eat into what you realise — see the maths with our percentage calculator, then watch reinvested profits grow with our compound interest calculator.
Frequently asked questions
How do you win Harvest?
There's no fixed target beyond the growing season — the goal is to finish with as high a net worth as you can. Each week you plant crops across your fields, decide whether to lock in prices with futures, and react to the weather. You can sell up early to lock in your score. Run out of cash before your harvests come in, though, and you'll be forced to plough crops under at a loss — or have the bank foreclose.
Why shouldn't I just plant my most profitable crop everywhere?
That's the diversification lesson, and it bites two ways. First, putting every field in one crop concentrates your risk: a single frost, drought or outbreak that hits that crop wipes out your whole season at once. Second, when all those fields ripen together you flood the market — selling a big single-crop harvest in one week pushes its own price down (a glut). A spread of different crops, with different hardiness and harvest dates, smooths your income and protects your price.
What do the futures (hedging) do?
Selling a futures contract locks in today's price for part of a crop's future harvest. When you harvest, those locked units settle the difference between your locked price and the actual market price — so if prices crash (or your own glut drags them down), the hedge pays you the gap and cushions the blow. The catch: if prices rise instead, you've given up that upside, and if you hedge more than you actually harvest you still have to settle the shortfall. Hedging trades upside for certainty — most valuable on volatile crops you can't afford to see crash.
Why am I short of cash when my crops look healthy?
That's cash-flow timing — the reason real farms borrow. You pay for seed up front and owe weekly upkeep no matter what, but the money only comes back at harvest, weeks later. Plant more than your cash can carry and you can run dry before payday, even with a bumper crop in the ground. Manage the gap between money going out and money coming in, not just whether you're profitable on paper.
How does the weather work?
Each week's weather type is forecast before you commit, but how hard it bites is random — so the forecast tells you a frost is likely, not exactly how much it'll cost you. Hardy staples shrug off bad weather; fragile cash crops suffer most. On top of region-wide weather, individual crops can be struck by a blight or pest outbreak, which is exactly the kind of one-crop disaster that diversifying protects you from.
Is my progress saved?
Yes. The game saves to your browser automatically, so you can close the tab and pick up where you left off on the same device. Starting a new game clears the old save.