[Farming] Why you should be farming herbs :) Guide updated 16/04/2018

If you hate farming, and for the life of you can't train it, there isn't much I can do.
But when people ask me how to earn for a Bond, or mention that they are trying to earn money. I always recommend Farming, since you start to profit from early levels.

There are 5 main herbs I recommend, it comes down to if you prefer Money or Experience and the various prices. (They change alot)

Before I start I want to mention that I highly recommend the following:
- Supercompost Ultracompost
- Magic Secateurs (From Fairy Tale Part 1)
- Kandarin Diaries (Gives +5/10/15% extra herb yield in Catherby)
- Falador diaries (Gives +10% extra xp after medium diary)
- Access to Necromancy spellbook, for the Resurrect Crops spell.
- 50% Favour in the Hosidious House of Kourend for protected patches in Kourend.
- Ardougne Hard/Elite diaries for Herb patch teleport
- Using all the Patches you can access, these are:
Kourend (you go to Zeah via Port Sarim, and when you arrive, get to the grass and run all the way south or use the Xeric's talisman for a close by teleport, or use the Kourend House portal or the Minigame tele to Tithe farm)
Trollheim (Do My Arms big Adventure)
Ardougne (Is located in the North-East, can be accessed with Ardy cape 3/4, Skills Necklace fish guild tele or run from Ardy tele)
Canifis (Requires Priest in Peril, but Ghost Ahoy is recommended for easy and fast access)
Falador/Draynor (South of Falador, can be easily accessed with the ring from Lumbridge Diary)
Catherby (Located a little north of the bank)
Mos Le Harmless (Requires Morytania Elite diary done, can use the Harmony tele of the Necromancy spellbook)

I assume most people don't have Mory elite done, so you got 5 patches without Trollheim and 6 patches with Trollheim
More patches = More possible profit.

Now a little Q&A:

How do I avoid that my herbs die?
- The higher your Farming is, the higher chance your herbs have with avoiding disease.
- You can also use the Lunar spell "Geomancy" to check on your herbs every 15min or so.

What is the profit?
For this here is a screenshot of my ark, that I update whenever I buy new seeds, so I know which is best profit (I buy 100 at a time)

The most important part of all these numbers is the numbers in the thick square, because that is how much you profit per seed that is fully grown to a herb. For this screenshot I have set the average herb yield to 8. Which I have noticed is the average for the Farm people within the 40-85 lvls.
So for a lot of people toadflax is a really good option, since seeds are very cheap, so if they do happen to die, you basically lose next to nothing
In the high lvls, an average of 10 is the common one, so this is how I personally pick seeds:

If it isn't obvious, green marks the good options, red sucks and orange is okay.
Now normally torstol is a special case, it basically stays on 8-9 average even at 99.. that is why its Orange.. since I can't pull off a 10 average with torstols enough times for it to count

What do you use?
- I have Kandarin Elite diary done, which means Catherby got +15% extra herb yield.
- I use 7 patches.
- I got the Farming Skillcape, which gives the perk of +5% extra yield.
- I got magic secateurs, which gives +10% extra yield.
- I use ultracompost
- I got a high Magic level, which means I can spellbook swap to the Necromancy Spellbook, which got the resurrect crops spell, it cost like 8k to use, but with a high magic level it got 75% chance of restoring a dead herb. If you don't use Lunar Spells for farming, you can be permanently on the Necromancy Spellbook if you plan on Farming a lot and got the level required for "Resurrect crops".
This is how I look before a typical farm run:

My pouch contains lava runes, nature runes and astral runes.
So I got spells for: Fertile soil for ultracompost, spellbook swap for trollheim tele (used redirection scrolls before 96magic), teleports for ardy and catherby. Then the ectophial for Canifis, the Xeric tally for Kourend and the ring for Falador.
My order of patches:
I always start with the one I got the longest run to get to: Trollheim
Then I go to Kourend
Then I go to Mos Le Harmless
Then I go to Duel Arena to pick the cactus spines
Then I take Ardy
Then Canifis
Then Falador
And lastly Catherby

That was all the info, now for the actual Experiments we all love:

Your first goal is to get 32 Farming, this is not a guide for Farm levelling, but I recommend Quests.
At 32 Farming, you can farm Ranarr.

Experiment:
I bought 300 ranarr when they peaked, and kept all herbs until I sold them, after 11 days of Farming:


This means I average at 7.9 herbs per seed, which is with the prices they were at: 35,456 gp profit per patch, that is very good profit when a seed was 41k.

Snapdragon:
At 62 Farming you can choose to farm Snapdragons. They are currently more profit than ranarr, and 3 times the Experience compared to Ranarr.
So if you want Experience and better profit, do Snapdragons.

Experiment:
I got kinda unlucky in my experiment, I bought the seeds at a peak, and then the herbs crashed during the experiment.. so I earned less than expected, but that can happen, so I will still use the experiment, you don't always get perfect prices with Farming.


I did not sell them, I made them into Super Restores for Herb xp, but that was the price in trade window.
I averaged at 8.1 herbs though.That means I got a profit of 31,950gp per seed. Less than ranarr, but still very good.

<More Experiments may get added later>


Tips and Tricks:
When you farm as much as me, you sometimes pick some stuff up
- Preparing a double farm run inventory before you log off and take the first run before you logout, secures that you do 2 runs/day. Since you will have everything ready when you login next time, I usually log out at Trollheim, ready for next days herb run

- If you do Safe herbs option, plant the high risk herbs in the safe patches at Trollheim and Kourend after 50% Hosidious favour.

- Add picking cactus spines to your herb runs, by equipping a Ring of Dueling, plant a cactus at Duel Arena and harvest the 3 spines each herb run. Each spine is 5000gp, which means each herb run is an extra 15k profit!

- To be expanded


If you got any questions or feel like I am missing something or didn't explain something very well, feel free to tell me and I will fix it asap

Nice guide

Great guide man, I'm 90 farming right now, I do trees, fruit trees and calqs obv, but Torstol are definitely great for xp and some cash gains Farming is quite relaxing and rewarding, can really be an enjoyable skill once you get used to making farm runs in a timely manner.

Thanks for this! Helped me out alot and now i will do farming more, the only thing i need to do is organise my bank so it's easier for me to get ready for farm runs. Great guide!

Awesome guide, it's worth mentioning that Xeric's Talisman teleports you extremely close to the Kourend herb patch:

Very nice guide. So do you watch your herb patches or just use super compost and pray they survive?

SweetBrotato wrote:Very nice guide. So do you watch your herb patches or just use super compost and pray they survive?

I don't watch them, I use geomancy before I start my run, so I know if I should bring runes for the resurrect crops spell.
I use supercompost and cross my fingers that they survive, the worst I have tried is 4 dead patches, but got lucky with remaining 2, so managed to breakeven. But especially with Farming, it is important you don't quit because you get a bad run, as you saw with my examples where I bought the seeds in bulk, in the long run I make bank.

At the moment I have bought 500 ranarr seeds, and I am looking forward to see the profit I will make from that bulk

Added Xerics tally to the guide. (Thanks for mentioning that Ginnge )
Added a bit more info on how I do my runs.
Added Toadflax to the calculations including my personal opinion on them, this was added due to a lot of people doing Toadflax for profit.

A very nice guide. It's amazing how profitable farming herbs actually is for such little effort.

Hey nice guide! An alternative route to the ardy patch is using a skills necklace teleport to the fishing guild and running east to the farming patches. I like this because charges are free and I don't have to spellbook swap and then tele. It might be good for those who don't have spellbook swap but still want to use fertile soil.  

This isn't necessary, but I like to bring a herb sack to store the grimy herbs which saves time cleaning and noting on leprechaun. Though after it's full I switch to noting on leprechauns.

Flame Forged wrote:Hey nice guide! An alternative route to the ardy patch is using a skills necklace teleport to the fishing guild and running east to the farming patches. I like this because charges are free and I don't have to spellbook swap and then tele. It might be good for those who don't have spellbook swap but still want to use fertile soil.  

This isn't necessary, but I like to bring a herb sack to store the grimy herbs which saves time cleaning and noting on leprechaun. Though after it's full I switch to noting on leprechauns.

The herb sack isn't worth it if you consistently get more than 30 herbs per run since after 30, your herbs then essentially take up two inventory spaces instead of just one if you note them all from the start.

The Quest Cape teleport is also super useful now for the ardy patch too.

Definitely am bookmarking this, I've never been a big farmer on osrs but I know its inevitable

Still works, so bumped

Don't tell me what I have to do Kaninka.


Nice guide! Haven't seen this one, didn't need it but could be useful for beginners!

Great guide. Maybe I'll actually start farming regularly! Heh.

I am off to do some farming again now, that's inspiring, I wish I'd read it sooner, although you have given me hints and tips in cc in the past, always useful to have a nice guide like that to refresh with.

A good free teleport to the Kourend patch is through the tithe farm minigame teleport, as shown by the purple star north of the vinery. It is also a good way to stop by a bank on the way to the patch.

eoinc wrote:A good free teleport to the Kourend patch is through the tithe farm minigame teleport, as shown by the purple star north of the vinery. It is also a good way to stop by a bank on the way to the patch.  

Thank you!

Great thread! Will definitely consider farming herbs again