All regular crops and some limited edition crops on Zynga's Farmville offer a fun feature called crop mastery. The feature is available to farmers when they reach level 10 and receive an invite to turn this feature on. Mastery incentivizes players to plant lots of different types of crops rather than just high-return crops or to preference crops of a certain maturity type.

How Does Crop Mastery Work?
Crop mastery keeps track of the total number of plots of a particular type of crop have been harvested by a player (when crops are planted, they earn XP, but when harvested they earn mastery points). Crops that wither uncollected do not earn mastery points.

There are three levels of crop mastery for each crop that are tracked using a meter on the crops block in the marketplace. Hang the cursor over the meter to display the number of crops required for that level of mastery. The number of crops required for each level varies widely from crop to crop. In general though, quickly maturing crops like strawberries and raspberries require more plots to be harvested per level than do slowly maturing crops like artichokes and potatoes. For example, at the introduction of crop mastery, raspberries required 15,000 plots for level 3, but at some point Farmville reduced some of the requirements at the high extreme, though some still remain.

When a crop mastery level is reached, the game delivers a reward of coins and XP to the farmer that increases with each level. There is also a chance to post a feed story sharing the achievement and offering a prize to friends who click (50 coins for level 1 mastery, 100 coins for level 2 and 150 coins for level 3). The crops block in the marketplace fills in each of three stars for mastering a level, and when all levels are mastered fills the meter permanently and displays the word "mastered."

With the introduction of Farmer's Markets in Spring 2010, it became possible to use bushels to double crop mastery counts when harvesting. The game also sometimes offers "double mastery events" where anything harvested during that weekend counts as double mastery points.



Read more at Suite101: Farmville Crop Mastery http://internet-games.suite101.com/article.cfm/farmville-crop-mastery#ixzz0sVwFndYZ