THERE ARE PEOPLE MINING ON THE MOON!? Why did you only just now tell me this!? Screw the Earth! I'm gonna be a space farmer! I'll open up a ranch on the moon and provide them with plenty of fresh milk and cheese! And radishes! Space miners LOVE radishes!
*ahem*
That out of the way... farming, produce contracts, and sacrificing the lives of unwilling victims for personal profit.
First of all... Japanese and their damned rice. -__-; *sigh* Whatever. Rice is a nice spice to splice into our weekly farming slice... of life. Though, I personally hate these partial day plants (Pumpkins at 7 instead of 8 time units, Rice at 5 instead of 6). Since we can't harvest in the evenings anyway it seems like a meaningless waste of a unit of time, but I'll hold out hope that something will happen in the future to make these make more sense. Automation? Stadium lighting over my farm so I can work later? Big-ass combines (on my tiny little backyard garden...)? Goddesses as slave labor? Who knows!
I like the addition of improving the quality of our seeds, mostly because it gives a convenient and productive means of using up time for our cute cows to generate milk on days when I can't harvest and plant. Another already mentioned that the bulk murder of innocent produce isn't sufficiently profitable, and I'll parrot that. Those massacres somehow save on energy, but that's not enough of a benefit when I sacrifice 100 rice for only +2 progress and tear out my hair in frustration save scum like a seasoned PC gamer. :P Just increasing to the first level up in quality still takes ages, though, and when we get even MORE things to plant in the future... oof.
The orders at the Co-op are... unwieldy. I've been able to complete a couple, but there are issues with them as viable alternatives to basic bulk sales. First of all, the base length of time we have to complete them is too low. These orders frequently require moderate quantities of difficult to farm produce, things that take 3-4 days to farm a single crop of. They require multiple rounds of harvesting to get the necessary quantities, yet we are given 3-5 days on average to complete the contract. When they require three harvests of pumpkins, one harvest of cabbage, two of radishes, and two of rice to complete, there is no way to have that ready in 4 days. The only option is if you already just happen to have most or all of that produce sitting in your storage area waiting to be sold. This is not viable, as we have only just now gotten to the point where we can survive week-to-week without selling all of our produce. We can, now, get by with minimal produce sales thanks to the increase in milk production and the advent of our cheese industry (CHEESE, GROMIT! ♥ ), but this also means we have nothing in reserve to dive into these orders with.
"Just start saving up now." Well, yes, clearly. But now that brings in our lovely competition. With smug, sassy, sexy Riley in the picture, our time to complete contracts is even less than stated. She somehow manages to farm much faster than we can, so despite just getting her start, she gobbles up all the orders after a day or two. Not even the 3-5 we're supposed to have, let alone the 20 we need. This will only be sexier worse when more lady farmers come to town and take a bite out of our carrot profit. Then fold in our need to improve the quality of our seeds (again, thanks to the Life of Riley), and we're left in a situation where we never have the produce we need to knock out an order. 4 days to complete, and only need a bit more cabbage? I got this! ...except I don't, because when I come back, Riley has already cleared it.
I'd suggest the ability to "claim" an order. You can put your name down on an order as a promise to fulfill it, which stops Riley or anyone else from completing it before you, but then with a stiff penalty if you fail to do it in time. Of course, you can still fill any order that hasn't been completed by another farmer, but this gives the player the ability to lock in one that they know they can fill within the allotted time. ...or just leave it as is, and I'll continue to live on my bulk sales through Isabella. :P I can always count on my favorite sister to take care of me.
We also still desperately need a second plot of arable land to farm on, but that will either require some concessions from Bastet... or our buying more property from Aurora / the city.
That said, with seed quality now giving us another option to stall for milk production and co-op orders giving us a more profitable outlet for varied produce sales (as well as sales of smaller quantities of individual produce types), farming everything is now much more viable. Planting pumpkins is still a waste of time, but not nearly as much as it used to be. We now have an actual reason to do so... sometimes. We're not there yet, as far as game economy goes, but it's a BIG step in the right direction.
One more thing, though. (Sorry, I type a LOT... and there's another post coming. XD ) When you upgrade a seed, everything you already have stored automatically upgrades as well. I think this should start a whole new item, instead. Separate Radish (D) from Radish (C) so that, when you upgrade a seed type everything you already have stays at quality D and only what you grow from now on is at quality C. Also so that you have to grow an all new stockpile to start increasing quality again, rather than using the same produce that got me to quality C to start working towards quality B. I know, I just spent like 7 paragraphs wanting things to be easier, and now I want to make THIS harder. What can I say? I'm difficult! :P