Xiang

The post was an amusing display, but the method is completely impractical. At the point you could comfortablye deluxe water retain a whole farm, you could do anything else, and anything else is better.

Speed grow at best, gives 25% profit increase with THE WORST sprinkler, this rapidly plummets to 12.5%, ~4% and ~2% with pressure nozzled iridium.

Meanwhile, same tier quality fertilizer will give ~38.8-41.6% profit from farming lvls 8-14. The only multiharvest crop that can dilute this enough to go lower than the ~2% are hops with agriculturalist. That's 2.08% vs 2.08333...%.

On the other hand same tier (tier 3) speed grow can increase profit up to 100% on melons with agriculturalist going from 2 to 4 harvests a season. Less demanding in setup, starfruits gain 50% profit with just tier 2 speed grow. The only crops underperforming with speedgrow are ancient fruit, and gemberries without agriculturalist, where speed grow just doesn't give any extra harvests (this is out side the greenhouse, else they're still better).

The only place water retaining actually has merit is when you can't use sprinklers, or in the greenhouse where multiharvest crops that stop benefitting from the other fertilizers will eventually favour water retaining.