Temping

“Temping” or “Temp” is a short term strategy to amplify the capabilities and output of your farm. You temporarily box (put into storage) all of your decorations and then build temporary houses and buildings (usually fields, chicken coops or apples). After you are done, you bulldoze the temporary buildings and place your decorations back down. (Click and hold a building to bring up the move, bulldoze, and store options.)

Temping utilizes the game mechanics to balance space and happiness (production costs) for short durations to accomplish a specific goal. You exchange cash and revenue for product. Done well, you minimize your losses.

Do's and Don'ts are further down the post if you want to skip the numbers.

Why Would I Temp?

For interest sake, lets look at my main farm and a 5 star Wedding task for 7800 eggs. I have a level 8 free range chicken, a level 2 premium chicken and a level 9 regular chicken. With mascots on the free range and regular, plus a library book of +15, I get 178 eggs per harvest. I run a happiness of 64 at the moment. It would take me 43 runs, or 5 hours of continuous egging. If I box my deco and build 12 chicken coops plus 3 houses (I have 30 spare workers for temping), I can get an extra (21+15) x 12 coops = 432 eggs. 7800 eggs now takes 12 runs at 610 eggs per harvest, bringing my time down to 1 and a half hours of straight egging.

Early game farms with 4 level 2 fields can produce 260 wheat, enough for 30 cow feed. If you want to push your farm and have 2 cows, growing 4 fields of wheat overnight (when your decorations aren't doing anything anyways) gives you enough wheat for 50 cow feed. Do that for 2-3 nights, and you will have a week buffer to grow into more or bigger fields. Temp wheat overnight is also great for the Patty Cake co-op project and collecting events.

Reasons to Temp

Grow more wheat overnight
Collect crops faster for theme event
Collect eggs or pigs faster for theme event
Collect apples or almonds faster for theme event
Collect more crops or eggs for co-op projects
Collect collection items faster for theme event - remember the number of items is based on the time, not level of the building. Level 1 and Level 10 buildings give you the same amount.
Collect hammers or hotdogs for weekend collecting events
Collect dung from chickens in a pinch - run your dung tractor for the extra 14% dung.

Money and Happiness

I would never encourage a person to run negative happiness for a long time because it will hurt their revenue. Apples at 40 happiness cost $2,639 to start and $22,170 to start at -600 happiness, so you need to do this with some planning. Just think how much more corn you can collect if you have 14 fields instead of 6!

Temping will cost you money, but there are ways to minimize your losses. Corn at -1000 happiness will cost $66 to start, and if you have a bonus of +4 from your library, will produce 14 corn that can be sold in the barn for $70. A chicken coop costs $123 to start at -1000 happiness, but 21 eggs can be sold in the barn for $189. Any bonuses help. You have to remember the full picture of corn, milling feed, and chickens all have costs. Greenhouse level 20 gives a bonus of 8 corn per field, which translates to $40 per field profit, or if you are milling chicken feed, it means you can sell more excess corn to minimize losses.

In my above egg example (-1722 happiness), 610 eggs sells for $5,490. Starting the chickens costs $3,555. Running corn and chicken feed (18 of each in a 6 min cycle) costs $1,806 for a total profit of $129. I will lose money ($750 per coop, $230 per house) building and bulldozing the buildings, but saved myself 3 and a half hours of collecting eggs. Now if I accidently start flower honey, that will cost me $504,000.

Premium (blue) and Super (orange) feeds and seeds don't cost anything to start making them perfect for negative happiness.

Do’s of Temping

Start all long term and expensive processes on your farm before temping - start Forest Honey when it costs $26,730 instead of $288,900.
Box up all your decorations - if you are going to temp, go all in. Going more negative has little impact on cash flow, but half temping gives half the results.
Be very careful that you box and don’t bulldoze your decorations - Support is in the business of making money, not helping users. Getting a mistake reversed can be a long, hard, and fruitless battle.
Starting your good buildings before bulldozing - you can't bulldoze a building that is running, so this safeguards against accidents.
Leave a building construction slot open - nothing sucks more than temping in fields or chicken coops and then locking them in for 16 hours because you just started a stable upgrade.
Use premium and super feeds and fertilizer - if you can’t avoid starting an expensive orchard or crop, premium and super feeds and fertilizer are free to use.
Invest in greenhouse and library upgrades that increase your products per harvest.
Sell off excess inventory in the barn.
While wildflowers can be the fastest way to get collection items, growing and milling corn is a close second (level 12 mills are a tie) and helps to build your chicken feed.
Build temp houses if you don’t have workers.

Don’ts