With the Warly update out for everyone, me and some friends decided to start a new world and play together. A few of them picked Warly, and I picked Wormwood (I always do, I love the guy). and decided to farm 4 of the new crops...
For anyone unaware of how bird cages work with farm crops, here's a brief explanation: When you feed a bird a crop, it drops one seed of that crop with a 50% chance of dropping a second seed for it. There's also a chance to drop regular (random) seeds, but those aren't really useful for farming specific crops.
With this system, you would get about 50% more crops than you fed the bird if the 50% chance happened exactly 50% of the time. But it doesn't, so there's a bit of variance in how much you actually get.
To farm specific crops, I usually set aside a specific amount of that crop to feed the bird and the rest gets used up as food. Said amount is 30. By always feeding the bird exactly 30 crops every harvest, I get a relatively consistent amount of seeds, usually around 42-48. And since 30 of those will go back to the bird, I'm left with 12-18 crops as profit.
I personally find it kind of ridiculous that in order to keep farming a certain crop, I have to sacrifice TWO THIRDS of every harvest. Planting 45 seeds takes a long time and it isn't exactly very engaging when all you're doing is right clicking the ground in various spots. And I do this 4 times for 4 different crops (onions, garlic, potatoes and pepper) so the total amount of seeds I get is well above 160. Getting so little (15 of each crop) from farming so much is what I feel is the main problem with farming.
And all of this is only possible for me because I'm playing Wormwood. Other characters would have to build a farm for each and every single seed they want to plant. I don't think I'd get involved in farming at all if I had to build 45 farms to get a decent amount of crops as profit.
I think a nice solution would be to make birds always drop 2 seeds for the specific crop you want, so that the profit from farming is consistently higher (you'd always profit half of what you farmed, which sounds pretty good to me) and to leave the random seeds drop as the only random chance item involved.
If you've tried out farming with bird cages yourself, please let me know what you think of it in the replies!