One fine morning, bffs and roommates Doomer Girl and Trad Girl were on their way home from their shitty part-time jobs. As always, they stopped for a moment to admire Farmer Chad’s rich green fields and palatial house. He was their village’s resident crypto king. All the villagers both celebrated and envied him, including them.

“I heard he got in early, when everyone thought crypto was worthless,” said Trad. “That’s how he can afford those beautiful fields.”

“Some people have all the luck,” grumbled Doomer in response.

“You’re always so negative,” laughed her friend. “Why not just enjoy the beautiful sight?”

Bright coins glinted gold in the breeze. It was beautiful but Doomer still sighed. She couldn’t help wishing some of those incredible gainz could be hers. It didn’t seem fair.

That thought circled in her head until the urge to take a closer look overcame her. Maybe she could learn something about how Chad did it.

There was an open gate just to her left, with a folksy painted welcome sign nailed to it. She and her friends had often giggled at how cheesy it looked, but today she decided to take it at face value.

“I’m going inside,” she said to Trad.

Trad argued with her that it wasn’t right, despite what the sign said. She refused to go with Doomer and continued on her way home to the apartment they shared.

Shaking her head at her friend, Doomer took a deep breath and stepped through the gate. She followed a path away from the road, moving to where the greenery was deeper and more lush. She was so intent on her destination that she jumped when a deep voice spoke up from behind.

“Hello.”

Doomer whirled and found herself face to face with Chad. He smiled at her, his hair and teeth gleaming as brightly as his coins.

“Uh…hi. Sorry, the gate was open and…”

She trailed off, knowing she didn’t have a good excuse for trespassing. To her surprise, Chad didn’t look annoyed at all. In fact, he nodded and smiled wider.

“Yes,” he said. “Everyone can come in if they want, but you’re the only one who has so far.”

“Really?”

To her surprise, Chad recognized her from the village coffee shop. He was easy to talk to and grew especially excited when talking about his crypto fields. Doomer congratulated him on getting in early and making so much, but he laughed and told her that wasn’t the case at all.

“I made my crypto yield farming over the past year,” he said. “Anyone can do it.”

“Yield farming?” she asked in disbelief.

Chad explained that he planted seeds, staking them into the ground, and tended them as they grew until they blossomed into maturity, ripe for the harvest. He even gave her a handful of seeds to try for herself.

 

Some time later, Doomer no longer stopped on her way home to stare wistfully at Chad’s fields. Instead she hurried home to tend to her own little garden, but she had to admit it wasn’t thriving like his.

Her own was a collection sad little pots on her windowsill. She’d planted the seeds Chad gave her and even gone out and bought another packet with her own money. But she often forgot to water or feed them, so they frequently withered and died.

Trad criticized how they looked. She didn’t like when their dried, dead leaves fell and made a mess of the apartment.

“They’re getting dust all over my nice, clean fiat bank statements,” she’d complain to Doomer.

Doomer could only apologize and clean up, promising to take better care of them. But she’d promised that a lot. It turned out that taking care of these plants could be a full-time job in itself.

That wasn’t to say Doomer had never seen any success—she’d managed to blossom and harvest a few small coins. Yet when she brought them to the farmer’s market to sell, the market demanded such high fees that in the end she took home less money than she’d paid for her seeds in the first place!

Sometimes she went online to read tips about yield farming, but there was a lot of noise to sort through. Even worse, what little real information she could gather was never guaranteed to help. Whenever another of her plants died, she could never tell if it was because the seeds had been bad or if she’d done something wrong.

Today when she filled her small watering can and went to check on her yields, she found three more dead plants. She watered everything anyway, but felt hopeless.

She wondered if she’d missed out on the good days of yield farming just like she’d missed out on the early days of bitcoin and ethereum. Then she wondered if Chad had misled her. He’d been so handsome and helpful that she’d trusted him, yet all she had to show for it were a few struggling, leggy plants.

The idea gnawed at her all evening and into the next day until she began to grow angry at Chad. It was her day off, so she’d had a lot of time to think about how tricked she felt.

After eating a boring meal of soggy, vegan chicken tendies, which was all she and Trad could afford these days, Doomer jumped up and grabbed her remaining live plants. She marched them down that road and over to Chad’s field and began yeeting them over his fence.

Chad came out of his house and ran over to her, yelling at her to stop.

“You’ll damage these precious young plants!” he said.

“I don’t care! They’re worthless and will never yield anything.”

“That’s probably true, if you keep them separated out in these tiny pots,” he responded.

“What? Where else would I put them?”

“In the ground.”

He gestured towards the fields. Doomer looked at him in confusion.

“But those are yours,” she said.

“They belong to everyone. I’m just the only one using them in our village right now.”

Doomer crossed her arms over her chest and glared at him. “Why didn’t you tell me this before?”

Chad shrugged his massive shoulders, made strong with his hard work tilling the earth.

“I thought you’d read the FAQ or the wiki,” he said, pointing over to just inside the gate she’d once gone through.

Right there was a wooden bookstand and on it a gleaming book titled Wiki. Its pages were pristine, as few villagers had ever bothered to glance at it, much less open it. Even Doomer had walked by it without bothering to take a look inside.

Now she read it, with Chad by her side, encouraging her. It explained how small farmers could come together and pool their resources. They shared the rich, fertile ground for planting their seeds and when the harvest came in they shared the costs of transporting or selling, reducing those costs for everyone.

“This sounds like communism!” exclaimed Doomer.

“Maybe it is,” said Chad, “though the profits aren’t distributed to everyone, only those who bother to figure it out and stake their seeds.”

Doomer looked around at her yeeted plants lying on the ground. Now she wished she hadn’t thrown them and broken their pots. But Chad helped her gather them up and showed her the way to an empty corner of a field. He handed her a trowel.

“Dig up your own set of keys and then plant these into the ground,” he told her. “I and all the other farmers will help you out.”

 

Doomer Girl’s little corner of the farm is now flourishing, thanks to the help of Farmer Chad and his friends. In that time yields have gone up and down, but with the advice of the farmers around her, she’s enjoyed nice returns.

Even her bff Trad Girl has begun to come around. She definitely likes that they can afford real chicken tendies these days, but she also enjoys spending time in Doomer’s fields on nice days. Doomer has been encouraging her to plant a few seeds of her own, but Trad insists she’d rather watch Farmer Chad at work than try it herself.

That’s fine. Doomer knows yield farming isn’t for everyone, only those interested enough to walk through the gate and stake their seeds. Doing a bit of reading helps too.