Georgophobia

That's the fear of farmers.  Couldn't find a term for fear of farms/farming, so here we are.  A ham-handed attempt at being clever.  So, what's this all about?  Hint: It's not just about the Tillers!

Time is Money, Friend!

For many of us in the gold making business, we don't head out in the world to advance our ventures.  Often, we have alts camped at specific places, log on to them to craft, harvest and replant at our farm, do profession cooldowns, and buy and sell at the Auction House.  Were they living, breathing beings, they would be miserable.  Only doing a couple of set tasks every day, running back and forth to the same spots, joints aching from repetitive motion...But I digress.

There's a reason for this, and best best way to explain it is: "Time is money". The activities listed above generally provide the more gold per hour than farming (of any kind).  And gold per hour is really what you want to concern yourself with, because it takes into account both the gold you earn, and the time you spend to get it.

Time is a scarce resource.  Meaning, there's only so many hours in a day you can play WoW.  In theory, that limit is 24 hours a day.  But that's unrealistic, not to mention unhealthy.

Plants versus Metals

Let's compare 2 actual activities.

Activity A:  Tillers farm plot.  I plant harvest and plant herbs every day.  It takes roughly 5 minutes.  Harvesting yields about 5 Golden Lotus, plus 35 other herbs.  Golden Lotus is currently about 55g on my server, and the other herbs about 1g each.  That's a total of 310 gold.  A Bag of Enigma Seeds costs 27g (with the guild perk), has 10 charges.  2.7g per charge, 4 charges per day, is 10.8g.  So in about 5 minutes, I make ~300g, which is 3600g per hour.

Activity B: Ghost Iron Ore gathering.  Let's say you can gather 30 stacks of Ghost Iron Ore per hour.  30 stacks x 20 per stack x 3g each is 1800g, so that's 1800g per hour.

So Activity A nets you double the gold per hour that Activity B will.  But wait you say!  Activity A only earned me 300g, and Activity B would earn me 1800g!  But if you did both activities for the same amount of time, you'd get double the gold from A than you would from B.

In this particular example, you can't harvest and replant your Tiller's farm for an hour on a single toon.  You can only do it once, then wait until the next day.  But, if you had 12 toons with 12 farms, you could. However, that's unrealistic for most players.  Still, the point stands.  Tiller's farm harvesting is much more profitable per hour compared to Ghost Iron Ore gathering.

Ok, So What Now?

Let's take this to a practical level.  Every day, you'll need to spend time listing (and probably cancelling) auctions.  That's what is going to drive your gold making.  You'll want to use whatever methods you can to limit this time, but it's always going to be greater than zero.

Figure out how much time you have to spend on making gold.  Subtract the time you'll spend at the auction house.  You'll want to spend the amount of time you have left on the most profitable activity possible.  Right now (Patch 5.4.1), that is likely going to be Tiller's Farm on as many toons as possible, plus "other time".  Consider all the activities you can make gold doing, and figure out which makes you the most gold per hour.  That's the activity you should be doing during that other time.  It could be gathering ore, it could be searching the auction house for cheap deals.  It might even be reading blogs or looking at the Consortium. The best thing to do will vary by server, your professions, amount of time you have, and maybe even other factors.  What might be right for you, may not be right for some.