An Introduction to farming Chia

This article will introduce you to the concept of Chia farming, as well as explain how to build-up and kickstart your own Chia farm. We will discuss the set-up required for a basic farm, briefly touch on the different types of keys and which ones you can and should share, as well as which one you should never share with anybody. Enjoy the read and stay tuned for more articles and deep dives into all topics mentioned in this article.

What even is Chia farming?

As you probably already know, Chia is all about proof of space and time — naturally, farming has a lot to do with providing storage to the Chia network.

To be more precise, farming describes the process of providing storage space to the Chia network by storing so called plots and keeping them online at all times, while being rewarded in the form of Chia coins.

All active plots are constantly participating in a network-wide raffle, where every plot has the same chances of winning 2 Chia coins every 18.75 seconds. The winning plot forms a so-called block and proves the entire blockchain is working correctly.

This reward-mechanism incentivizes and rewards the farmers for the work they are doing, because they are an essential part of the Chia ecosystem, as they are the ones bringing new Chia coins into circulation and approving the blockchain blocks.

To put it short and simple: Without farmers, there is no Chia blockchain.

What do you need to farm Chia?

To get started, a farmer has to install the Chia software on their computer and use it in combination with so-called Plots to farm for Chia.

After the download, the software will link with the Chia blockchain, which can take up to a few hours. Once the synchronization is completed, you can start farming your plots.

These Plots have a size of approximately 108.8 GB and they are the result of a labor intensive plotting process.

Because plotting requires a lot of computing power and expertise, we made it our mission to use our hardware to produce plots at scale. So visit our website and skip this labor intensive step to directly begin farming and harvesting Chia coins by simply buying plots made specifically for you.

Every plot that enters your Chia farm must be created using your own personal keys, otherwise the rewards will not belong to you. These keys can be found through simple commands in the Chia software and you should only ever share your Farmer Public Key and your Pool Public Key, as these are the only two keys required to produce plots that are made specifically for you.

Do not share your private keys and do not buy from plot seller who do not ask for the two keys I just mentioned.

Besides the Chia software and plots, you need an appropriate hardware set-up to kickstart your Chia farm — let me give you a brief list including everything you need to set up a basic farm:

• You obviously need a computer on which Chia can be farmed in the background. This could be your regular computer or a dedicated machine just for Chia. We recommend using a desktop because it is rather difficult to move around with a laptop connected to a bunch of hard drives via USB.
• Further, you need External Hard Disks, preferably Hard Disk Drives, in short HDD’s. The larger, the better — a popular size among farming beginners is 18 TB.

With this set up, you are ready to begin farming your plots.

This set-up can be scaled up, if you decide to expand your farming activities — we will cover this topic in a future article, as well.

I hope this article helped you gain more insights into how Chia and especially farming works. To learn more about Chia, stay tuned for the next articles and join our Discord server, to get in touch with our community and have all your questions answered by members of our team and community.