This is a complete reworked and revised guide - thanks for your interest!

Pretty straight forward: I exported the ingame data and put it on the same demoniator:

24 Hours

Just use the numbers to calculate the perfect production chain.

Because it is a very long guide due to a lot of tables, feel free to use the table of content on the right to navigate. I am sorry for that - can't change it.

Farms are the first and most basic way to grow crops. The production interval always stays the same (except for coffee beans and farm level III), but you can research ways to increase output during this interval. These numbers are based on 100% fertility. If you build farms on less fertile land, the formula is not very intuitive or simple — there’s another chapter on that. Level 1.5 is just the upgraded version of Level 1, the same applies to 2.5 and 3.5.

The second table shows the cost of one farm calculated against the amount of goods you get. There are also upgrades to lower the daily cost of a farm. Interestingly, the color coding does not start with dark red in the upper left corner and end with bright green in the bottom right corner, so the “sweet spot” for the cheapest goods lies elsewhere. In my opinion, this is not as crucial as it seems, because in the end you are limited by space, so you’ll need to upgrade your farms anyway.

Opium

Yes, Level 2,5 and 3 are the same, but more expensive.

Vegetable


Coffeebeans

At Level III duration changes to 1,2 days, ergo 28,8 hours.

Cannabis (Level II required)


Peel the Avocado (Level II required)


Coca (Level III required)


Chicken (Level III required)


Quinoa (Level III required)


Upgrade Costs
Upgrades for better productivity (Levels 1.5, 2.5, and 3.5) cost $2,500, $11,000, and $18,000.
Upgrades for cheaper maintenance cost $1,000, $2,000, and $4,000, corresponding to each level.
It’s not really useful to calculate an ROI here, since you are never limited by time — your only limitation is space. So if you are able to sell more products, you have to upgrade.

Plantations are larger and cannot be built everywhere, as the terrain must be flat, but they have a significantly higher throughput than farms. In the end, you need to calculate whether (according to fertility and available space) one plantation is better than, say, four farms. Also consider that your vans may only need to service one building instead of multiple farms. Plantations have the same production time but a higher output, and are already better at Level I (without considering the space required) than a Level III farm with upgrades — except for opium.

These numbers are based on 100% fertility. If you build plantations on less fertile land, the formula is not very intuitive or simple — there’s another chapter on that. Level 1.5 is just the upgraded version of Level 1, and the same applies to 2.5 and 3.5.

The second table shows the cost of one plantation calculated against the amount of goods you get. There are also upgrades to lower the daily maintenance cost of a plantation. Interestingly, the color coding does not always start with dark red in the upper left corner and end with bright green in the bottom right corner, so the “sweet spot” for the cheapest goods lies elsewhere. In my opinion, this is not as crucial as it seems, because in the end you are limited by space, so you’ll need to upgrade your plantations anyway.

Opium


Vegetable


Coffeebeans


Cannabis (Level II required)


Peel the Avocado (Level II required)


Coca (Level III required)


Chicken (Level III required)


Quinoa (Level III required)


Upgrade Costs
Upgrades for better productivity (Levels 1.5, 2.5, and 3.5) cost $2,500, $11,000, and $18,000.
An upgrade for cheaper maintenance is only available at Level III, where it costs $18,000.
It’s not really useful to calculate an ROI here, since you are never limited by time — your only limitation is space. So if you are able to sell more products, you have to upgrade.

Buildings located near rivers generate substances used for high-priced drugs. In general, they can produce three substances: H, O, and C — corresponding to Levels I, II, and III. Here, it works the other way around: upgrades shorten the production time, thereby increasing the daily throughput.

Again, these values are based on 100% fertility — don’t go for 30% unless you’re willing to wait roughly five times as long! For more details, check the chapter “Fertility.”

Chemic: H


Chemic: O (Level II required)


Chemic: C (Level III required)


Upgrade costs
Those upgrades cost the following:
Levels 1.5, 2.5, and 3.5 cost $4,500, $11,500, and $21,000 respectively.
Their maintenance upgrades cost $8,000, $10,000, and $13,000.

Fertility might not be a problem in the beginning, but if you scale up, it will. Having just 50% fertility does not just double the time you need for the same output; it roughly triples it! This won’t be a big problem if you stack your farms at 100%, 98%, 95%, but farms at 60% or even 30% will cause trouble.

Space is your rarest resource!!!

That’s why it’s not true that “plantations are better than farms” — not at all. Plantations are hard to place, and it’s even harder to get two at 100% next to each other instead of, say, 6–8 farms at 100% — and that’s the ratio: look at the numbers above. One Level 1 plantation for opium is roughly equivalent to four Level 1 farms; one Level 3.5 plantation equals about three Level 3.5 farms. So why even bother? They are cheaper to maintain, of course, and easier to integrate with your vans — they need one stop instead of three or four.

But back to fertility:
According to my in-game observations (opium, coca, avocado, coffee, and weed), your production interval increases by about 2.4× at 60% fertility. If you drop to 30% (opium, coca, avocado, coffee, weed and all three chemicals), you’ll wait roughly 5× longer. After feeding this into some math, I derived a formula that probably gives the correct answer, bearing in mind there’s a fair amount of rounding.

The formula:

A: New duration for one cycle
B: Base Duration
C: Fertility in decimal percent, so 0,7 for 70%


As a table to look it up:

So let's take a look at coca leaves:
Basic duration is 8 hours at 100% — if you build the farm on 60%, you can observe that it will take 20 hours. Checking the formula or table above, we get 19.5–20 hours. For 30%: observed is 41 hours, calculated is 40 hours. So there is a slight spread; the reason is simple: rounding and calculating the arithmetic mean.

This spread is roughly ±4%.

In the end, losing fertility punishes you increasingly. Try to stick to 100%; if not, use the table to compensate.

Just to be clear: You will get the same output at lower fertility, but it will take more and more time!

To get dried coca, opium, or cannabis, you need to process them in the Dryer — you don’t say.
The procedure is the same as above: upgrades reduce the time needed for each operation, while increasing the level also raises the amount of final product produced per operation.

For example:
If you research time improvements for a Dryer, you’ll need to increase your cannabis production, since the Dryer will process cannabis faster and therefore require more raw cannabis per day.
If you instead upgrade the Dryer from Level I to Level II, you don’t need to improve your cannabis production, because the processing time stays the same — you’ll just get more dried cannabis per batch.

In conclusion: if you have a well-balanced system with Level 2.5 (upgraded Level II) Dryers and a sufficient supply of coca leaves, and then upgrade your drying facilities to Level III, you’ll end up with a surplus of coca leaf production and lose some units per day — but that’s only in this specific case.

Dried Cannabis

Ratio: 34 Cannabis into X output
Level II + Productivity Upgrade performs better than Level III and is cheaper.

Dried Coca (Level II required)

Ratio: 92 Coca into X output
Level II + Productivity Upgrade performs better than Level III and is cheaper.

Spices (Level III required)

Ratio: 35 Spices into X output

Dried Opium (Level III required)

Ratio: 39 Opium into X output

Let’s get to the good stuff — Breaking Bad at its finest. You can increase your daily production either through research or by adding certain chemicals. The tables are getting more complex now, but you’ll get the hang of it.

Please note that the color coding in the cost table is overall — it includes both setups with and without additional substances.

Cocain

Ratio: 55Coca = 3Cocain or 55Coca + 5H = 5Cocain
Level 2 and 3 (no upgr.) are basically like Level 1 - only getting better, if they are upgraded, so never just click "upgrade" on a sufficient running Level 1,5 facility - you will get in trouble.
Dried Coca supply doesnt need to be adjusted after adding H

Meth (Money Printing) (level II required)

Ratio: 33O + 7H = 7Meth or 33O + 7H + 8C = 14Meth
Level 3 and 3,5 does not improve anything, so it is wasted money!
Chemics O and H supply doesnt need to be adjusted after adding C

Heroin (level III required)

Ratio: 31DriedOpium + 8C = 8Heroin or 31DriedOpium : 8C : 17O = 13Heroin
Dried Opium and Chemic C supply doesnt need to be adjusted after adding O.

Costs
Upgrading Labs do cost mones, as you might have thought:
Productivity cost 2.500, 7.000 and 14.000, and so do the cheaper maintenance upgrades.

This buidling is underestimated - at first you think that it is to hide your illegal stuff in legal goods. Basically it is, but after a while you might ask, why bothering with it if I export through an Airfield or small Port? There I don't need to hide anything, Fear will not rise.

True.

But: You don't simply hide your stuff, you also increase your export volume, because if you pack your drugs in legal goods, you can sell more!

E.G.:
At the small Port you can sell 10 Dried Cannabis per slot at level one.
But you can also sell 18 Coffee per slot at level one.
And you guessed it: You can pack 5 Dried Cannabis in 1 Coffee each, which increases your export volume to 90 dried cannabis per slot at level one instead of 10, which is STONKS!

So: I would go for Coffee, see the table down below for my reasons.

Workshop rates


Workshop Packing Quantitiy
It does not matter which drug you want to pack - it is all about the package itself.
Always consider where to get those goods to pack into - maybe it is easier for you to buy Coffee from a village and gaining Respect/Loyalty instead of harvesting from 30% Farms. Mostly it is cheaper, but needs a bit more maintenance (manual buy at villages).



Here is my point fo view to those goods:

• Veggies: don't bother, unless it is the only option
  
• Chicken: Dont bother either: Only 3 Drugs and you need a Farm Lvl III or expensive prices at Villages at higher Lvl
  
• Coffee: Easy to get at Lvl I Farms, Lvl I Villages and pack in Lvl 1 Workshops - THIS is the way!
  
• Avocado: Imo better fertility spread than for coffee - swith after a while, if you want, but you need Lvl 2 Workshops
  
• Quinoa: Dont know, Farm Level III and slow production, I guess not worth it
  
• Pet-Food: Small Increase of drugs compared to relatively easy to manage Coffee Packs, but way harder to produce or expensive to buy, dont think it is worth it at all.
  
• Spices: Maybe in some situations a good choice
  
• Gaming Controller: Hard ot maintain, since you need a town building and manual buy - I never used it.
  
• TV: Hard ot maintain, since you need a town building and manual buy - I never used it.
  
• Spicy Sauce: Endgame Package I guess. If it works, it is all automated and you can ship loads of stuff!

Basically the endgame packaging: Sauce.

Just imagine selling 42 Sauces each Slot at a Level III Pier filled with 10 Heroin each: 42*10*5*1450$= over 3.000.000$ dirty money each ship.

You will never achieve this, but it is crazy.

Can Factory


Upgrade Costs
Level 1,5 and 2,5 cost 10.000 and 14.000$. Cheaper Maintenance is only available for Lvl 2, which will cost you 14.000$.

Just a playaround:

For this: Just imagine selling 42 Sauces each Slot at a Level III Pier filled with 10 Heroin each: 42*10*5*1450$= over 3.000.000$ dirty money each ship. you would need rounded up:

210 Sauces packed with 2.100 Heroin.

• For the Sauces you need:
  
• 48 Canning Factories Level II upped producing Sauces.
  
• 3.780 Avocado per day coming from 117 Level III Plantages upped or 643 Level III Farms upped at 100% fertility
  
• 630 Spices per day coming from 68 Level III Dryers upped using 22.050 Vegetabeles per day coming from 276 Level III upped Plantages at 100% fertility.

• For the Heroin you need:
  
• 89 Level III upped Labs using
  
• 10.067 Chemicals "O" produced by 219 Level III upped Chem-Factories
  
• 1.261 Chemicals "C" produced by 40 Level III upped Chem-Factories, so 259 Chem-Factories in total
  
• 18.036 Dried Opium produced by 281 Level III upped Dryers (so in total 349 Dryers) using
  
• 54.205 Opium coming from roughly 1.024 Level III upped Plantages at 100% fertility - so just about 1417 Level III Plantages.
  

I guess there is not enought space on the map.

But it is just a wild guess. And might be outdated.

Spreadsheet available! [docs.google.com]