Harvest is a community of farmers who aggregate resources to achieve DeFi yields. Launched in 2017 by Kevin Owocki, Scott Moore, and Vivek Singh, the Harvest platform identifies the most profitable pools for traders and can deposit money into a pool on behalf of a trader. Thus, Harvest Finance acts as a "yield aggregator" that organizes and automates the yield farming process for its users.
As Decentralized Finance (DeFi) grows, it's becoming increasingly common for protocols to provide token rewards, often in the form of "stake" tokens, in exchange for using their platforms. This process of collecting rewards is commonly referred to as "yield farming" or "liquidity mining." As an intermediary, Harvest Finance collects tokens from many users and stakes them on their behalf collectively, saving on network fees (gas).

Known also as liquidity mining, the yield farming system is a type of lending system. A trader with cryptocurrency can add their crypto to the platform's pool and, if not touched for a certain period, earns interest at a predetermined rate. The crypto added to the pool is locked (staked), and there is no access to these tokens for a certain period. In exchange for staking these tokens, the platform rewards the user with tokens. However, since there's no way to intervene if the value of the staked token falls, it's a system that carries as much risk as it does potential profit.

Harvest Finance automatically "harvests" or collects reward tokens on behalf of its users. It then swaps these for the base assets that users have deposited, combining the earned interest. This saves users time and network fees associated with multiple transactions and improves annual yields through automatic compounding mechanisms. When farmers make a deposit, Harvest automatically employs the latest farming techniques to achieve the highest yield possible with these deposits.

The FARM token was launched on September 1, 2020, to provide yield and incentives to farmers on the Harvest platform.
A key innovation of the FARM token is providing token holders with a performance fee generated from Harvest's yield farming strategies. While each strategy aggregates different assets, the performance fee is used to purchase FARM on the open market, which is then distributed to those holding a "Profit Sharing" stake in FARM. As a result, the price of FARM is subject to consistent buying pressure. The value of FARM comes from the profits generated through various strategies applied.

The farming system is highly manual and inconvenient for those with daily jobs and unable to keep up with DeFi 24/7. Harvest automates farming by regularly harvesting in more than 100 different farms.
Manual farming is quite challenging due to high gas prices. With Harvest's automation, users can save on gas costs.

FARM and iFARM are ERC-20 tokens on Ethereum.
FARM serves as a cash flow token for Harvest. iFARM is a yield-bearing token for Harvest. bFARM is the equivalent of FARM on the Binance Smart Chain. bFARM can be exchanged for FARM and converted back to bFARM using the Anyswap bridge.

fDAI, fUSDC, fWBTC, and other f-tokens are yield-bearing versions of the respective assets automatically compounded by Harvest. When Harvest generates yield, 70% of these returns are used to increase the value of these tokens.

FARM acts as a cash flow token for Harvest. When Harvest generates yield, 70% of this yield is used to increase the value of the deposits. The other 30% is given to farmers who deposit their FARMs into the FARM pool, and it's converted into FARM tokens to increase the value of iFARM. The FARM pool also receives weekly FARM emissions from a total supply of 690,420.
The newly created tokens are released weekly and distributed as follows:

Launching with 0 tokens in supply, FARM is set to be minted over 4 years up to a hardcoded maximum supply of 690,420 tokens. It is regularly burned to control inflation. Mining is done through staking.