I've been working on breeding some enderblooms with better stats with the following strategy (I've got other crops that I might eventually breed higher stats for, but currently I'm focusing on this one):
1. I have a diagonal line of 4 "parent" crops with 6 crossbreeding plots around them
2. If a "child" crop starts growing with weak stats (worse than the parents, or equal but not already at the maximum (safe) value), I remove the crop and make it a crossbreeding plot again.
3. When a good "child" crop is full grown, I try to collect the seeds and start or add them to a new diagonal line of crops, clockwise around the central water block (of a 9x9 plot of farmland)
4. Once I have 4 better crops in the new diagonal line (and they've grown sufficiently for breeding), I get rid of the old "parent" crops, and start crossbreeding with the new ones.
However, I've been wondering whether it would be faster to use larger batches (e.g. 40 crops checkerboarded with crossbreeding plots), and discard the worst of each batch at the end instead of stopping weak crops early. Does anybody know which is faster? Or have alternate strategies to suggest?
If there was a way to automate collecting seeds from specified crop locations once the crops there had finished growing, that would make the large-batch strategy a lot more attractive, but I'm not aware of any addon that allows that.