As I just realized when responding to Kaios, the current farming system has a flaw. It is much less mindless human drudgery in not needing to pick seeds out searching for the best quality. However, this system has introduced the inability for players to have any influence on their crop quality. Your seeds rise or fall, you are powerless to influence that. What we need is something that keeps with this system, but allows players the ability to nudge quality in a direction of their choosing to give back that limited sense of control of guiding crops.
I would like to propose fertilizer to help aid this issue. Three different types, each one modifying the RNG on a single quality type. So if you fertilize your crop with the substance fertilizer, you would get -2/+7 as your range for the substance stat for that cycle (-0/+5?). Players would feel like they have control in that they have to choose which quality type to raise since only one fertlizer could be applied per crop cycle. Personally I feel fertilizer should be left quality-less so as to not cap farming progression since that system worked well in legacy.
I feel the concept fits within the "guided RNG" of the old system, without bringing back the mindless clicking/sorting of seeds.