this post (that i came across in a discord server; i'm not related to it at all) goes into it in more detail
one quote:
<repstr:0> can be replaced with any crop name in this particular instance, and we had to ensure that it would grammatically work with every crop possibility. (Not to mention, the player can name their rare hybrid crops, so that was another factor to take into account!) In Japanese, this isn’t as much of an issue, since the concept of singular and plural nouns work a bit differently. You can say 「この前もらったトマト…」 (the tomato I got from you before) and you could be referring to one tomato, or three, or a hundred!