Stop caring about your virtual farm and start caring about real ones.

The sun always shines. Pink cows produce strawberry milk. Soybeans take two days to grow and ripen. Something is not right. It’s too clean. Nothing smells. Coffee bean grows next to squash. Millions of first-time farmers plant new crops every week. And—finally!—people pull out their wallets to support local agriculture. Welcome to Farmville.

Farmville has become a viral internet trend since its launch as a Facebook application this summer. It has now grown to 70 million users, making it the number one application on the social networking site. Players sign up and get fields, infrastructure, and cash. They’re tasked with creating bigger, better, and richer farms. The game is a rehash of the addictive Tamagotchi pet toy of the early 1990s, but instead of feeding a little “animal,” you’re caring for a digital homestead with insatiable livestock and crops that need regular clicking and attention.

The virtual farm provides an odd mashup of social networking with back-to-the-land fantasies. Farmville offers no real sustenance, but its emphasis on cooperation, strategy, and creation represent a culturally significant development in the often violent world of gaming. It’s a simulation with less stimulation, a sort of virtual country calm that transports us somewhere else for a minute or an hour. In doing so, the game taps deep into the American psyche, and the longing for an idyllic agrarian past. “People just want to get back to something simpler,” one tech writer told NPR.

While using new media to express old agrarian values may seem paradoxical, Yi-Fu Tuan points out in his book Topophilia that the romantic appreciation of nature in literature has always arisen from wealth, privilege, and the urban advancement of society, which distances us from a gentle, unselfconscious involvement with the physical world. Farmville is just the latest iteration of the theme.

But Farmville’s farms don’t actually mirror reality. In Farmville, farmers can get high returns. Seeds mature at impossible rates. It’s a place without slaughtering. There’s little of the harsh reality that Americans value food only enough to spend 10 percent of their income on it. If you had any doubts, know that Farmville is complete fantasy.

In 2004, Eleanor Agnew wrote a memoir, Back From the Land, about her homesteading experience. After being lured by the idealism of living in nature and trying to live off the land, she eventually moved back to the city. Life in the country was tough. She spent an exorbitant amount of time making ketchup. Her marriage disintegrated. “Liking the idea was not enough,” she writes. Liking just the idea of farming has little potential to transform the world; Farmville’s online community of artificial soybean farmers won’t improve our food system. To do that we need real farming, and that's not a game. It’s time to support actual small farmers and stop playing around.

www.good.is/post/What-Does-Farmville-Mean-for-Farmers/

Too bad, I broke my contact to all my ex in-laws after my acrimonious divorce. My brother-in-law was a nice guy. A grain farmer in Ill. It was a hard life. Dealing with weather which you have zero control.

Combine needed attention all the time... 6 head corn attachment, wheat attchment... The poor guy had all these equipment. $100k for the basic combine and god knows how much everything else cost and he was dirt poor financially. Up and at'em at 6:00AM... you get the routine.

I don't think a farmer cares for farmville. I don't care either and it means nothing. I hear often, "put your money where your mouth is!" bit pugilistic but I just can't see how it can relate to real life. 

Aphid infestation, mosaic virus... cutworms, hail storms... and your well planned growing season gets wiped out. Then you've got to deal with potentially rotten neighbors.  idiots burning poison ivy to guys letting their dogs run wild and threaten your free range birds... Being in an unincorporated area may have some advantages but it has its set of disadvantages too. You don't hear too much about those. And I don't think farmville has incorporated all the downside.

If you enjoy the game. I'm happy for you that you are enjoying the game.  Just keep in mind, come on out and wok your garden/field/farm.

Still looking forward to having about 5 acre micro-farm. came so close to buying one about 16 years ago. Good thing I backed out. Ag water price went through the roof and they put so many restrictions, it was cheaper to chop down the avocado groves. Then the gangs moved into the area. IT WAS IDYLLIC BUT NOT ANYMORE. Too bad.

And many prime farming area in California are either way overpriced for you to make a living as a farmer or you have no water rights i.e. you can't just go drilling for water! and even if you can, water level has dropped 100feet or more in places. And in places like Camillaro (sp) water level dropped so much that the salt water from the ocean is now seeping far inland and contaminating the fresh ground water. It's a tough life.

Justin,
I really like your essay about Farmville. Farmville is a very odd phenomenon to me; I signed up for it as soon as I joined Facebook because I mistakenly thought that it would help me learn some farm management skills that I could apply to real-life farming. Ha ha! I quickly discovered that it was less like farming than the game of Monopoly is like selling commercial real estate. I have banned all Farmville requests and offers from showing up on my Facebook page at the risk of hurting my friends' feelings; however, initially I tried sending messages to them asking them to physically come out to the farm for a few hours of actual volunteer work, but nobody took me up on it. Interestingly, some of the people I know who are avid users of Farmville are actual gardeners who do grow their own food. But I still can't understand the attraction of Farmville to anyone who knows what it's like to put his/her hands in real soil or raise a real plant to maturity or husband a real animal. Does anyone get it?

Justin,
really good writeup, Farmville is really a mistery to me, if one tenth of the folks who participate in this game would just apply it to actual farming or gardening they would understand the satisfaction of diggin in the dirt. But I think for most people food production is a mistery and something that cannot be done. I just do not understand it. My daughter plays this game so I asked her what the purpose of this game is and she really could not tell me. I then asked her if she actually gets anything out of it, again nothing. One thing she did tell me is that you can actually spend real money to buy what I don't know but whatever it is it is not concrete and only lives in the digital world. very strange.

I don't worry too much about it. True, it's an abstraction and bastardization of a passion that most of us here share, but it isn't any different than Monopoly, Sim City, Sims, Civilization and countless others. Of my friends on facebook that all play this game, most have never had any interest in growing their own food. I am forever espousing the virtues of a home garden, gently urging my colleagues to starting there own home garden. What I hope and watch for is that these successes on the cyberfarm will somehow break down some of the reluctance to grow-your-own and hopefully give me another chance to persuade them to go out, get dirty and translate these electronic successes to the real world medium.

I'm amazed at how many of my Facebook friends say to me "You're a farmer -- how come you're not playing Farmville then?", as if that is shocking to them. I just look at them blankly and say, "Um.. because I have the REAL thing?"

I have friends that snub the "getting dirty" part of farming (eye roll) and I have other friends that live in the city and have stated how jealous and proud of me and my farm. Having been raised in the country growing up, I personally can't stand Farmville. I much prefer to be doing the actual work which is much more relaxing, not to mention healthy.

Here's a quick smile for the day...

Maybe it's just my browser, but as I am reading this posting and responses I see a Google ad on the top right of the page for - - Farm Frenzy, Fantastic Farm, Virtual Farm, Garden Dreams, Chicken Chase, Harvest Mania To Go, Enchanted Gardens and Grimm's Hatchery!

Don't ya just love it???

Someone asked me recently, "why did you stop playing farmville?". And my reply was "when I realized I was spending 30 minutes every day harvesting FAKE crops when I could be planning my REAL garden!". And most people don't get it.

 Farmville is a distraction and in the winter for me its a pleasant distraction. Its a game , just a game , and if it leads one person to actually try growing something in their backyard (like it has my father , my stepmum and a few of my cousins) it is a good thing. Until Farmville entranced my father he had NEVER even THOUGHT of planting a seed. It made him curious and its opened a whole new world.