Looking back to my college days, there was one craze that my roommates and friends got into that I never got into. It’s called Virtual Farming, and it’s a new application on Facebook. I ran across an excellent column on this Virtual Farming by Gary Truitt at Hoosier Ag Today. While I always thought of it as some strange addiction that would more than likely eat up all my time (partly true), Truitt sees it as an educational opportunity for consumers (if the application was accurate).
Let me explain how this works. On Facebook, you can join a farming community, where you can purchase livestock, plant and harvest crops, make money, build fences and join a neighborhood. Truitt writes, There are no diseases, no deaths, no market crashes, no hail storms or droughts, and no bank foreclosures. Yet the game is engaging and, if you are not careful, rather addictive. Like farming, it can get into your blood.
This game on Facebook is one of those tools that might begin a conversation with consumers about where their foods come from; however, the livestock aren’t used for meat or milk production in this game. Truitt admits there are flaws to this system when he writes, I would like to see the game developers add some new features to the higher levels. Things like confined animal feeding, biotechnology, and conservation tillage. These are simple concepts that could be easily added to the game and would enhance the players’ understanding of agricultural issues that are very much in the news today.
To read the entire column, link to Hoosier Ag Today. And, let me know if you give this virtual farming thing a shot. I haven’t tried it yet, but I might think about joining a rural community online one of these days…
Hey Chuck,
I too have been caught by the craze. Over 7,000,000 people have downloaded the application. Would be interesting to know, of that 7,000,000 how many actually farm.
I recently asked Facebook if they knew the specific demos of the game and they politely pointed me to the Facebook advertising page, which is good info but doesn’t tell the whole story.
I personally would like to see integration of some real brands into the game, would certainly take ag + social media to a higher level. Can you imagine buying a real ag product or seed that produces better. I believe its coming.
I totally agree with Josh. What a great way to brand our ag products. Even though most of the ‘farmers’ might not be real farmers – I’ll bet some are. I would like them to have a “precision farming” tool – my fields are really crooked. It would be much more efficient if they were straight! Chuck – I’d love to be your neighbor! There are a few ‘agrimarketers’ that are currently farming!
I play Farm Town on a pretty regular basis. I like some features, but others are definitely just there to round out aesthetics. Adding in educational features would take some time and I’m not sure that the people who created the game would be all that interested in doing it if it wasn’t sponsored by someone – but I think it’s a good avenue for companies to place educational ads on the game page and try to increase that education component, at least it’d make a good testing to see if it would be worth creating an application that’s more accurate as a communications tactic for a larger company. I mentioned this idea to Monsanto when they were speaking to Gateway NAMA about their social media work – they were planning on developing a Facebook page, but I asked them to consider building an application, those get shared much more frequently than a page does and would have repeat visitors and additional points of contact could easily be built in.