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Real Life Farmville
arkenian writes "The BBC reports on a farm in the UK to be run by online subscribers to the MyFarm website voting on which crops to grow and livestock to rear. For a £30 annual fee, 10,000 farm followers will help manage Wimpole Home Farm, in Cambridgeshire. They will be asked to make 12 major monthly decisions during the course of the year as well as other choices. The National Trust says its MyFarm project aims to reconnect people with where their food comes from."
it hurts with the stupid.
Oh to hell with it. Have we fallen so far as a civilization that people no longer know where their food comes from? Have never seen butchering and slaughtering done? Have never killed an animal themselves, skinned, cleaned, and done their own cuts. I can probably answer myself too. Yes to all of the above.
Om, nomnomnom...
Aren't these people broke?
I really don't see how this can be a good idea. Trying to accomplish anything by letting it be managed entirely by what's essentially an unaccountable committee group is going to end in ruin. But hey maybe that doesn't really matter. Getting 300k euro + what ever government subsidies farmers in the UK get my be worth totally fsking your productivity and crop output.
I never thought my agbusiness degree would come in useful as a linux sysadm.
It will never work
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
http://www.thepeoplesclub.com/
Next, a real-life Cow Clicker game, anyone?
http://www.bogost.com/games/cow_clicker.shtml
New rule, nobody is allowed to discuss or post about Farmville on Slashdot.
Agreed? Good.
What? I personally thought this was a great idea to build upon. In the country I come from, there is a huge economic gap between the farmers who live in the villages, and the consumers in the metropolitan cities. The government tries to subsidize the farmers by giving them money and infrastructure, but it's just not enough.
If social experiments in Facebook, Twitter and Anonymous have shown us anything, it is that the general public likes to participate in making major decisions (which makes then feel important), and are willing for this. It is a win-win situation for everyone.
However, it is crucial that the trolls be weeded out by some means.
it may give people more of an appreciation to the farmers their lives depend on, and the not-so-clean-cut decisions they have to make throughout the year to produce the best crop possible.
... the citydwellers - with their antibiotic EVERYTHING, who can't tell the difference between good and bad soil from the smell of it, who have never grown anything past that shriveled Venus fly trap plant at age ten - start having to make critical decisions and invariably wind up making them badly and then start going hungry.
(What I'm saying is that if they really want something like that to be educational it has to directly impact the participants' stomachs, there has to be visceral conseqeunces; short of that it's still just a game.)
the ABC rural programme down under ran a cotton farm from listener feedback, choosing harvest times, types, cropping, organic or pesticide, all the way through to selling the crop.
2-3 years ago.
yawn.
Um...isn't real life Farmville...a farm?
You know, like real life Simcity would be (wait for it) a city.
So, this guy charges 30 pounds/year to allow 10,000 people to chat with each other and vote in polls on how they want to run the farm... while the guy pretends to listen to them?
Holy shit, why didn't i think of this?
I guess this experiment gives new meaning to the term "bought the farm". Unfortunately, it's the plants and animals that will take the brunt of any bad decisions. Please don't have a cow man!
I wonder how much control can be given to the players. Would they be allowed to make hiring decisions after being shown various resumes? Or firing and promotion decisions? I'm curious if this experiment can make certain class of farm manager redundant if it works really well.
-Farm owner(s): Hey, what is your favorite [insert category here for something that's in-season) - 10,000 followers [see: a total of £300,000 in additional funding per year]: YAYY! -Farm owner(s): *Grin as they get market data while their subject PAY THEM for the information. This could be a really bad idea, but it'll probably increase their bottom line profit enough to pay their bills and then some.
If it doesn't come with an iPhone app, how progressive could it be?
I thought the Kibbutz method was fairly successful until the seventies? It still is, there's just less of a committee thing going on.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
Some of the participants are going to want to eat the produce from "their" farm, in turn neglecting their local farms and burning more fuel to get the goods sent to them, or traveling to the place. Well, it's all in the UK so it's not as bad as buying passion fruit from the other side of the globe, but still. This experiment is a first, so it will be interesting to see what comes out of it.
I think "Pick Your Own" farms are also a good way of reconnecting people to the source of their food. When you're out there in the fields walking, crouching and bending down to pick a couple of tomatoes for yourself you're really thankful that you don't have to do this every day. Then again, same problem : lots of cars driving to the farm, when a couple of trucks going from the farm to the city's market saves more gas.
we know now better than ever where our food comes from.
much better than anyone knew 30 years ago, and so much better than anyone knew 100 years ago - we even got pictures from the spice fields in india, imagine that, we can take a car and go see the local farms if we want to and to top it off the news is full of real stories about real shit about food - read a newspaper from 1950's and see the difference. Except the really poor farmers of the world, they know their food comes from their crops, but they have no idea where the supplements they take come from though(spices, fruits they don't grow themselfs, preserved ingredients they need for cooking like yeast and so forth).
but how many people could that farm in theory even feed?
what this farm is looking is 300 000£ in extra funding. it's not going to provide food for the followers. and they decided that they'll have 10 000 subscribers, which kind of makes sharing your farmville account with 10 000 others, wouldn't that be sweet? what happens is that they can and will manipulate the voting and 10 000 is enough that the votes will spread to some 'sensible' suggestion that they give. I doubt they're going to plant just carrots for a year and a second year of farming rabbits even if it got played to be the top choice.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
It's a National Trust farm, so not really a typical agricultural business. I live pretty close by and our village butcher sells Wimpole's rare breeds meat, so these kids are deciding where a small amount of *my* food comes from.
The other poster wanted to *weed out* the *farm* trolls.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Will they decide by a simple majority, in the case of purely internal affairs, but require a 2/3 majority in the case of major decisions?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Good news for the farm, they get £300,000 even if all their crops flop, and since the farm gets to create the choices being voted on, that'll probably be unlikely. Profit ahoy!
We need an app for that.
That sucking sound you hear is my bandwidth.
There are tons of projects making it possible to run a community through collaborative software.
This is Wimpole Hall we're talking about (it's the largest house in the entire county, which is roughly the same size as Rhode Island), not some peasantry where they actually lived off the farm. The farm was one of the last things built on the estate - 150 years after the house! The owners did not live off the farm - the people who worked it probably did, but there's no way they controlled any resources...
Thanks for the post. Online games skyrocket in proportion in our era. Indeed, there is an upward trend for its utilization. There are currently about sixty two million individuals that play Farmville. Moreover, in connection with this, to link virtual life to real life, an internet Wimpole farm in the U.K. is turning itself into a Farmville. Up to 10,000 subscribers pay 30 pounds apiece for the right to get to make major decisions about the farm. I found this here: Online Wimpole farm creates real-life Farmville.