But the BSE crisis in 1997, combined with a sudden drop in wheat prices, meant the farm went from prosperous to struggling almost overnight. In Herefordshire, Coldborough Park farm had been managed by two generations of Manning’s family, and he’d worked on the farm since the age of 13. In 2005, Sam Manning was forced to leave his family’s tenant farm. In the UK, both gross farm income and individual holdings have declined by 50% in the last 40 years, forcing many farmers out of the industry. Relaxation therapy … Sam Manning virtually recreated Coldborough Park Farm in Herefordshire for Giants Software. “Now the disconnect is getting greater and greater and fewer and fewer farmers are farming the same land.” “Used to be 100 years ago, almost everyone either lived on a farm or had very close family that farmed,” Welker says. Some farmers see games like Farming Simulator as a connection to a lifestyle that has slowly been dying out. In this way, Farming Simulator can act as a form of wish fulfilment for those unable to afford thousands of acres of land, or the largest or most technologically advanced farming machinery. “But through Farming Simulator I can do that, with a lot of different equipment choices.” Playing on the mobile version of the game, Kelley creates large arable farms more like Welker’s than his own. “One of the main reasons I play Farming Simulator is, in real life, we don’t run a very large operation,” says Wade Kelley, who works on his family’s 500-acre corn farm in Tennessee. The simulation game allows farmers to run large operations and expensive machinery, like Big Bud tractors, out of reach for their own business.

“Even though Farming Simulator is about farming, it’s also about all the dynamics in the background, like trying to manage your budget, buy the land next to you, and get new equipment that will make your operation more efficient.” “There’s a type of accomplishment, to grow and build and overcome a challenge in the game,” says Nick Welker, of Welker Farms Inc, a 10,000 acre wheat farm in northern Montana. The game’s creator, Giants Software, estimates that as many as a quarter of its players are connected to farming in some way, and around 8-10% are full-time, professional farmers. And then, in the evening, you sit down at a computer to do it all again – virtually.įarming Simulator is a long-running video game series played by about a million people. You do this every day, all year, in all weather. I magine that you spend most of your day ploughing fields, sowing seeds, spraying fertilisers or pesticides, harvesting crops, feeding livestock (if you have any), repairing fences, and maintaining a half-dozen different kinds of farm machinery.

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