Waterloo-Cedar Falls Courier, Iowa, Matthew Wilde Column

By Matthew Wilde, Waterloo-Cedar Falls Courier, Iowa

Jan. 2–Last month I spent — much of it borrowed — $407,100 on several pieces of brand new John Deere farm equipment and $119,000 on a 1,000-head hog building and didn’t lose a wink of sleep doing it.

I don’t know if a real farmer would rest so easy after forking out that much dough. Taking into account current commodity prices and a recent agreement by the World Trade Organization to eliminate farm export subsidies by 2013, profitability in farming won’t be easy in the short and long term.

But an “American Farmer” like me spent without a care in the world.

Apparently, I thought corn was worth for $4 per bushel and hogs brought 60 cents per pound every day.

You see, when you’re playing John Deere’s American Farmer computer game, you can get away with spending money with no real consequences. After playing the farming simulation game, I quickly found out bad farming decisions can be costly.

For people with a little extra time who have always wondered what it would be like to raise crops and livestock for a living, this game is as close to farming as you can get. Just like in real farming, the decisions you make, along with the weather, will have a direct impact on profitability or the lack there of. Knowing when to sell crops, which equipment to buy and how to keep hired help happy will be the difference between earning enough money to take a Hawaiian vacation or going bankrupt.

“The game is very addictive,” said Christopher Murray, marketing coordinator with Waterloo Implement. Besides farm equipment, the John Deere dealership sells the game and other John Deere toys and gifts.

“You can’t overwork your wife or help or they might quit. You have to have a good balance.”

Murray said unexpected announcements keep the game exciting, which players have to make adjustments for. A celebrity may suddenly announce meat is bad, which negatively affects prices. Or the government announces it will be feeding more soy-based products to prisoners, making soybean prices go up.

“Just like in real farming, you want to sell when prices are high,” Murray said.

The game offers 10 farming scenarios from simply trying to run a profitable farm of your choice called Free Play, to trying to fix up an old farm and pay off $200,000 in debt within five years. Other options focus on hog or dairy farming, as well as managing a large operation with six employees.

I played Free Play, which starts players off with 464 acres, a small house and $300,000 in cash. I decided to raise corn, soybeans and hogs.

After buying the minimum equipment to plant and harvest my first crop, along with one hog building, it didn’t take long to go into debt.

Plus, I needed to purchase feeder pigs, feed and crop inputs. I became real familiar with how to take out a loan — in excess of $200,000.

If I tried to do that in real life, I’m positive all the banks in the Cedar Valley would throw me out the door — and with good reason — for just asking. After playing the game, I found out just because I grew up on a small grain and livestock farm and write about agriculture for a living, that doesn’t make me a farmer.

The game is intense. It’s a race against Mother Nature to get crops planted and harvested in time. The game season is from March 1 to Oct. 31.

The graphics are excellent. I watched my crops soak up a much-needed rain and get pummeled by hail. Everything is basically controlled with the computer’s mouse, from assigning chores to hooking up implements and dictating what fields need to be planted and when. You direct the farmer to get into a tractor, hook up to a piece of equipment and watch the simulated John Deere machinery do the work.

“It’s very realistic,” Murray said.

Of course I had my wife — let’s call her Deena (which is my wife’s real name) — feed the hogs and clean the hog barn while I sat in the new 7820 tractor doing the field work. I wanted to make the experience as real as possible.

I didn’t build grain bins the first year, so I had to sell my crops at harvest. Luckily, I got more than $2.70 for corn and $5.70 for soybeans.

I made about $20,000 after selling 842 hogs. Yields were OK, with corn averaging about 143 bushels per acre and soybeans near 50.

At the end of the first year my net worth was almost $450,000, with a loan balance of a little more than $230,000. My cash at hand was at $143,133, but that would be used to help pay for next year’s crop.

I think I can pull the Wilde Family Farm out of debt — eventually — but it will take quite a few more years before that happens. For now, I don’t plan on giving up my day job.

The John Deere American Farmer game is available for $19.99 at Waterloo Implement on Highway 63 in between Waterloo and Hudson.

Contact Matthew Wilde at (319) 291-1579 or matt.wilde@wcfcourier.com.

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