What FarmVille can teach Columbia about local food

On Blinking Cursors and Blank Pages: A Poem Written Under the Influence of FarmVille

This has taken four hours to do
but I haven’t written a word;
and the promises I made myself,
about punctuality and bedtimes,
lie broken

Because “five more minutes” is a relative term,
just one more page in a magazine never hurt anyone,
and right now seems to be the perfect time to be productive in anything
but writing this poem.

Like with a toothache or a Band-Aid,
which I’ve always heard
hurts less when handled quickly,
there are two choices
and as I come to the proverbial fork-in-the-road,
I decide that Frost had it wrong:
Yes, the yellow wooded paths are not the same,
but I take the road more traveled.

It may be two a.m.,
but FarmVille calls.

Community defines the system: individual farms incorporated into networks of symbiotic aid are developed to increase the collective bounty. Lest crops be left to wither and die, neighbors fertilize and tend to each other’s cultivated produce with the distinct knowledge that such attention will be returned. The year is 1860. Wait, what are we talking about again?

FarmVille, a wildly popular role-playing game on the social networking site Facebook, operates based on a precedent. It is virtual populism, an education for the urban citizen in the necessity of agricultural cooperative effort. Essentially, each player begins with a plot of land, a pile of coins, and the ability to purchase and sow seeds. Immediately, these neophyte farm hands are faced with the reality that any economist will tell you—it takes money (and patience) to make money. Each packet of seeds purchased automatically deducts money from precious reserves, and once planted, the crops generally take anywhere from hours to days to come to fruition. In this way, as one might suspect from glancing around any study space during finals week, the game breeds a kind of expectant obsession. There in the glow of MacBooks, Internet farmers await the blossoming of their virtual apples. These bleary-eyed students spend hours maintaining their agricultural efforts, not to mention creating associations of “neighbor” farmers—other players—who share the task. It is in this aspect of the game that an interesting parallel can be drawn to real-life agriculture of the past and present, and in which there may be a lesson about local food: it too requires community to sustain itself.

Once upon a time, such a concept was political. The populist Granger movement of the 1860s is an example of the agriculture community opposed to the newly developing American urban-industrial society that we have come to know. As the first major farm organization in the nation’s history, The National Grange of the Order of Patrons of Husbandry blossomed at the end of the Civil War, attempting to bring farmers together to learn new scientific agricultural techniques, create a sense of community, and eventually organize marketing cooperatives and urge political support. Gradually becoming a powerful movement, the Midwestern collaborative worked its way into the national consciousness. Farmers’ Alliances began cropping up across the country, principally concerned with local agricultural problems.

The movement evokes an image of Americana that seems ingrained in our national identity: a fraternal sense of neighborly responsibility that would allow individuals to flourish by the sweat of their brow. ”Little House on the Prairie” fantasies of fields of wheat and time-forsaken friendly towns creep from the ideology of an agricultural organization. To be frank, there is something quaint about the whole concept, and it certainly seems separate from our Morningside Heights reality. What, then, is a simplification of these same principles doing in a game that seems to have gripped the collective attention of our generation, if not our campus? Approximately 8 million farmers were members of the 1880s Farmers’ Alliances. Compare that to the more than 78 million players world wide who use FarmVille. What is being communicated?

Simply put, the game is a lesson in the necessity of agricultural community, a fact that applies to contemporary farms as much as it did a little more than 100 years ago. The 20th century model of engorged super-farms has proven itself unwieldy, dangerous, and irresponsible. The environmental impact of large shipments of produce is an outpouring of carbon into the atmosphere, creating a layer impermeable to solar rays, which in turn increases the global temperature. Beyond that, the practice of creating monocultures poses the risk that, should a pathogen or bacteria attack the produce, the entire crop could be decimated. These facts are pertinent to the choices that we, both at Columbia and in our daily lives, make. But we can also look to FarmVille to teach another lesson: local farms require the aid of their neighbors. Support of local agriculture is important because it breeds more local agriculture. There is no restart button on real-world farms.

Elizabeth Kipp-Giusti is a Columbia College sophomore majoring in religion with a concentration in human rights. She is a Columbia EcoRep. A Tree Grows in Morningside runs alternate Fridays. opinion@columbiaspectator.com