For a little over a year my 5-year-old son Nathan has been addicted to the game Farm Simulator. Real farming is stressful enough for me without a simulated version, so I only get bits and pieces of the action.

I do know that he knows a lot of technical things about growing crops, which are totally foreign to this farm (such as cotton), so he is learning from it.

Just the other day he persuaded us to download a more advanced version that allows him to buy and sell machinery.

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The first hint of trouble came when he was complaining about needing to combine, but not having a wagon to load in.

Financial trouble

I asked him why he didn’t have a wagon, he said he had sold it to buy something else. I told him if he kept buying he would run out of money, but he simply said, “all I have to do is combine more and I’ll have more money”.

The stress got greater and greater until he had a meltdown because he had sold his combine and couldn’t buy another because he had no money.

My wife threatened to delete the game and he immediately said “do it, I am sick of this”. After she put him to bed, I quizzed her about what was going on and she told me every time he sold something he was losing money and was having trouble grasping that he could not argue with the game the way he argues with us.

The next day, my son had changed his mind. My wife reset the game and he started over. Soon he was in financial trouble again.

Early retirement

After his mother put him to bed, she informed me that Nathan had decided to retire from farming and go into construction.

I have to wonder if playing games like this will make the next generation have a better understanding of the financial perils of farming, or if they will not be able to grasp the similarities to real life.

All I know is this probably prepares him better for the future than the hours and hours of cowboys and Indians I played when I was his age.

Brian Hind farms 1,250ha of prairie land, of which 960ha is family-owned and the rest rented. Of this, 330ha is arable cropping with maize, soya, grain sorghum, alfalfa plus a mix of rye, triticale and turnips for grazing his herd of 400 beef cattle. Grassland is used to produce hay.