The Use of a Farm Simulation Game to Enhance Student Leaning

Teaching a capstone class in farm management where over half the class plans to return to the family farm someday can be challenging due to the broad nature of the topic. Such a class has to integrate topics from finance, production, and marketing while helping students develop their problem solving skills. At this point in their collegiate careers, students have had classes learning about specific tools but they need an opportunity in one of their final major classes to put everything together and think like a farm manager. One option that can be used is a farm simulation game that combines financing, production, and marketing into a weekly exercise. This paper discusses a farm management simulation game that uses real data from the student’s home state to help build their strategic management skills. In this game, students are divided into teams and must first build a business plan for their farm. The groups all start with the same acreage and asset base and each week they make decisions relating to acreage allocation among crops, when and how much machinery to replace, borrowing decisions, and investing decisions. In addition, every couple of years in the game, groups can buy or rent more land.