Britain's virtual farmers

Wednesday, August 10, 2011

For just £30 (about C$48), you can farm in England and you don't even have to visit.

The Wimpole estate in Cambridgeshire (http://www.wimpole.org/) is looking for 10,000 virtual farmhands as part of a program called MyFarm. The "farmers" get to work with farm manager Richard Morris to decide how Wimpole Estate should be run.

From late May onwards, online farmers will vote at least once a month on different issues to do with the everyday running of the farm including the selection of crops and animals to breed.

Wimpole, a National Trust farm, is home to many rare breeds of sheep, cattle, pigs, poultry, horses and goats which are rarely seen on farms these days and is one of the Rare Breed Survival Trust's Approved conservation centres.

Farmers will get daily, online insight into how the 1,200-acre organic farm operates, including video updates, webcams, live webchats, together with debates, comment and opinion from both well-known farming experts and National Trust tenant farmers.

The National Trust in Britain has 250,000 hectares of land under its care and 80 per cent of that land is farmed in some way. BF