The young kid playing Farmville today is tomorrow’s farmer - and this changes everything!
— Jim Carroll
Original 2021 statement: We’re entering the era of connected agriculture, in which a kid who grew up playing Farmville will define the future virtual farm
What Jim has written about this
From “Daily Inspiration: “The young kid playing Farmville today is tomorrow’s farmer - and this changes everything!”” (October 2021)
Here’s the thing - we are entering a world of technology-oriented farming, with Moore’s law and hyperconnectivity driving the speed of innovation. Much of this will be driven by that next-generation - today’s kid playing Farmville is tomorrow’s farmer. They’re going to adapt to the world of 24-hour, real-time autonomous spatial oriented, location-intelligence based farming faster than you think! (If you don’t know what this is, you don’t know the future.)
From “The Trends Scorecard: Agriculture & Food - What I Predicted, and What Actually Happened” (June 2026)
In a long 2019 piece looking ahead to 2030, I wrote the future of agriculture as if I were already living in it. Continuous farming, autonomous machines, and a tech-native generation running the whole thing under one umbrella concept: “Rather than farming when the sun is up, we’ve moved to a world of continuous 24 hour farming, aided by robotics, autonomous self-driving technology, and virtualized farming platforms based on Farmville concepts. The entire process goes by the name ‘real time spatial intelligence farming.’ A continuous flood of new technologies has come into the industry, supported by the arrival of the tech-generation who has taken over the family and industrial farm: things such as weed zapping laserbots, virtual tractors, drone seeding copters and more.”
Prediction #5 — “Farming 24 hours a day, run by a kid who grew up playing Farmville” (2021) — Hit
In 2021 I connected two threads I had been pulling on for years, autonomous machinery and the generational handover, into a single image: “We’re rapidly moving to a world in which we’ll farm 24 hours a day, rather than just when the sun is up - and it’s pretty likely that the process will be managed by a young farmer who grew up playing Farmville”
From “Daily Inspiration: “You are ALWAYS just on the edge of an epic future!”” (December 2021)
Those aren’t crazy, fringe-based thinking - most of those trends are well underway, on the pathway to wide adoption and maturity. These are the types of issues that define our future - and you are on the very edge of that future.
Read the full pieces on jimcarroll.com:
Daily Inspiration: “The young kid playing Farmville today is tomorrow’s farmer - and this changes everything!”
The Trends Scorecard: Agriculture & Food - What I Predicted, and What Actually Happened
Daily Inspiration: “You are ALWAYS just on the edge of an epic future!”