Subsistence

You run a small family farm in Kestrel Valley. You have six plots of land and five people to feed. Each season, you decide what to plant and what to pay for. The weather and the world market decide the rest.

How a season works

  1. Choose a crop for each plot. Grain and roots feed your family. Coffee sells for cash.
  2. Decide what else to pay for: school, insurance, upgrades, goats.
  3. Start the season and see what the weather brings.
How long do you want to play?

Your teacher may give you a word to type here. Teachers: there is no list of codes. Pick any word and have the whole class type it. Everyone gets the same weather, prices, and events, so students can compare their choices. Leave blank for a random game.

Kestrel Valley

Season
Money
Stored food
Goats
Family health

Your seasons

Great rainsNormalDryDroughtFlood

Talk about it

  1. Look at your chart. Which seasons hurt the most? Was that because of your choices, or because of the weather and prices?
  2. Find a classmate who used the same class code. You had the same weather and the same prices. What did they do differently, and how much did it matter?
  3. Coffee usually paid more than grain. Why might a family still choose to grow its own food?
  4. Goats sold for the least right when families needed cash most. Where else do people with little savings get stuck like that?
  5. Find a real place where farmers face these same tradeoffs. What matches the game, and what did the game leave out?

Your results

Copy this and paste it wherever your teacher asks. Nothing is sent anywhere.

For teachers: how the model works
  • Class codes: there is no preset list. Any word works, and capital letters and extra spaces do not matter. Give the whole class the same word and everyone gets the same weather, coffee prices, and events in the same seasons, so differences between students come from their choices. Different words (or no word) let you compare luck instead.
  • Tested codes: MAPLE and SEED are gentle. THUNDER, BADGER, and RAVEN are typical (THUNDER is the best all-purpose pick). CEDAR and PECAN are hard. ORCHARD and RIVER are brutal. For a sharp discussion, split the room between MAPLE and ORCHARD and compare.
  • Grain feeds more people than roots, but roots hold up in dry years. Coffee earns the most cash on average, but its price is set far away and swings hard.
  • Food sells cheap at harvest and costs more to buy, especially in bad years. Goats sell for less when everyone is short on cash. Insurance pays based on the valley's weather, not your own farm, and costs slightly more than it pays out on average.
  • Kestrel Valley is fictional. The pressures are real ones faced by smallholder farmers in many parts of the world. Question 5 asks students to find and check a real case.
  • Simplified on purpose: no land market, no labor beyond the partner leaving, no climate trend. Those make good "what's missing?" discussions.