Special to The Wall Street Journal Europe

Russian Farmers Get Hung Up on Tractors and Neglect Harvest

By MARYA FOGEL Wednesday, July 13, 1994

It's Only a U.S. Board Game Trying to Demonstrate Business of Agriculture.

NIZHNY NOVGOROD, Russia- As one of Russia's new private farmers, Sasha Proskuryakov is struggling to overcome his conservative impulses.

After carefully calculating his debts and assets, Mr. Proskuryakov takes a long look at his property. He is finally ready to make his first capital purchase. "I need a tractor and credit," says the lanky 37 year old, handing the required 20% down payment to his banker. The banker hands back a tiny vinyl sticker embossed with a simple drawing of a tractor. Mr. Proskuryakov parks his new tractor next to his wheat field and the deal is done.

Husbanding One's Capital " You have to think about what's best to spend money on," says Mr. Proskuryakov reflecting on his complicated new role as an entrepreneur.

It's midsummer, peak farming season at the recently privatized Rostok Farm, some 400 kilometers east of Moscow. But many of Rostok's new landowners are far from the fields, hunched instead around a table to play the Farming Game, an American board game based on the ups and downs of the family farm.

"This game is a school," says its inventor, George Rohrbacher, a Washington State farmer who has come to Russia to help translate the game for local use. "It doesn't teach you how to grow wheat, but it does teach the economic planning it takes to be a successful farmer.

The International Finance Corp., an arm of the World Bank, plans to distribute hundreds of the games to Russia's new class of private farmers. The idea is that, after years of disincentives ranging from irrational central plans to Stalin-era purges, Russia's private farmers have a lot to learn about how to run a farm as a business.

That's clear after a couple of trips around the game board, each cycle of which covers a year in a farmer's life. The three Russian players are mesmerized by machinery. Each has acquired both a harvester and a tractor to work his initial eight hectares of wheat and hay. They pay little attention to more crops.

Mr. Rohrbacher, meanwhile, has invested nearly everything in fruit- the riskiest but potentially most lucrative strategy. Medflies and Frost " Fruit is like the queen in chess," he says.

But the Russians don't like the pitfalls; swarms of imaginary medflies, frost, and a trucker's strike that leads to rotting produce. On the other hand , aspects of the game seem too easy for the Russians. Like getting credit. All a player has to do is provide a 20% down payment and the bank automatically gives a loan.

In Russia, most fledgling private farmers can't afford bank loans, which they say require down payments of at least 50% and carry annualized interest rates of 150%. Mr. Rohrbacher concedes that the game offers easier financing than can be had even in the U.S. " This game is a dream machine," he says. If it reflected farming completely it wouldn't be any fun at all.

When two other American players in the game are wiped out by heavy debts, the jovial Mr. Rohrbacher, eager to demonstrate bankruptcy proceedings, begins to auction off the failed player's assets. But the Russian farmers balk at spending on cut-rate goods from neighboring farms. Mr.Rohrbacher is incredulous: You're not interested in buying cows at half price?"

With no serious bids to stop him, he adds the livestock to his own farm for what amounts to little more than cattle rustling. He wins the game easily Mr. Proskuryakov comes in second, although he doesn't stick around to tally up the score. "I've got work to do," he says, and goes back outside to the real farm.