If you haven’t heard of Farmville, you will soon. It’s a Facebook game, it’s spreading through campus faster than H1N1 and you can’t ward it off with hand sanitizer.

The Editorial Board has caught the bug.

First it was our friend, whom we caught playing the game, or who told us about it. Then we hopped on board. Suddenly, everyone we know — even our moms — is playing Farmville.

The good folks down at Facebook must have decided that stalking past girlfriends wasn’t addicting enough, so they gave third parties the ability to create applications and games. Before long, we had Mafia Wars, Graffiti and the most compulsively addicting of all: Farmville.

It’s insane how much the game hits all of our psychological reward centers. There’s the sense of accomplishment when we level up, and the feeling of reward when we get to plant a new crop for the first time. Plus, those little cartoon animals are just so stupidly cute.

So now we’re up at 3 in the morning, plowing and planting, leveling up to unlock new and exciting crops and wearing out our laptops’ buttons with hours of vigorous clicking.

But like any good addict, we do our best to justify our behavior.

First of all, we say, Farmville gets us back in touch with nature and helps us city-folk better understand where our pumpkins, avocados, eggs and chocolate milk really come from.

What? You say chocolate milk doesn’t really come out of a brown cow?

So scratch that. But you can’t argue that the game helps to foster communication and understanding between ag students and non-ag students at Iowa State.

When we don’t have anything to talk about with the agronomy major we meet at the bar, we can always ask about the differences between Farmville and real farming. And if we don’t have anything in common with that cute animal science major, we can always wow him or her with the gift of an electronic goat.

OK, so maybe that’s not such a good argument either.

But at the very least, Farmville is a great way to make better use of class time.

For example, let’s say 95 percent of our professors’ time is spent covering class material. Out of that, 10 percent is review, and 10 percent is not going to be on the test.

Given those assumptions, we could spend a full 25 percent of class time farming and still not miss any material.

Not that we’d ever advocate goofing off in class — even if our professor is just telling that story about his kids again.

Fine. So Farmville is useless and Editorial Board members are squandering our precious youth when we spend hours scrutinizing the details of whether planting aloe vera yields a higher return than planting bell peppers. But why should we have to justify the way we spend our time? We’re college students, and we’re entitled to be unproductive. We can do whatever we damn well … wait, hang on.

We’ll get back to you. Our sunflowers are blooming and it’s time to harvest.