FarmVille / Edy's Fruit Bars Farm Cash Giveaway now live; do you feel lucky?

Back in May, we brought you a sneak peek at a new cross-promotional giveaway being offered in FarmVille between Zynga and Edy's / Dreyer's Fruit Bars. These frozen snacks can be found at most grocery stores (the name might be different depending on which state in the US that you live in, but the packaging looks the same), and for a limited time, you'll have a chance of finding FarmVille branded boxes that contain codes that you can enter back on Facebook.

To be specific, you must enter your codes on Edy's Facebook fan page. Look on the left-hand menu and select "FarmVille Farm Cash Giveaway" to see a form you can fill out.

If you don't have a code, you can generate one for free by selecting the appropriate button. No matter how you earn your codes, you can enter up to three per day. Don't get too excited though, as most codes won't be winners. This promotion is more like a lottery than a guarantee, and even paid codes out of purchased boxes of the Fruit Bars aren't guaranteed to reward you with anything (bummer, huh?). Still, 3,500 players will walk away with 50 Farm Cash, 1,500 players will win 100 Farm Cash and 250 players will win 500 Farm Cash each. The grand prize (for 50 players) is even better - a whopping 1,000 Farm Cash! Just think of all of the limited edition trees, decorations, animals, etc. you could buy with that kind of cash!

Of course, you'll need to have an insane amount of luck to win the grand prize (or seemingly any prize) at this point, but if you've got a sweet tooth and some real world cash to spare, this is definitely a promotion to keep in mind while shopping this summer.

FarmVille: Randomly appearing Dartmoor Ponies leave players confused

Quick farmers! Login to FarmVille and check your Gift Box. If you're like me, you might ask yourself if you're seeing things. But no, that's a Dartmoor Pony sitting in your gift box, for free. In my case, I never purchased this Pony, and as they're not even available in the store anymore or on the free gifts page, I know no one could have gifted it to me. It's as though this Pony has appeared by magic.

Upon some investigation, it appears that I'm not the only one. A thread has started gaining speed on the official FarmVille forums filled with farmers just as confused as I as to where this free horse came from. Placing it on my farm caused no out of sync error, and it seems to work as normal. Heck, even multiple game refreshes didn't cause him to vanish. Sure, I'm excited, but the thing is, this Pony normally costs 24 Farm Cash, and that's a heck of a price tag for Zynga to suddenly release one to players for free, so forgive me for being skeptical.

What's more, not everyone has received this free animal. It could be that it simply hasn't rolled out to everyone yet, but it could also give further evidence to this being a glitch. In cases where items were simply given away, we normally received some sort of a pop-up as indication that it had happened, but this has silently come and gone without a peep from Zynga, as of this writing. Let's just hope that if this is a glitch, we won't suddenly lose our Dartmoor Ponies just as quickly as we were given them.