Our goal is to build a small-scale, campus-shared, and cloud-mode Experimental Smart Farm Simulation (ESFSim) platform. This platform, informed by real-world data collected from the UC Merced Experimental Smart Farm (ESF), will allow researchers to more quickly run experiments and gather data. Because many experiments can be run in parallel within a simulation, researchers can pursue ideas that may not be feasible to test on a real farm due to cost or scale. Of course, bespoke digital simulations have drawbacks of their own. They are initially costly and difficult to build. By creating a common foundation, more researchers will be able to make use of compute resources by lowering the effort required to deploy simulator-based experiments. They can instead focus their efforts on customizing the platform to suit their specific needs and performing directly productive research activities. Such efforts can be reused by other researchers to further lessen the effort required to use the system.