Business Game: Regenerative Agriculture

Generate Abundance Through Serious Gaming

A transition to agriculture that respects our planet and our farmers requires systemic change and cultural mind-set shift. Most of all it requires understanding and empathy between stakeholders. In a world of ideological polarization, professional specialization, faceless video meetings, and impersonal market forces, facilitating this exchange is one of the greatest barriers to the implementation of regenerative agriculture at scale.

At present, we have relatively few tools to address this problem…

“You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation”

-Plato

Serious Gaming is a promising method by which decision-makers can not only learn about, but also experience and feel the challenges and opportunities of implementing sustainability initiatives in complex, multi-stakeholder systems.

Learn more about serious gaming’s unique entrepreneurial potential and ability to bring the abstract into focus here, here, and here.

Alongside professional game-developers at Fresh Forces, Tari is co-developing a regenerative business game that will distill the insights and challenges of our real-world projects into an experience that will challenge diverse stake-holder groups in mindful reflection on systemic transformation.

  • In a (not so) distant future, global agriculture is under tremendous pressure to feed the people of the world. With landscapes degraded and beginning to feel the first drastic effects of climate change, existing food systems are beginning to crumble.

    Some relatively isolated areas have retained much of their ecological resilience, and one such island must undergo its own transition to regenerative agriculture before it is too late…

    Teams of players will adopt the roles of key actors...

    -Agribusiness and commercial farms

    -Governments and municipalities

    -Smallholders

    -Market buyers and processing companies

    …as they navigate a decade of food-system reform in the course of a single day. Along the way, players must carefully manage biodiversity conservation, supply & demand, price fluctuations, climate change and ecosystem health, refugees, and conflicting player interests.

  • This game is for people from every corner of the food-system, from business executives to smallholder farmers (preferably playing together…), and everyone in between. More specifically, we plan to play this game with farmers from every continent, impact investors, researchers, policy-makers and advisors, and any other change-makers with a stake in how food is grown, sold, and eaten.

    We believe gaming is a tool that should be utilized everywhere that important decisions are made, and our dream is for exercises like this one to someday be played on the floor of the UN General Assembly…

  • This projected will be developed taking existing Fresh Forces business game The Newtonian Shift as its foundation, in a co-creation that combines Tari’s regenerative agriculture experience and Fresh Forces’ game development expertise.

Kyampisi Farm - Amfri Farms Ltd. Demeter certified, mixed annual-perennial planting at one of Africa’s leading pioneers in commercially viable biodynamic production.

Real-World Ecological & Commercial Dynamics

This game will be developed in consultation with regenerative agriculture experts from within Tari’s existing network and beyond. Researching and developing this game offers us a unique opportunity to strengthen and expand regenerative networks, as well as to learn more from the regenerative pioneers who prepared the way for us.

In order to capture as much of the complexity of real-world dynamic as possible, Tari will be visiting farms and speaking to regenerative farmers worldwide about their regional perspectives. We will also be conducting first-hand research into the web of interconnections that bind together ecosystems of food-producers, buyers, and consumers, and how governance and external market forces drive these dynamics.

Practice to Theory,

And Back…

 

In developing and facilitating this game with players, we hope to establish a mutually-informative dynamic, in which our learnings from the real-world projects are incorporated into the game, and insights from game-play inform our real-world projects, both in real time. By doing so, we hope to bring boardrooms and field sites a little bit closer.

Because Tari’s focus is as much on regenerative agriculture’s financial viability as its ecological sustainability, we see also see this business game as an entrepreneurial tool with unique potential. Through this game, we hope to help players identify obstacles, bottlenecks, venture ideas, & impact-opportunities. We also hope to empower them to fill these gaps using their newfound systems perspective, and to jumpstart their ideas by drawing on our network of connections and on-ground projects.

Cooperation, Not Competition.