Teaching Agricultural Policy Tradeoffs through DayBreak: A Classroom Board Game on Policy, Incentives, and Distributional Effects

Agricultural and food policy decisions often involve tradeoffs among economic, environmental, and social objectives. Students frequently struggle to evaluate these tradeoffs because policy outcomes are interconnected across stakeholders and regions. Traditional lecture-based instruction can make it difficult to illustrate the feedback mechanisms, distributional effects, and coordination challenges that characterize many contemporary policy issues. This paper describes the use of Daybreak, a cooperative board game, as an experiential learning activity in an undergraduate agricultural policy course. In the game, students assume responsibility for major world regions and work collaboratively to achieve climate and social objectives while responding to resource constraints and unexpected crises. The activity is designed to help students recognize policy tradeoffs, understand the distributional effects of policy decisions, and develop a systems perspective regarding the interconnected nature of economic, environmental, and social outcomes. The paper reviews relevant literature on experiential learning and game-based instruction, describes the integration of Daybreak into an agricultural policy curriculum, and outlines a reflectionbased assessment approach that may be used to evaluate student engagement with key policy concepts. Although originally developed as a climate-focused game, Daybreak provides a flexible framework for discussing food insecurity, environmental regulation, energy policy, resource constraints, and international spillovers within an agricultural and food policy context. The activity offers instructors a practical tool for promoting systems thinking and encouraging discussion of complex policy challenges that extend beyond the evaluation of individual policy objectives.