A future design social experiment for sustainable agricultural production

Sustainable agricultural production (SAP) is essential to make food systems sustainable through increasing crop yields and reducing environmental hazards in the long run. However, little research has been conducted on policies or futures-studies approaches for a persistent change in food production towards SAP. This study utilizes a future design (FD) approach where people are asked to think of a vision, a mission and a strategy for problem solving through taking a perspective of future generations, investigating a research question “how does FD affect fertilizer practices for food production?,†and the hypothesis “FD induces a persistent change in farmers’ productions towards SAP.†We design a double-round social experiment with four treatments of “baseline,†“visioning,†“one-person FD (OFD)†and “group FD (GFD),†collecting data on organic and inorganic fertilizer practices from 400 family farms in Bangladesh over five months. Family farms in baseline report fertilizer practices. In visioning, they additionally deliberate with their family members to have a vision, a mission and a strategy. In OFD and GFD, they additionally take each perspective of past, present and future generations in a person and in a group of family farm’s members, respectively, then deliberating and thinking of the same issues. The results demonstrate that GFD induces family farmers to a more sustained increase (decrease) organic (inorganic) fertilizer practices than do any other treatment, and the magnitude under GFD is almost twice as much as those under visioning or OFD. Thus, it is advisable that applying FD to a group of people is the most effective for sustained changes of farming productions towards SAP, potentially due to sympathy, empathy and peer effects among group members sharing the same vision, mission and strategy.