Turning European agriculture sustainable? Theatre might be a solution.

European agriculture is a big contributor to global warming, soil erosion, pollution, and to the loss of biodiversity. Few people will be surprised by knowing that food production accounts for 11% of EU greenhouse emissions, or by the astonishing 24% decrease of the birds populating European countrysides in the last 10 years (Bird Farmland Index).

It is also no surprise that institutions in the EU and in the UK are frantically at work to create new regulations, plans and strategies to curb the gas (and chemical)-guzzling appetites of conventional agriculture – oftentimes meeting with strong reactions from farmers throughout the old continent. Whether in the EU or in the UK, agriculture is split: pulled on one hand by the (literal) burning need to de-carbonize agriculture, while being pulled on the other by farmers asking – indeed, legitimately pretending – that their work in providing what we eat generates livable incomes.

Contrary to what some vocal politicians might argue, if solutions were easy, we would already have found and applied them – it is clear that the old continent needs innovation, and not just in agriculture. As it is often the case, breakthroughs tend to come from fields that are far away from where the problems are.

At least, this is what an international group of training experts are suggesting and, indeed, experimenting with in the field of agriculture. In particular, their take on the issue of sustainable agriculture involves an unlikely solution: training farmers on theatre methods.

“Agriculture has historically been led by bandwagon effects”, affirms Angelo Fanelli, leadership researcher, coordinator of an international Erasmus+ project appropriately dubbed “Crescendo” and president of “LiberoPensatore”, the Umbrian NGO leading the project. “Changing the carbon footprint of EU agriculture is essentially a diffusion-of-innovation problem: how farmers jump on the bandwagon of an innovation that is supposed to bring better incomes, lower effort, and a better ecological footprint. This is what all EU policies are about: setting up models of what farmers should do, and putting in place incentives to nudge farmers to get on board.

We are dealing with this issue bottom up, so to speak. Brussels may draw the “new EU agriculture” and then push its adoption through law and regulations, but for this to work, it needs a complementary approach: taking those farmers that are already experimenting and innovating with sustainable agriculture and giving them a voice. Helping them to communicate so that their peers are convinced to explore new methods and attitudes”.

Theatre training is central to this endeavor, as explains Danilo Cremonte, Italian Theatre Director and Trainer of Crescendo: “By working on their bodies, their voices and their emotions, farmers are able to approach the first obstacle of communicating: being able to express effectively what you want and need to communicate. After all, we should remember that ‘clown’ comes from the Latin ‘colonus’ – farmer”.
“We call it value-based learning”, affirms Pedro Garcia, a young Spanish remote worker specialized in web-communication living in the Pyrenean small village of Anso, and coordinator of the Movimento Tecnologico Rural, an NGO of young professionals animating the technological side of Crescendo.

Mustafa Ginesar, project manager of the entrepreneurial Bureau of EU affairs of the Turkish Governatorate of Kocaeli, describes the involvement of the Turkish government in Crescendo with the compelling need of Turkyie to keep “straddling Europe and Asia”: “We are providing a training experience whereby Turkish farmers can explore the values underlying sustainability, make sense of them, and ultimately become champions of sustainability across the country-sides of Europe”.

Started in February 2024 with an international workshop involving trainers and participants from Italy, Spain and Turkyie, the Crescendo training is currently being implemented in Umbria, in the Pyrenees and on the Black sea coast of Turkyie with three groups of farmers and other rural entrepreneurs involved in sustainability (hospitality, restaurant industry, and tourism). So far, the experience seems to be well received: Diego Leonardi, a young Crescendo participant working as a permaculture gardener in Umbria, tells it enthusiastically: “I learned that you need to be able tell stories, personal stories: dreaming them first and then actually creating them. Crescendo helps me to completely rethink myself and my work from within my daily dimension, something that has a great value for my work but also for my life – which is the essence of sustainability”. Info: https://www.agricrescendo.org

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