Imagine 40 years from now…
Where do you buy your fruits and vegetables?
Who grows your food?
What does farming look like in 2060?
These were the questions we (Navya, Anna, Hannah U., and Huei Ying) posed to participants who stopped by the BRIGHT-Futures information booth at the Festival der Zukünfte, which took place on 14 May in Kempten, Allgäu, a picturesque Alpine region in southern Germany.
Through this visioning exercise, we wanted to explore the hopes that participants, many of them residents of the region, hold for the future of food systems, agricultural landscapes, and the planet itself.
By focusing on existing positive examples of agricultural practices, we also asked visitors what they are already seeing today that gives them hope for the future.
We used collage-making and button-making activities to help participants express their visions. Visitors created collages on a shared whiteboard and designed their own buttons using images cut from magazines and paper.
The button-making activity especially attracted many children, who brought incredible creativity and artistic energy to the space, often choosing images of animals and plants, perhaps reflecting their own visions of the environment surrounding the festival.
By the end of the event, the BRIGHT-Futures team walked away with a wealth of inspiring ideas: sustainable and hopeful farming systems that prioritize planetary and ecosystem well-being, diversity instead of monoculture, livelihoods for all, collaboration, the inclusion of young people as future changemakers within food systems, and a redefinition of agriculture itself.
Specific to this region, one message stood out clearly: the cows stay. Cows continue to play an important role in shaping the landscape, biodiversity, and cultural identity of the Allgäu region.
Last but not least, the team was deeply grateful to be part of such a hopeful event and to engage with participants and organizations who each contributed diverse perspectives and initiatives toward a positive, open, fair, and value-driven future.
We also thank our festival contact person, Boris Wilkelmann from Gemeinwohl-Gesellschaft e.V. Kempten, for making this participation possible.
