Barilla Sustainable Farming

Abstract

Dealing with agriculture is challenging for companies like Barilla because of several uncontrollable factors, such as climate change.
Purchasing from the spot market constitutes a high economical risk for the company, which decided, in 2010, to launch the Barilla Sustainable Farming Projects.

Barilla Sustainable Farming projects support and promote the adoption of more efficient and sustainable agricultural practices while increasing the economic advantages of farmers. Accordingly, farmers sign agricultural contracts with the company, that in exchange for the security to buy the product ask for sustainable practices' application.

The Barilla Sustainable Farming project spread throughout the Italian farmers successfully; then, the company decided to expand these sustainable projects abroad. One of the two scopes of this graduation project is to export the Barilla Sustainable Farming projects abroad to increase the number of contracted farmers further.

However, despite many contracted farmers, Barilla still faces a significant issue: the tools and the Sustainable Farming practices developed by the company are not understood and thus adopted by farmers holistically. The scenario creates relevancy for this graduation project that aimed to apply the design methodologies to find a creative solution.
Then, the problem is defined in exporting the Sustainable Farming projects abroad while convincing farmers to adopt the Sustainable Guidelines developed by the company.

The project started from in-depth research on the countries' agricultural systems where Barilla could export the Sustainable Farming Projects and passed through semi-structured interviews with farmers to gain insights on possible design directions to convince them to apply the sustainable practices.

Then, with a conjoint definition on the two pieces of research (one for each scope), the final design direction was defined: creating an educational framework that aims to create engagement, understanding, and participation on the Barilla Sustainable Guidelines. Accordingly, the solution is a platform that allows farmers to learn, via different activities, all the company's guidelines, which should be applied while cultivating.

In the end, in compliance with the educational model, the company's interest would be relevant in implementing the Barilla Sustainable Farming in countries with a rearward agricultural level. Therefore, the most relevant countries have a lower educational and technological level among the studied countries. Consequently, after developing the educational framework, namely how farmers should learn the guidelines, a roadmap has been developed for implementing the educational framework in two different countries: Turkey and Russia.

Besides the academic core of the project, the main goal is to create a creative direction to investigate new possibilities further to expand the Barilla Sustainable Projects abroad. Then, the primary aspiration of the project for an actual application would be to create inspiration to explore new possible strategies Barilla may consider in the future.