The Long Game ProjectWork / Live engagement
Wargaming food-system failure in the Wimmera.
A facilitator-adjudicated policy wargame for ALLFED - the Alliance to Feed the Earth in Disasters - testing how farmers and governments respond when shocks to the food system stop arriving one at a time.
The decision at stake
ALLFED researches how food systems survive compounding and cascading disasters. The hard question is not whether the risks are real - it is why the people who would live through them do not act early. Existing regional drought plans handle one chronic hazard at a time; nobody rehearses what happens when a supply shock, a flood, and a biosecurity incursion arrive in the same season.
The engagement, part of the Growing Rural Resilience project in Victoria's Wimmera, asks the question directly: what does it take for farmers and governments to treat compounding tail risks as real before a crisis - not after?
The exercise
One continuous scenario, three compounding forces.
Built on a live baseline
The scenario opens from conditions participants already recognise - a real fuel and fertiliser supply disruption - then escalates through flood and a biosecurity incursion. No suspension of disbelief required: the first shock already happened.
Played by the real actors
Wimmera dryland farmers play themselves, alongside agriculture, industry and emergency-management stakeholders. Decisions are argued, adjudicated and recorded - not surveyed.
A closed loop
The design's distinctive move: policy decisions meet actual farmer responses, and the consequences come back to the policy table. Each side sees what the other really does - not what the plan assumes they do.
Research-grade capture
Every decision cycle is captured against a structured coding scheme feeding ALLFED's resilience modelling, with an ethics and data-governance framework around it. The game is the instrument; the data is the point.
What the baseline research has already surfaced
Interviews with Wimmera growers, run with the project's agricultural-extension partners before any game is played, have already surfaced the assumptions the exercise will test: farmers frame risk at the paddock level rather than the system level, treat real supply-chain disruptions as blips that will self-correct, and rarely adopt long-term mitigation even after living through a shock. The exercise is designed to find out what actually shifts that - because telling people about risk demonstrably does not.
The first game session is being scheduled around the region's agricultural calendar - the exercise fits the farm year, not the other way around. Findings will be published with ALLFED as part of the project's research output.
This is a live engagement: the exercise is in design and the sessions have not yet run. We publish what an exercise is built to do - surface assumptions and build alignment - and we report outcomes only once they exist.
Facing a decision with this shape?
Thirty minutes with Dr Dan Epstein - the person who designs and runs these exercises. Describe the decision and get an honest read on whether an exercise helps. No pitch.