Two students from Waipahu High School made their mark on the 98th Annual Future Farmers of America Convention and Expo in Indianapolis. Nicholas Nishimura and Lakeisha Quitog won a Social Science award in the Agriscience Fair.
Their project used social media to spur action on climate change. Nishimura is the state president for Future Farmers of America and Quitog is the state secretary. They recently talked with The Conversation about the project and their interest in agriculture.
The duo focused on getting people to act on climate change through educational or informational means.
“We had to reach out to a network of educators in agricultural and sustainability spaces to really reach out within their schools and send out this survey that got a lot of basic metrics about students,” Nishimura said.
“And what we did from those surveys was we sorted 195 students into different groups, and each one of these groups received an A or B type of stimuli," Nishimura said. "Type A stimuli was informative, informational, using data and straight facts, and stimuli B was emotional, pulling on the heartstrings, trying to see if we could leverage human emotion to enact climate-positive action in students.”
Surveys were distributed through email or Instagram. Students were given information each day over the course of a 14-day observation period, and the student participants would select one to 10 actions that they could do throughout their households to make a positive impact on the climate.
“We found the most effective stimulant was informational Instagram posts,” said Quitog. “And I think this goes to show that people like the cold, hard facts. They don't like being manipulated. They want to know what actually is going on and what’s happening. And it just goes to show, when you connect with the youth or other people, you need to do it on a platform they use regularly and that they already check. When you connect with someone, you must be in the same community.”
Although the informational Instagram posts were most effective, only about 5% of the entire applicant pool took action over the survey period.
“I thought these stimulants would help people and motivate people to actually do things to help the climate, but what we found was there was no such change,” Quitog said. “Despite being exposed to these stimuli over 14 days, what can we do to help them, further motivate them? And I think that's something we can go into as you go into future projects with this same topic.”
Nishimura and Quitog also included agricultural education in the experiment to highlight Hawaiʻi's plantation and immigration history and engage others in connections to agriculture.
“What convinced me to go into a career advocating for agriculture as a politician was understanding the agricultural industry's importance to life," Nishimura said. “It touches everything from food to clothing to fuel to education to social structures to the economy. Agriculture touches all. … Today in Hawaiʻi, when our state of food importation means importing 90% of the food we eat on a daily basis, that really to us, becomes an agricultural crisis, because we as students see the state of agriculture in Hawaiʻi, and now we want to do all of this work to change it.”
This story aired on The Conversation on Dec. 16, 2025. The Conversation airs weekdays at 11 a.m. Hannah Kaʻiulani Coburn adapted this story for the web.
