LAND-MOBILITY – Innovative and digital training materials to foster land mobility initiatives Erasmus Project

Project Title

LAND-MOBILITY – Innovative and digital training materials to foster land mobility initiatives

Project Key Action

This project related with these key action: Cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices

Project Action Type

This project related with this action type : Strategic Partnerships for vocational education and training

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2019

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: Social entrepreneurship / social innovation; Rural development and urbanisation; Agriculture, forestry and fisheries

Project Summary

The LAND-MOBILITY project will aim to develop training materials for the establishment of land mobility services in all partner countries, and, in turn, hope to promote similar initiatives in all EU Member States and internationally beyond the project lifetime. The project will do this by setting out guidelines for how to establish a land mobility service and developing an animated educational video raising awareness of different concepts of land mobility and the enormity of the problem of access to land that faces European young farmers. This will be accompanied by a number of open access training materials such as animated slides and a mobile training application for land mobility brokers and advisors, as well as training materials for providing information on important topics to the farmers themselves (both successor and predecessor), which will be made available on the project website.

Thanks to the relevance and expertise of the partners involved in this project, these materials will be widely disseminated to the target group of local authorities, farm advisory centres, farming organisations and other rural actors via well-established and extensive networks and dissemination channels. This will, in turn, lead to the upskilling of several rural actors and members of the participating organisations by training brokers, as well as the eventual upskilling of the final target (the two farmers, successor and predecessor), by providing them with learning tools to help them through the process, to assist in their farming take-up or slow-down respectively, and additional educational material to cater for their identified needs – not to mention the skills the farming partners will teach each other.

LAND-MOBILITY’s training materials and educational videos will use successful pilot examples of land mobility services to raise awareness of the impact that new approaches to land mobility can have on the ageing demographics of the land management sector, increase the establishment and take-up of such land mobility initiatives, and fundamentally lead to better access to land for European young farmers. In turn, this will lead to a more innovative, competitive, environmentally sustainable and technologically-friendly EU agricultural sector, and a slowing of the annual increase in losses in the number of farms in Europe so far. This way, Europe’s family farming model can adapt to non-family partnerships in order to stay alive while keeping the same values and principles including quality, diversity and locality of European food and the sustainability of European food production.

The aim of the LAND-MOBILITY project is in a first instance to promote initiatives and innovative concepts surrounding land mobility by developing training materials and guidelines for landowners, farmers, authorities and advisors in the area of land mobility services, land management partnerships and farm take-over brokerage. In a second instance, it is to promote agricultural land staying in the sector and a continuation of the EU family-like farming model.

Ultimately, the project aims to ensure land in Europe is kept as much as possible in sustainable ownership and is not subject to land abandonment, and so that land becomes a tool for empowerment and entrepreneurship for Europeans rather than an obstacle to it.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 278713 Eur

Project Coordinator

Macra na Feirme & Country: IE

Project Partners

• PROPEL Europe
• The Polish Farm Advisory and Training Centre not-for-profit Sp. z o. o.
• EUROPEAN LANDOWNERS ORGANIZATION
• UNIVERSITY OF BEDFORDSHIRE
• GALWAY-MAYO INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY