Multifunctional Agriculture as a Driver for Innovation in rural Europe – Diversifizierte Landwirtschaft als Motor für Innovation im ländlichen Europa Erasmus Project

Project Title

Multifunctional Agriculture as a Driver for Innovation in rural Europe – Diversifizierte Landwirtschaft als Motor für Innovation im ländlichen Europa

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 adult education

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2015

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: Entrepreneurial learning – entrepreneurship education; Rural development and urbanisation; Agriculture, forestry and fisheries

Project Summary

The rural space of Europe, that is about 80% – 90% of the overall landscape, is still in the process of change. One of the major problems is the lack of prospects, especially among young people in economically underdeveloped regions with no appropriate infrastructure and jobs and therefore no promissing future. The major target-group of this project contains farmers, lumberjacks and Small-&-Mediumsized-Enterprises (SME) of farmers, as well as food-processing companies.
This project bundles the Know-How and experience of its partners in their particular countries. During the last years, agricultural cooperative societies did provide the regions of the partners of this project with new jobs in agriculture and forestry, in conjunction with new projects – dealing with Marketing, Tourism, nature conservation and environmental education. Those are analysed and developed under the perspective of combined European measures. As a result, this process provided the cooperatives of the local stakeholders with innovative, transferable business-models, able to cope with the needs of a tougher growing and highly competitive market – and therefore enabled the stakeholders to get into their own niche and provide the market with local products. The project created in this context 3 intellectual Outcomes. These are 3 Business Scenarios for cooperatives in the areas of bioenergy / wood biomass, tourism and local landscape development and cooperative marketing of agricultural products & services, and environmental education
For those rural enterprises, diversification of their services and products is the future. Cooperation is the key – in Marketing and promotion of the products of local producers, as well as non-agricultural services, like tourism, generation of energy, environmental education and preservation of nature.
One of the most important factors of survival and success of a private enterprise is access to education and as a part of it, innovation-skills of the Management. Here, the project entered the process with a training of the staff of the project partners. The knowledge and skills gained by this training will be passed on to the target-group and their companies by further education and guidance. In order to gain something of the results of the project – and simultaneously get the attention of as much people of the target-group as possible – 4 members of each NGO are further educated, trained and qualified to act as multipliers. The trainings was held in two seminar-blocks of 6 and 8 days.
A detailed case-study was address the surrounding environment of the target-group in the rural areas, by analyzing the strengths and weaknesses (a.w.a. advantages-disadvantages) of the former methods and the new developed best-practise models of the partners.
All outcomes were presented to a professional audience as well as to the local and general public on a special event of the multipliers. All the results and the developed educational tools of the project will be available on an online platform to provide on-going and lasting access and provide a tool that ensures professional dialog of former and future partners of the network.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 284121,25 Eur

Project Coordinator

STARKMACHER EV & Country: DE

Project Partners

• Terre di loppiano srl
• County Governor of Hordaland
• NAK Agrárszolgáltató Nonprofit Korlátolt Felelosségu Társaság
• LUONNONVARAKESKUS