A new EU project to explore digital technologies for farm advisors recently kicked off in Ireland, aiming to assist European agriculture in achieving sustainable food production.

The five-year EU Horizon 2020 funded project was launched in Dublin last week with the aim of improving agricultural advisors’ use of digital tools and services to enable better uptake of digital technologies by European farmers.

The FAIRshare project, which is being led by Teagasc, brings together 22 partners from 15 countries across Europe.

The project consists of “a mix of partners who have different backgrounds and skills working towards a common goal of unlocking the benefits of digitisation for farmers and society”, according to Teagasc.

This project will “engage, enable and empower the independent farm advisory community, through sharing of tools, expertise and experiences”.

Project coordinator, Prof. Tom Kelly from Teagasc, said: “Electronic data generation, analytics and communication technologies have the potential to enable more accurate, faster and better decision-making on farms.

“There is a danger that digitisation and future innovations will be hampered unless the rural advisory community is mobilised to take ownership of digital tools and to advocate at the user interface.”

Objectives

The FAIRshare project has two main objectives.

The first of these is to develop an open inventory of the digital tools and services in use internationally; this will be available to all advisors.

Secondly, the project aims to create a ‘living lab’ which empowers advisors from across the EU to engage and interact with the online inventory.

The FAIRshare will fund 40 different advisory cases that will enable advisors to address the challenge of embedding digital tools in different advisory and farming contexts across the EU.

Special focus will be on co-designing powerful communication and engagement approaches for advisors to advocate and inspire their peers and farmer clients, driving a stronger network for the wider and better use of digital tools.