New Entrants Need Tailored Farm Advice

Abstract

SummarySupporting new entrants in farming is an increasingly important political and practical issue in European agriculture. This article looks at a specific group of new entrants – career changers – who move into agriculture from other occupational and educational backgrounds. As they bridge several worlds, they are often important innovators. One of the main challenges encountered by this group is the lack of tailored advice and insufficient capacity of the existing agricultural advisory services to respond to their specific innovation needs. The article examines how career changers use the knowledge from their background and access new knowledge on agriculture. The research is based on biographical interviews with individuals who have changed their careers and in‐depth interviews with advisors in Latvia. The results suggest that the gap between knowledge needs and knowledge services is being filled through the creation of professional networks by new entrants with each other and with industry experts and customers and to a lesser degree with formal advisory services. We discuss how in this situation various actors in the EU’s agricultural knowledge and innovation system (AKIS) may better help the career changers to professionalise in farming and undertake sustainability‐oriented innovations.

Do Agricultural Knowledge and Innovation Systems Have the Dynamic Capabilities to Guide the Digital Transition of Short Food Supply Chains?

“…However, instead of examining how AKISs function and operate in mainstream production sectors, which receive the lion's share of attention from advisory organizations [23], we shifted our focus to a niche of agrifood systems: short food supply chains (SFSCs). In these types of chains, farmers directly sell their products to households (e.g., through farmers' markets, food boxes, on-farm sales), local restaurants, and food retailers without the intervention of other actors [24][25][26].…”

What's in a Name? Defining New Entrants to Farming

“…Third, the lack of emphasis on the age of new entrants -and recognition of the skills and resources brought into farming by individuals who come into farming as 'career changers' (Žabko and Tisenkopfs, 2022) -suggests that this is not a useful criterion for achieving policy aims. Although additional flexibility has been included in the 'new entrant' option to offer supports New entrant strawberry farmer, Canada © Lee-Ann Sutherland to farmers without consideration of age, the measures are still clearly located within a policy category of 'supporting young farmers'.…”