What Skills Do Agricultural Professionals Need in the Transition towards a Sustainable Agriculture? A Qualitative Literature Review

Abstract

Agriculture is facing mounting challenges across the globe and must move towards more sustainable practices to combat climate change and meet changed production requirements. Education has been acknowledged as highly important in a sustainable transition, but there is no clear agreement about what skills are needed for professionals in the agricultural system. The purpose of this paper is to identify and analyse skills needed for professionals in the agricultural system to engage in the transition towards sustainable agriculture and elaborate on the implications of this for a transition towards sustainable agriculture. The review is based on a qualitative semi-systematic literature review of 20 peer-reviewed articles concerned with sustainability, skills, and agriculture. Five categories of skills were identified and analysed, including systems perspective, lifelong learning, knowledge integration, building and maintaining networks and learning communities, and technical and subject-specific knowledge and technology. As the identified categories of skills have emerged from different contextual settings and a diverse group of actors, these five categories encourage a broad and inclusive understanding of skills that can be translated into different contextual settings, scales, and professions within the agricultural system. The article concludes that professionals engaged in the transition towards sustainable agriculture need skills that encourage a perspective that moves beyond generic discipline-based skills and instead builds on heterogeneity, inclusion, and use of different actors’ knowledge, practices, and experiences, and the ability to respond and be proactive in a constantly changing world.

Human–Robot Interaction in Agriculture: A Systematic Review

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Adding Machine-Learning Functionality to Real Equipment for Water Preservation: An Evaluation Case Study in Higher Education

“…The findings presented align with and build upon previous educational discoveries in the field [63,66,86], as they fulfill the objectives of agri-food professionals involved in the shift towards sustainable agriculture. Indeed, according to the study presented in [87], upcoming professionals require skills that foster an attitude based on diversity and the inclusion of various information, methods, and experiences, along with the ability to respond and proactively engage in a dynamic world.…”