One of the main goals of the FAIRshare project is to encourage farm advisors and their organizations to effectively use digital tools and services to support more productive and sustainable agriculture.
To achieve this goal, an inventory of digital advisory tools and services (DATS) available throughout Europe has been set up. It is now available on the FAIRshare platform (www.h2020fairshare.eu).
Digital Advisory Tools and Services (DATS) are technologies which include computer and mobile phone applications and services. Their primary function is to assist advisors to deliver a farmer-focused, decision support service or to assist in administrative or communication tasks.
257 DATS have been collected so far on the FAIRshare platform. Although useful, the collection of digital advisory tools and services does not guarantee their effective use. Introduction to digital tools is often arduous as farmers feel lost among the abundance of digital tools on the market. Moreover, advisors do not feel confident to guide them, especially if they do not have much experience with digital tools. More often than not, both farmers and advisers face difficulties in choosing digital tools and using them for the first time. There is a huge need to ease the transition to digital farming for both of our targeted publics. For this reason, an inventory of existing training modules was also compiled. AC3A, in collaboration with APCA, has been charged with this task.
Project partners from 22 European countries have been asked to identify and list the training courses available in their countries. In total, more than 180 trainings were identified. These general training courses (Use of the Web; Vitalize your remote meetings; Digital issues for farms, etc.) and DATS-specific trainings (Using Microsoft Teams; Creating your Excel data processing tool; Mastering MesParcelles to improve my advice, etc.) will soon be published on the FAIRshare platform to make them as visible and accessible as possible.
Lastly, to further guide advisors, we have developed training frameworks on the 3 themes identified as most in demand: Communication; Calculation and Data Tools and Decision Support Tools. These are series of general type and DATS specific training modules adapted to the participants’ needs. We consider that if the participant follows this recommended step by step program, at the end, she or he will be comfortable using digital tools of the chosen category. The training frameworks are suitable for both basic and advanced users of digital tools. In the same way as the trainings inventory, the training frameworks will be published on the FAIRshare platform.
These actions will allow agricultural advisors as well as farmers to have a global vision of the existing trainings and will help them to easily choose the ones that correspond to their interests and their way of life, whether they are face-to-face or online trainings.
