The Chambers of agriculture of the Atlantic area

The Chambers of agriculture

  • A Chamber of agriculture is a public institution lead by elected members to represent all of the stakeholders from the rural and agricultural sectors.
  • Elected members are nominated through universal suffrage every 6 years and represent professionals from the agriculture world (farmers, employees of agricultural organisation, etc.)
  • The rural code gives the Chambers two main tasks:
    • Representing and defending agricultural interests
    • Delivering support services to farmers, either individually or collectively

AC3A serving the Chambers of agriculture

The four regions in the AC3A network are: Brittany, Normandy, New Aquitaine and Pays de la Loire.

AC3A is the place where the Chambers of Agriculture can cooperate together in order to prepare projects funded by European programmes, amongst others. The AC3A network takes into account what the Chambers would like to develop in the future by relying on their experiences and skills as well as those of their partners in the Research and Development area. In order to enable the network to function correctly, agents from the Chambers of agriculture take part AC3A’s projects.

To be at the service of the Chambers of agriculture, AC3A’s activities aim to:

  • Innovate: taking part in actions which combine other lines of business.
  • Think ahead: foreseeing future changes (prospective study, farm strategy, agriculture social acceptability…)
  • Ensure that agriculture is always looking for new paths
  • Find funding programmes which can be useful for the Chambers.
  • Bring in new skills.

AC3A’s transfers to ACPA

Training within the Chambers of Agriculture is now led by RESOLIA/APCA. AC3A transferred its educational contents for vocational training on the topics of strategy, prospective and local economy to RESOLIA/APCA. The AVEC® method created by AC3A has been made available to the Chambers for activities concerning strategy and prospective activities.

Since 2015, AC3A has been developing a dialogue method between stakeholders on the ground and society using a “social acceptance” approach, involving raising awareness amongst farmers. This method has been developed throughout European projects such as BioBase4SME.

In 2016, AC3A joined the initiative “Unité Mixte de Services Appui à l’ingénierie de Projets européens Horizon 2020 (UMS-APIE)”in order to share its expertise concerning European cooperation in innovative projects.