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integration
What competences for advisors?
Strengthening competencies is one of the two main paths to strengthen the agricultural advisory services within the AKIS. Art. 15 Reg. (EC) 2021/2115 states that "Member States shall include in their CAP Strategic Plans a system providing services for advising farmers and other beneficiaries of CAP support on land management and farm management (‘farm advisory services’). Member States may build upon existing systems. The farm advisory services shall cover economic, environmental and social dimensions, taking into account existing farming practices, and deliver up-to-date technological and scientific information developed by means of research and innovation projects, including as regards the provision of public goods...”.
The aim of this provision is to support farm decision-making through a holistic approach, integrating the various sources of information and the farm context. The advisor should be able to consider all aspects of agriculture, from the overall effect on farm profitability to changing parts of production to specific technical advice. In short, the aim is to promote prompt, tailor- made, trusted advice.
To this aim, Member States must ensure adequate training and the integration of all advisors, public and private. Since the challenges are becoming more and more complex, advisors should be ready for change. Linear advice (based on technical knowledge transfer) will always continue to play a role, but the future advisor should be more listening-oriented, able to act as an intermediary and to support the farmer by adapting information to the specific farm circumstances and farmer's needs. Moreover, more and more competences are needed to support multi-actor innovation processes.
Acquiring soft skills, including cognitive (involving the use of logical, intuitive and creative thinking) or practical (involving the use of methods, materials, tools and instruments) ability to apply knowledge and use know-how to complete tasks and solve complex problems, asks for new training approaches based on experiential and transformative learning and interactive methods.
In this respect, the SWG SCAR-AKIS Policy Brief on New approaches on Agricultural Education Systems recommend focusing on multi-actor approaches (e.g., masterclasses that could be developed by researchers, teachers/education and advisors together with agricultural entrepreneurs) and peer to peer learning initiatives (e.g., study groups). Four different training practices are presented in this section: the Field Peer Review, the Cross- visit, Train-the-trainer for innovation support and the AKIS academy course.
Article 15 goes on to state that “...Farm advisory services shall be integrated within the interrelated services of farm advisors, researchers, farmer organisations and other relevant stakeholders that form the AKIS. Member States shall ensure that the advice given is impartial and that advisors are suitably qualified, appropriately trained and have no conflict of interest. The farm advisory services shall be adapted to the various types of production and farms”. Education programmes for advisors are generally defined by advisors, education centres (e.g., universities), and public institutions responsible for policies/programmes, resulting in different objectives and achievements.
To better connect advisors into the AKIS, there is the need of aligning advisors’ ‘skills and messages they deliver to farmers to policies objectives, programmes and strategies focusing on agricultural and rural development. Advisory services should cover the needs of a variety of farmers, both small and large scale, as well as have a deeper understanding of agroecological & organic practices and production techniques and how these can be applied in the different farming systems. This is the main reason why advisors' training should be publicly funded.
Moreover, in many cases, specific advisory competences are missing (e.g., new techniques, new crops, minor sectors, drones, etc.) and this undermines farmers' trust. Therefore, it is important to keep impartial advisors up with the latest knowledge in order to be on an equal footing with staff from private firms which is paid for commercial goals. In addition, public authorities have a responsibility to push the knowledge frontier even further, communicating research results in a format so that the advisors can incorporate the new knowledge in their advice.
Since agricultural higher education is more and more going away from practical applications and getting oriented to the most “publishable” research results, the need for a more holistic approach offered by advisory services becomes more urgent.
The practices reported in this "Compendium" show new training methods already tested successfully by some European projects (Field Peer Review, Cross Visit, Train-the-trainer for innovation support). In particular, they highlight that to qualify innovation advisors, new approaches are needed that also enables the advisors, as trainees, a) to experience interactive innovation creation methods, b) to reflect upon their effects and impacts and c) to provide a safe space for practicing to get enough self-confidence before applying the methods in collaborative learning and daily work situation. Only if advisors experience themselves how it feels using interactive methods and how other actors in the innovation process are able to contribute and develop own ideas and come to solutions, they can apply such methods practically. This insight is a critical step in the process of transforming prevailing attitudes and values of agents and of evolving one-directional training behaviour into a more interactive one. The shortage of trainers having a participant-oriented learning attitude, using interactive training methods, and applying an experiential learning approach is certainly an issue.
In this respect, CAP Strategic Plans should first be addressed to train the trainers, eventually with the support of new Horizon projects sharing the same goals of National SP. Finally, from the AKIS Accademy course, two further insights emerge: (i) the opportunity to use incentives to attend courses, (ii) the opportunity to implement continuous training over a period of time, by including a pull of AKIS experts/actors in planning and implementing the course.
Advisor training is much more than a regulatory requirement. Training is an opportunity to continuously improve individuals' competencies, giving them the chance to explore topics of public interest and discover new things that open up new horizons. It also keeps professionals up to date with the rapidly changing environment and profession, providing them with the necessary competencies. All this results in a guarantee for farmers and foresters: a curious advisor, who does not stop updating, will continue to offer a quality service, thus gaining the trust of his/her clients.
In this perspective, we could raise a few questions (not exhaustive) to help us reflect on training implementation:
