The Farmer’s Toolbox for Climate Change Mitigation or Farmers’ T.B. (https://www.farmingbox.eu/)
Around 22.2 million people work regularly in agriculture (8.7 million full-time equivalent workers), but the farming sector needs to attract a new generation of farmers with the necessary skills to live and work in a challenging context. They will have to produce more efficiently while protecting the environment; contribute to the fight against climate change; meet society’s demands regarding healthy and balanced diets; and keep up with increasingly rapid scientific and technological progress. It is therefore essential that future farmers benefit from adequate agricultural education and training and acquire the various skills needed to adapt to a changing environment. The current common agricultural policy (CAP) places strong emphasis on knowledge sharing and innovation.
In order to promote a more participative and equal approach to knowledge creation in the agriculture sector, this project comprehends a complementary set of organisations that represent different interests and stakeholders and bring useful background and experience. This will enable trainers to reinforce their digital competences and farmers, agricultural and rural workers to upskill or learn new skills and diversify their activities and initiatives.
In short, the project aims to equip trainers with a digital environment where students and farmers can develop climate smart agriculture skills, generate awareness about challenges of climate change, enable free access to practical knowledge in order to invest and modify agricultural practices. The project foresees, in fact, the development of the following two main results:
-a MOOC about climate smart agriculture to provide key information about CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) and to present learners some useful practices in order to improve land management in view of biodiversity principles and climate change adaptation needs
-An online Simulator that will allow learners, small farmers and farm-holders to simulate in a virtual environment the benefits on a given area of the implementation of CSA measures presented in the MOOC.
The MOOC and the Simulator are addressing mainly future farmers, students, expert farmers, farmers’ associations and organisations that are interested to acquire CSA-related skills or to upskill their farming competences and to test them into a virtual environment.
By accessing to the MOOC and the Simulator, the project participants expect to enhance trainers’ capacity to transmit and create innovative farming knowledge, approaches and practices, through the use of critical climate scenarios (scenario-based approach) and increase in this way students and farmers’ competences on climate change adaption practices (soil and water management, climate resilient crops etc.). Therefore, the use of open digital practices will improve trainers and users’ confidence and usability of digital tools, especially in agriculture and in agricultural education, and will facilitate the spread of open information on the topic, by creating a transnational knowledge community.