Experts meet on New Entrants in Farming

3-4 November 2015, Sicily, Italy

In May 2015, the European Commission established a group of experts to tackle the issue of New entrants into farming.

This group is part of the EIP-AGRI Focus Groups, established to foster innovation on a number of agriculture and rural development issues. Focus Groups collect and summarise knowledge on best practices in a specific field, listing problems as well as opportunities. They take stock of the state of play in research and practice and highlight possible solutions to the identified problems. Based on this, the groups suggest innovative actions and ideas for applied research and for testing solutions in the field, involving farmers, advisers, and other practitioners.

The expert group on New Entrants specifically seeks to:

• Clarify the main challenges faced by newcomers; identify solutions to address these challenges based on newcomers´ business and organisational models, list opportunities for further uptake by the farming community, especially by other new farmers.
• Identify the potential models of newcomers to farming, e.g. which knowledge they manage and how they acquire it, the use of technology, their access to capital (also land?) and financial management, their marketing strategies, cooperation initiatives etc. Examples will illustrate these models.
• Propose potential innovative actions to enhance and stimulate setting up new agricultural enterprises and to multiply positive effects within the agricultural sector, including ways to disseminate the gathered practical knowledge.
• Identify practical needs and possible knowledge gaps on those processes which may be solved by further research.

The group particularly focuses on the features, needs and innovative potential of newcomers.

After a first meeting in June in Portugal, the experts group is meeting on the 3rd and 4th November in Sicily, Italy. The objectives of this meeting are to finalise the content and proposals of the thematic mini-papers produced by the Focus Group, as well as to agree on key findings and on next steps for research, experimentation and dissemination. Access to land is one of the four main topics of the group.

A number of members and close partners of our organisations are members of the Focus group. Look out for conclusions and next steps!