Advancing business competitiveness of rural entrepreneurs:

A digital repository of training opportunities for young farmers

According to official EU statistics, two fifth of the EU territory is under cultivation: a ratio underlying the impact detained by farming on environment, economy, customs and traditions. Agriculture, farming and their derivate (i.e. food and culinary industry, agritourism, etc.) play a major part in defining cultural identities of EU regions. In the latest years, a rising number of customers give particular importance to the “cultural background” of their purchases, favouring those product and goods with an intangible tradition.

Despite the economic potentials of the sector, young Europeans struggle to see in farming and agriculture potential for business opportunities and the overall number of young farmers remains relatively scarce. The reviewed datasets confirm that financial aids are not enough to sustain the rising of a new generation of farmers. Young European are culturally dissociated from agriculture and rural entrepreneurship.

Second and first generation of young farmers have much greater interest on education and training, upskilling and empowerment, with specific focus on trans-sectorial skills, business and management literacy. Data indicate in fact that Marketing, Communication, ICT, Digital are profiled as “high priorities” among young farmers, as much as technical and sector-related knowledge. Young farmers are eager to shift the cultural paradigm of rural entrepreneurship from labour-intensive sector to knowledge-intensive sector: in doing so, there are approaching to farming with a much broader vision that embrace advanced elements of management and organisation studies, business strategy, environmental sustainability. The aforementioned consideration represented the very building ground of the Young Farmers’ training curricula, official deliverable of an internal project co-financed by the E+ programme of the European Commission aimed at strengthening the entrepreneurial competences of EU Young Farmers. The structure of the curricula is as follows:

Fundamentals of digital entrepreneurship applied to farming opportunities This course offers information training about entrepreneurship fundamentals applied to farming business on the online world. Learn how to create an online store to sell your products and make yourself known, as well as tools and strategies to enhance your marketing and networking campaigns.

Business and Competitive Strategies The thematic covers four major topics concerning competitive and business strategies: low-cost strategy, differentiation strategy, best cost strategy and focus strategy. Special attention is paid to risk assessment and its practical implications.

ICT tools for farmers to enter foreign markets International Markets are great opportunities to enhance a business. Nonetheless, this may seem difficult if you do not have a great amount of resources or budget. This is the reason why ICTs are powerful tools to help you upgrading our business to an International level.

Project Management The main objective of this course is to increase and enhance learners’ understanding of the concepts and techniques employed in modern planning and implementation of agricultural businesses.

Digital Marketing and Communication in Agriculture Understand the relevance of marketing to the agricultural and food sectors • Understand the meaning of the marketing concept • Understand why it is necessary to implement the marketing concept throughout food and agricultural marketing systems • Understand the functions of marketing

Stakeholder Management: The EntreComp perspective of “Mobilising Others” Stakeholder management is the process by which you organize, monitor and improve your relationships with your stakeholders. In this module In this module you can get new information about different tools to manage relevant stakeholders for your project.

EU Incentives for Agriculture and Rural Farming The main objective of the course is to provide basic information on the tools/policies available at European level, through which projects can be implemented in the various fields for achievement of specific objectives in the development of agricultural activities.

Internationalisation and Export Management / Customer Relationship Management / Export Management The module is divided into 3 themes. Each of the parts presents Europeanly accessible instruments/ policies in two guidelines – general information and support opportunities.

Green Management: Sustainable thinking according to the EntreComp Framework The following Module is divided in 2 parts: The first part of the course defines Green management, a definition, objectives and principles. After an overall introduction of the concept, the module introduces the concept of green management in agriculture.

To know more about the project, and access the training and education curricula made available for free and in multilanguage version, please visit the official OER platform of the project: www.young-farmers.eu