The University of Granada (UGR), together with the universities of Foggia (Italy), Ghent (Belgium) and Plovdiv (Bulgaria), is implementing the Work Package 1 of the e-TOMATO project, which aims to recognize and identify learning needs in multifunctional agriculture, to later implement a training course on the subject.
In this initial phase, three different profiles have been identified as working groups: university students related to the territory, agriculture, the environment and tourism disciplines; business, social and academic experts related to organic farming, rural space and agricultural multifunctionality; and finally, farmers who practice different modalities of multifunctional agriculture in several rural areas of Spain, such as: short marketing channels, social and didactic agriculture, and agro-tourism. Together with the other three universities involved, a general overview of the state of affairs in Europe will be completed.
In the coming months, various informative meetings will be held to publicize the first results of this initial phase of research being carried out, and of the project itself, to the aforementioned target groups.
As an advance of the results, for the Spanish case, the UGR team has detected, as some important aspects to be highlighted, the need for more practical training in the management of multifunctional farms; the importance of developing entrepreneurship skills; the management of human resources and projects; the need for more support and advice from the administration; the increase of the degree of sustainability of the farms, and finally, the convenience of doing more cooperative and collaborative work, among the stakeholders involved.
The latest development in this framework has been the meeting held in the city of Ghent, Belgium, on May 21 and 22, 2019, in which there has been active participation by members of the UGR sharing the first results on detection of training needs in multifunctional agriculture. At the same time all the research team, has been put in common, the basic questions related to the preparation of the training courses to be developed in the next months on multifunctional agriculture: teaching tools, structure of the courses, and other academic issues as the adaptation of these to the ECTS European credit.