This deliverable contributes to understanding advisor-farmer engagement activities as well as motivating factors and barriers for famers and advisors in adopting digital advisory technologies. To achieve this goal we sent farmers and advisors surveys aiming to:
- Understand what is working and what is not working in the field of digital advisory tools and services on the end-user side.
- Understand the motivations for the adoption of digital advisory technologies.
- Identify the digital advisory technology “entry” factors that both farmers and adviser consider when assessing digital advisory technology – capital cost/ongoing costs/knowledge and training costs.
- Assess the baseline knowledge among survey responses of perceived „benefits” of using the digtial advisory technologies and of their attitudes to perceived risks of using it.
- Capture details on the communication methods used to raise the knowledge of the benefits of digital advisory technologies.
- Understand incentivising factors that influence digital advisory uptake, use and impact.
- Understand barriers in the adoption of digital advisory technolgies, but also explore tools, which receive a widespread use.
The surveys were sent to a large population of farmers and advisors aiming to information on the adoption of digital advisory among different farming sectors (livestock, field crops, horticulture etc.), different farm sizes, and education levels of end-users as well as across a broad age spectrum.
Main conclusions
The sample analysis presented in the deliverable from more than 1.000 survey answers from both farmers and advisors shows that:
- Farmers and advisors have strong trust relations, with farmers relying heavily on advisors in their decision making process.
- Farmers are used to receive expert and personalized advice; they have come to expect this and DATS should be a useful add-on to the delivery services but not a replacement.
- Farmers and advisors agree on the benefits they expect from the use of digital advisory tools and services (DATS).
- However DATS benefits are not necessarily easily understandable especially for farmers, posing a barrier to their adoption.
- In practice learning and investment costs need to decrease for DATS to become more attractive for advisors and farmers.
- Infrastructure issues like connectivity, availability of automated data and data interoperability are unsolved issues, which slow the dispersion of digital advisory tools and services.
- Advisors do not have a reference source for their digital tools. They rely on their company/organization, on other advisors, or the internet to identify and discover suitable tools for service provision.
- There are no recognized best practice tools and services for agricultural use. There is however a wide diversity of individual experiences, which are not collected in one place.
- Farmers get their DATS from advisors or other farmers.
- Advisors recognize their need to receive training in the provision of digital advisory services (from communication, to methodology, to content). However they would like to receive this training offline and in person.
Read the full deliverable here.