Electronic data generation, analytics and communication technologies potentially enable more accurate, faster and better decision-making on farms, with huge potential to improve agricultural sustainability. There is a major focus on digitisation by EU and national/regional policy-makers to ensure that digital innovation in agriculture keeps pace with other sectors and the benefits of digitisation are available to the wider farming community. However, there is a danger that digitisation and future innovations will be hampered unless the rural advisory community is mobilised to take ownership of digital tools and to advocate at the user interface. This CSA (Coordination and support action) will engage, enable and empower the independent farm advisor community, through sharing of tools, expertise and motivations.
FAIRshare has two main programmes. Firstly, work-packages (WPs) 1, 2 and 3 will gather an evidence base of the digital tools and services used internationally, leveraging the social networks of partner institutions that span EU and non-EU countries. The inventory of tools will be accessible to end-users on an intuitively navigable online interface that has been co-designed using a multi-actor approach. Accompanying the tools in the online inventory will be information, for instance short ‘good practice’ vignettes, on how the tools may be used/adapted for use. Secondly, WPs 4, 5 and 6 will generate and resource a participatory ‘living laboratory’, empowering advisor peers from across the EU to interact with the online inventory and, in a series of workshops, to exchange, co-adapt, co-design and apply digital tools. The FAIRshare ‘living lab’ will enable advisors to address challenges to embedding digital tools in different advisory and farming contexts across the EU. Special focus will be on co-designing powerful communication and engagement approaches for advisors to advocate and inspire their peers and farmer clients, driving a social movement for the wider and better use of digital tools.
The overarching aim of FAIRshare is to ensure that farm advisors and their organisations effectively use digital tools and services for supporting a more productive and sustainable agriculture. The co-ordinators commit to ensuring that farm advisors are included in all workshops and actions to ensure that they have an ownership of the project and its ambitions.
Research data includes audio and video files, questionnaires, laboratory notebooks, statistical and other data files, models, algorithms etc. Data can take many forms, it can be digital or non-digital, and may be collected using a variety of methods such as observations, experiments, simulations, or from existing datasets. There are different data types (primary and secondary) which can exist in different states (raw, cleaned, processed, and analysed).
The purpose of data collection in the FAIRshare project is to generate freely reproducible material that can be shared and incorporated into other platforms, such as the EIP-AGRI platform and the EIP-AGRI practice abstracts. EU policy aims to speed up innovation in agriculture, forestry and rural areas. The project will identify and screen digital solutions for advisory services that are already on the market, either within house from the EUFRAS members and from third parties (industry, academic, etc.).
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