Planting roots - Generational renewal and LEADER

As Europe’s rural population ages and young people drift toward urban centres, the question of who will live, work, and farm in rural areas tomorrow becomes ever more urgent. Generational renewal in agriculture and rural life has become one of the EU’s key challenges. While the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) offers direct tools to support young farmers, LEADER, though often overlooked, is quietly helping create the ecosystems that allow younger generations to imagine a future in the countryside.

Due to regulatory constraints, LEADER cannot directly fund core farming activities. As many LAG managers know too well, “you’re told to look at EVERYTHING BUT agriculture” when drafting Local Development Strategies. Fear of double-funding has led many LAGs to focus less on agriculture, even in areas where it is central to rural identity.

Nevertheless, LEADER has found creative ways to complement the support to generational renewal in farming, sometimes innovating around the very rules that constrain it. What emerges is not a traditional farm subsidy programme, but a web of enabling actions: helping young people access land and skills, building inclusive farming models, enhancing rural liveability, and involving young people in shaping the future of their territories. LEADER cannot plant the seed on a farm, but it can prepare the ground.

A five-fold path to generational renewal

Across Europe, LEADER projects are helping to foster generational renewal through five broad pathways.

1. Access and experimentation - Spain’s RETA network (Red de Espacios Test Agrarios) provides low-risk environments for aspiring farmers to test their skills. These ‘agricultural test spaces’, also called ‘farm incubators’ in other European countries, are coordinated by LAGs and other partners such as city councils, cooperatives, or local foundations. The incubators offer land, infrastructure and equipment, legal structures and mentoring, tutoring and advice. The 2019 Evaluation of the impact of the CAP on generational renewal confirms that such support for new entrants to farming, especially through LEADER, has promoted innovation and created space for ‘non-conventional new entrants’, especially for those who do not have a prior connection to farming and for those who lack any of the above-mentioned resources to enter farming, who are often not served by mainstream CAP funds.
2. Skills & motivation building - The Durven Springen (‘Dare to jump’) project in Flanders, Belgium, organises ‘mirror trips’ for young people to reflect on whether farming suits them, and to build entrepreneurial competencies. This experiential learning helps avoid poor succession planning and encourages a new generation to dare the leap into agriculture. Elsewhere, LEADER supports entrepreneurial training for young rural people, including in Estonia, where LAGs award bonus points to the scoring of projects for younger applicants in entrepreneurship or community action measures.
3. Social innovation - In Wallonia, the Social Insertion Farms project initiated by the LAG Haute Sûre Forêt d’Anlier creates pathways for vulnerable groups (such as school dropouts or people with disabilities) to engage in farming. This form of social agriculture fosters inclusion and develops new multifunctional roles for rural farms (see the Walloon network report on social farming).
4. Territorial attractiveness - young people (including those interested in farming as a profession) are more likely to stay, or return, if rural areas are liveable. LEADER projects that invest in housing, mobility, broadband and cultural infrastructure do not always look like agricultural policy, but they are essential. As the 2019 CAP evaluation puts it, “most of these measures will indirectly promote rural vitality by making rural areas more active, generating growth and jobs and thus improving quality of life”.

Networking and local governance - LEADER’s community-led structure means young people can be involved, not just as beneficiaries, but as co-creators. Many LAGs actively involve youth representatives in Local Development Strategy design or project steering, giving them a voice in shaping the future of their communities. In Ireland, LEADER has supported youth-led enterprises, cultural hubs and digital skills initiatives, with farm diversification often emerging as a side effect. There, for example, LEADER has helped a family tillage farm turn into an internationally recognised cookie-producing business, along with a tourism centre. The farm diversification encouraged the farmers’ university-trained son and daughter to return and modernise the family farm and business.

A catalyst for renewal

LEADER’s strength lies in its flexibility and bottom-up creativity. As one practitioner put it: “LAGs bend the rules and the established order”. Even under tight constraints, LEADER manages to support young people entering or reimagining farming. LEADER may not be a direct funding channel for agriculture, but it can be a critical enabler of rural generational renewal. It has the potential to create the conditions for young people to stay, return, or start anew in rural areas, even if not always as farmers.

What LEADER proves is that generational renewal is not just about subsidies: it is about belonging, imagination, and local power. It is about ensuring the next generation has both the right and the reasons to stay.

So, what can your LAG do to support generational renewal in farming with LEADER? A quick checklist for LAGs and Managing Authorities ready to shake things up!

1. Think beyond agricultural production on farms - LEADER cannot fund core agriculture directly, but you can support:
   1. Test farms, starter plots and farm incubators (e.g. agricultural test spaces like RETA in Spain)
   2. Social and multifunctional agriculture, tying farms to inclusion or care work (see the examples from Wallonia)
2. Farm smarter, not harder
   1. Offer diversification support (cookies, campsites, crafts, you name it!)
   2. Set up local micro-channels to connect primary producers with local buyers, shops, chefs and tourists
3. Unleash local entrepreneurial energy
   1. Combine business start-up aid with coaching, networking and advisory services
   2. Offer training trips, mirror workshops and peer exchange (see “Durven Springen” in Flanders)
   3. Use cooperation measures to build bridges: between old farmers and young successors, between locals and newcomers