EIP-AGRI Workshop Small is smart: Final report

The EIP-AGRI workshop ‘Small is Smart – innovative solutions for small agriculture and forestry holdings’ took place in Bucharest, Romania on 29-30 October 2019. It was developed in recognition of the integral part which these small-scale holdings play within Europe’s countryside. They help to preserve landscape diversity whilst providing a livelihood for millions of people who nurture and protect the countryside, rural traditions and customs, as well as biodiversity and the environment as a whole. The workshop also contributed to the broader body of work being.

Small farms and forestry holdings exist throughout the EU, and are often run at a family level over many generations. Broadly they can be characterised by lower efficiency and a higher diversity of production. Owners are often older or may not have had the opportunity to participate in higher education, so implementing innovations and new technologies can sometimes be challenging. There has also been a growth in small holdings owned and run by part-time farmers. They face similar challenges, exacerbated by even greater limits on their time to undertake training, through peer-to-peer exchanges or by making use of advisers. Part time farmers certainly have less opportunity to discover, explore and implement innovative solutions.

The overall aim of the workshop was to ‘promote networking among people and projects dealing with innovation and adoption of new technologies in small farm and forestry holdings.’ This enabled the workshop to focus on learning more about each other, exploring common issues, identifying collaboration opportunities and exchanging knowledge. The specific objectives of the workshop were: