ECONewFARMERS: Building bridges between family and organic farming through vocational training

Abstract

The ECONewFARMERS project, a partnership with EU countries (Hungary, Spain, Italy, Turkey, United Kingdom and Slovakia) focuses primarily on improving the quality and performance of education and vocational training in order to strengthen the European dimension in organic farming.

Knowledge and technical training are essential for the adoption of organic farming, so the project ECONewFARMERS - Building the future with new farmers in ecological faming through vocational training aims to contribute to the technical training of farmers who want to convert or start a farm in organic farming in m-learning (learning in mobility contexts) and to provide tools to improve their capacity and innovation..

In this way, this work intends to characterize the agricultural practices used by family farmers in the municipality of Viseu and to evaluate the similarity of these technical itineraries with organic farming theoretical profile in order to identify the training needs of these (or new) farmers. The identification of agricultural practices was based on a survey using a checklist method that was applied to 30 farmers whose farms have 2 or less than 2 hectares, with work labor constituted by family members and whose income is mainly from the farm.