Project
TECHCOACH: CONNECTING OPERATIONAL GROUPS ACROSS BORDERS TO ENHANCE FARMERS’ ABILITY TO ASSESS, ADOPT, AND INTEGRATE SMART CROP FARMING TECHNOLOGIES
Project sponsors
Abbreviation
Project type
Focus area
Implementation time
1.2.2025 - 31.1.2028
Financing program
Horizon Europe
Project description
Background and Needs
Farmers face both societal challenges and the need for financially sound operations. They must navigate area-specific issues unique to their location, while ensuring the resilience and economic sustainability of their farms. To tackle these challenges such as limiting greenhouse gas emissions, improving water and soil quality, and maintaining biodiversity, requires integral approaches that acknowledge the interconnected nature of the various factors that influence farm operations. Smart Farming Technologies (SFT) encompass a wide range of innovations designed to enhance efficiency, productivity, and sustainability in agriculture. These technologies, like automated irrigation systems, farm management software, cross-functional platforms, and field mapping through GPS, UAVs, and/or sensors, can play a crucial role in developing integral approaches as they gather, analyze, and apply critical data on soil conditions, weather patterns, crop growth, and pest infestations. SFT available today and those to come offer lots of opportunities to make farming more environmentally friendly while maintaining or increasing yields1. In particular, the efficient use of fertilizers and pesticides can significantly minimize environmental impacts, primarily through demand-based application. For example, in arable farming a 30-40% reduction of fertilizer and crop protection is feasible with Variable Rate Application (VRA)2, and precision irrigation can increase productivity by 10%3. By embracing these technologies, farmers can address specific challenges in their areas while building a resilient and economically stable farming future. Despite the potential of SFT to enhance agriculture, their adoption remains surprisingly low in Europe. Even in technologically advanced agricultural countries, it is estimated that less than 10% of farmers are utilizing these innovations4. Of the 2929 Operational Groups listed in the EIP-Agri database5, only about 5% are engaged with precision farming, precision irrigation, or data-driven agriculture. 13% focus on ‘equipment and machinery', however, this is not necessarily about SFT.
Some of the main factors in the adoption of SFT are perceived complexity or risk, lack of information, and the role of the Agricultural Knowledge and Innovation Systems (AKIS)
67. In the EU H2020 project 'Smart-AKIS'8, it was shown that farmers require impartial and independent advice and information and strongly prefer advice from their community. The decision to adopt SFT is notably influenced by social factors, especially farmer-to-farmer communication. The Smart-AKIS project also described how the common concern throughout Europe about insufficient availability of information flow about new technologies is restricting farmers' access to unbiased guidance, and is slowing down the widespread adoption of SFT. To stimulate the adoption of SFT and realize their potential value, it's crucial to address these factors in the farmers' decision-making process. Recognizing that each farmer has unique needs, a tailored approach rather than a one-size-fits-all solution is essential for the successful integration of SFT in agriculture. Farm advisors remain vital for guiding farmers' investment and operational choices9, but with the increasing complexity of both on-farm challenges and their potential solutions, it is increasingly difficult for individual advisors to offer comprehensive guidance and integral advisory services. This is why, as described in literature10 and evidenced in various Operational Groups, the rate of SFT adoption can benefit greatly from multi-actor collaboration and advisory. For instance, the Dutch project ‘Practice Center Precision Agriculture' showcases the successful collaboration between farmers, researchers, technology providers, and advisors, optimizing SFT use in specific contexts 11. Despite these achievements, this is not the usual or prevalent approach.
Involving multiple stakeholders in Smart Farming advisory offers diversification of expertise, solutions, and recommendations. This multi-actor collaboration cultivates holistic solutions, which can address complex agricultural challenges. It creates a ‘technology pull' from farmers instead of a ‘technology push' from technology providers and researchers. Advice is tailored to local conditions and preferences, ensuring practicality and acceptance. Active engagement in the advisory process enhances farmers' capacity and resilience through training and knowledge exchange activities, promoting skill development and informed decision-making. Farmers can take both the role of advisor and innovator or learner. Additionally, collaboration fosters innovation, facilitating the co-development and adoption of new technologies for productivity, resilience and sustainability. However, while a multi-actor approach in Smart Farming advisory offers numerous benefits, it also poses risks such as communication challenges, power imbalances, resource constraints, and complex decision-making dynamics. Addressing these risks requires careful planning, transparent governance structures, inclusive participation mechanisms, and ongoing support from stakeholders at all levels.
While Smart Farming involves diverse technologies to optimize agricultural production in different subsectors, TechCoach will focus specifically on the application of Smart Farming technologies for crop production, or Smart Crop Farming (SCF). With Smart Crop Farming, farmers aim to optimize inputs such as irrigation, fertilizers, and pesticides, and tailor cultivation practices to specific crop requirements. According to Eurostat12, 58% of 9.1 million farms in the EU in 2020 were categorized as specialist crop farms: just over one-third (34%) specialized in field cropping, about one-fifth (22%) in permanent crops, and a small share (2%) in horticulture. 22% of the EU's farms were specialist livestock farms and 19% of farms were mixed farms, meaning that they had multiple crops and/or livestock. As such, the majority of farms are engaged in crop production. The focus on Smart Crop Farming in the project will facilitate more precise implementation and definition of target audiences, ultimately leading to more impactful outcomes.
TechCoach Objective
The TechCoach objectives are based on the recognition that well-organized, farmer-focused multi-actor advisory systems and networks are crucial in helping farmers understand and adopt Smart Crop Farming technologies to match their objectives. These systems involve multiple stakeholders and prioritize farmers' needs, knowledge, and views, enabling knowledge exchange among diverse players. Operational Groups (OGs) provide a strong platform for this, but many lack the required capabilities and have expressed the need for support. TechCoach's main goal is to strengthen farmers' ability to assess, adopt, and integrate Smart Crop Farming technologies at the farm level, by facilitating collaborative innovation and multi-actor advisory in Operational Groups and Agricultural Knowledge and Information Systems (AKIS). This will be achieved through the mobilization of Operational Groups and AKIS, as well as the utilization of existing and new Thematic Networks and Multi-Actor Approach (MAA) projects, to gather and disseminate knowledge and experience for application in local contexts across Europe.
Project results
1. Expected outcome from the call: Contribution to the cross-cutting objective of the CAP on modernizing the sector by fostering and sharing of knowledge, innovation and digitalization in agriculture and rural areas, and encouraging their uptake, as well as to the European Green Deal and farm to fork strategy objectives and targets, including climate change and carbon farming.
Project contribution: TeachCoach will directly contribute to most of the Key Policy objectives of the new CAP 2023-2027: 1) Knowledge and Innovation – The collected Good Practices and tools (WP1 and WP4) will be distributed and shared with farmers, advisors and other practitioners to enhance their knowledge and access to Smart Crop Farming solutions. All this knowledge will be used and delivered in training activities (WP4) and through innovation Bootcamps (WP2) to promote new skills and support new professional facilitators in Smart Crop farming. 2) Rural areas and Generational Renewal – TechCoach will strongly focus on supporting the transfer of knowledge and innovation capacity to small and medium farms, which struggle the most in the adoption of SCF solutions, yet represent the majority of agricultural activities in the rural areas The training activities (WP4) and the innovation bootcamps (WP2) are mostly aimed to young farmers under 40, possibly children of farm owners who can apply the new skills in the family farms. Project partners AERES, AUA, JAMK and SZE are directly connected to large numbers of agricultural students, many of whom are planning to take over their family business. This approach will also support the Rural Pact policy to support innovation and revitalization of the rural communities; 3) Environmental care and landscape and 4) Climate change – the OGs involved in the TechCoach project will enhance understanding on the relevance of SCF solutions for improving landscape management and ecosystem services, as well as the contribution of these tools to adapt to severe weather conditions and climate change challenges. The farmer-centered multi-actor advisory processes promoted by TechCoach per definition takes a broad perspective. The good practices and tools identified during the project will further show how SCF can contribute to meeting the Grean Deal and Farm2Fork objectives, in particular those of climate neutrality, sustainable production and sustainable consumption.
2. Expected outcome from the call: Collection and distribution of easily accessible practice-oriented knowledge on the thematic area chosen, in particular the existing innovative solutions, best practices and research findings that are ready to be put into practice, but not sufficiently known or used by practitioners.
Project contribution: TechCoach will produce a minimum of 60 Practice Abstracts, both in English and native language, from different activities of the project. The first 20 Good Practices will come from the direct experience of 10 Operational Groups (WP1) directly involved in the Action. Around 10 Good Practices will be derived from the experience and recommendations shared by the main practitioners attending the Innovation bootcamps (WP2). An extra 30 Good Practices will be identified and collected from the innovation watch on Smart Crop Farming (WP3), which will provide information from additional Operational groups, European projects and other relevant platforms and initiatives at national and European level. These figures represent only an initial estimation of the wide range of resources available in Europe. Project partners acknowledge the potential of collecting numerous experiences and practices from the project network and stakeholders. It is also a main priority of the partners to convert and adapt all the information gathered during the project into practical knowledge, which is easy to find, access and use by the main practitioners. This will also include audio-visual material and podcasts (WP5&6). All materials will be made available through the TechCoach Library (WP3).
3. Expected outcome from the call: Maintenance of practical knowledge in the long-term – beyond the project period – by using the main dissemination channels that farmers/foresters most often consult.
Project contribution: TeachCoach will make use of knowledge repositories available both at national and European level (WP2). At national level, project partners will share and upload the practices in the channels, platforms and networks mostly used by the farmers and advisors in their own country. At the European level, the project will adapt the collected practices into the EU CAP common format to be hosted in the OpenAire and the EU-FarmBook platforms (WP3). More channels and inventories will be used following the collaboration with existing or upcoming projects that best align with the thematic areas of Techcoach, for example the EU platform used by Climate Farm demo and Climate Smart Advisors. In total, the project will make use of at least 1 repository in each country of the consortium and at least 2 repositories at EU level.
4. Expected outcome from the call: Increased flow of practical information between farmers/foresters in the EU in a geographically balanced way, creating spill-overs and taking account of the differences between territories.
Project contribution: TeachCoach will run 5 innovation bootcamps (WP2) one in each country involved in the consortium. This allows a geographical balance of the project across the EU with the participation of the Netherlands (West Europe), Finland (North), Italy (South), Hungary and Greece (East). The bootcamps will serve as a network environment to exchange knowledge, challenges, and most importantly experience of the OGs in the adoption of SCF technologies and practices (WP2). The participants of the bootcamps will then be invited to share the results and experience of the national OGs at European level during the international cross-visits (WP4). At the end of the project each partner will issue a training course in its own country (WP4) to promote good practices, solutions and lessons learned from the OGs and from the participants who attended the bootcamps and international cross-visits.
5. Expected outcome from the call: Greater user acceptance of collected solutions and a more intensive dissemination of existing knowledge, by connecting actors, policies, projects and instruments to speed up innovation and promote the faster and wider co-creation and transposition of innovative solutions into practice.
Project contribution: TechCoach will demonstrate the added value of SCF technologies and methodologies by developing better capabilities of farmers, advisors, and AKIS at large in identifying and bringing existing solutions to the farms. The project will produce a set of practices and information material easy to understand and use by the main practitioners, especially farmers and advisors (WP1, WP3). In addition, an intense activity of networking between farmers, advisors and multiple AKIS actors will be stimulated throughout the project, both at national and European level (WP2, WP4). In particular, the format of the innovation bootcamps will be recommended as an innovative approach to be used beyond the TechCoach project to facilitate exchange of experience and innovation in agriculture. As part of the WP3, the project will conduct a steady identification of projects, platforms and any relevant tool and initiative that can contribute to enhancing knowledge, experience, and acquisition of Smart Crop Farming solutions.
A. Expected Impacts from the call:
- AKIS stakeholders and end users including primary producers and consumers are better informed and engaged thanks to effective platforms
- Innovative governance models enabling sustainability and resilience notably to achieve better informed
TechCoach's contribution: The project will facilitate connections among representatives of the OGs, farmers, advisors and other professionals in the role of AKIS (WP2 and WP4). In doing so, the project wants to foster a farmer-centered multi-actor advisory approach in the circulation of knowledge and support the role of different professionals (including farmers) in becoming innovation facilitators on Smart Crop Farming. For this activity, TeachCoach will make use and promote the utilization of existing tools and platforms (WP3) developed by other initiatives such as Attractiss, STRATUS, i2connect, EU-FarmBook as well as facilitation tools developed by AKIS organizations at national level. Finally, TechCoach will develop 5 policy recommendations taking into consideration the inputs received by the Managing Authorities, the NCPs and the results of the project. The documents will include insights for better governance models that foster the circulation and adoption of agricultural innovation following the farmer-centered and multi-actor advisory approach promoted by TeachCoach.
B. Expected Impacts from the call:
- Areas related to the European Green Deal benefit from further deployment and exploitation of environmental observation data, products and 'green' solutions
- Sustainability performance and competitiveness in the areas covered by Cluster 6 are improved through further deployment of digital and data technologies as key enablers
- Strengthened EU and international science-policy interfaces to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals.
TechCoach's contribution: Smart Crop Farming solutions are still under-exploited or unknown by many farmers, especially small farms that lack the necessary knowledge, resources and network to adopt them. This is despite the fact that Smart Crop Farming technologies can significantly contribute to the sustainability of farms, while ensuring productivity and resilience, e.g. through the reduction of chemical fertilizers, Plant Protection Products (PPPs) and water use. All the practices collected in WP1, WP2 and WP3 are strongly oriented to the identification and promotion of digital technologies and applications. TechCoach will foster the role of innovation facilitators to enhance awareness, circulation, and utilization of technological tools and platforms in agriculture (WP4). This approach will contribute to the innovation capacity and the sustainability of the European farming system in response to the objectives set out in the European Green Deal and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) such as: 9. Industry, innovation and Infrastructure, 12. Responsible consumption and production, 13. Climate action and more. The policy recommendations at national/international level, involvement of the relevant Managing Authorities/ National Contact Points, and the involvement of researchers and policy makers in multi-actor advisory systems for Smart Crop Farming will decrease the distance between policy and ‘practice