The LAND-MOBILITY project will aim to develop training materials for the establishment of land mobility services in all partner countries, and, in turn, hope to promote similar initiatives in all EU Member States and internationally beyond the project lifetime. The project will do this by setting out guidelines for how to establish a land mobility service and developing an animated educational video raising awareness of different concepts of land mobility and the enormity of the problem of access to land that faces European young farmers. This will be accompanied by a number of open access training materials such as animated slides and a mobile training application for land mobility brokers and advisors, as well as training materials for providing information on important topics to the farmers themselves (both successor and predecessor), which will be made available on the project website. Thanks to the relevance and expertise of the partners involved in this project, these materials will be widely disseminated to the target group of local authorities, farm advisory centres, farming organisations and other rural actors via well-established and extensive networks and dissemination channels. This will, in turn, lead to the upskilling of several rural actors and members of the participating organisations by training brokers, as well as the eventual upskilling of the final target (the two farmers, successor and predecessor), by providing them with learning tools to help them through the process, to assist in their farming take-up or slow-down respectively, and additional educational material to cater for their identified needs - not to mention the skills the farming partners will teach each other. LAND-MOBILITY’s training materials and educational videos will use successful pilot examples of land mobility services to raise awareness of the impact that new approaches to land mobility can have on the ageing demographics of the land management sector, increase the establishment and take-up of such land mobility initiatives, and fundamentally lead to better access to land for European young farmers. In turn, this will lead to a more innovative, competitive, environmentally sustainable and technologically-friendly EU agricultural sector, and a slowing of the annual increase in losses in the number of farms in Europe so far. This way, Europe's family farming model can adapt to non-family partnerships in order to stay alive while keeping the same values and principles including quality, diversity and locality of European food and the sustainability of European food production. The aim of the LAND-MOBILITY project is in a first instance to promote initiatives and innovative concepts surrounding land mobility by developing training materials and guidelines for landowners, farmers, authorities and advisors in the area of land mobility services, land management partnerships and farm take-over brokerage. In a second instance, it is to promote agricultural land staying in the sector and a continuation of the EU family-like farming model. Ultimately, the project aims to ensure land in Europe is kept as much as possible in sustainable ownership and is not subject to land abandonment, and so that land becomes a tool for empowerment and entrepreneurship for Europeans rather than an obstacle to it.
The LAND-MOBILITY project will showcase the achievements of initiatives such as the Irish Land Mobility Service in a number of other Member States where there is a similar demographic crisis in the farming population (which accounts for almost all EU Member States). . In response, LAND-MOBILITY will provide information about how to set up their own national or regional service and provide training materials for people to take on brokerage and matchmaking roles with farming families and young farmers in their own countries.. This project will therefore target local authorities, farming organisations, landowners' organisations, land managers, farmers, farm advisory centres, land initiatives, foresters, and other agricultural stakeholders in order to inform, educate and train them about what potential land mobility initiatives are out there which may help their agricultural demographic crisis and how they can implement them in their own regions or countries. In this context, the project will develop promotional videos; an information pack including guidelines on how to set up a land mobility service; training materials for people to act as partnership brokers and successful case studies of this match-making service in practice.
Considering that over one third of European farmers over the age of 55 have yet to identify a potential successor, and that only 6% of European farmers are under the age of 35, it is crucial that best practice examples of land mobility and achieving improved farm succession rates are showcased across Europe in a bid to stimulate further successful land mobility initiatives and avoid land abandonment. In particular, examples such as Landgilde in the Netherlands and Ireland’s Land Mobility Service (http://landmobility.ie/) are exceptional examples of a novel and innovative approach to the issue. We applied for this project as we saw a need across Europe as the average age of the farming community was in the age bracket 50-65. From Macra's experience over the last 6 years we seen first hand what farmers wanted as they existed farming and what they wanted in a person coming behind them wheather it was a son/daughter or a stranger. The project gives farmers young and old the tools and information needed to progress in which ever arrangement is best suited to each individual situation.