Last week, a team of researchers from the CCRI attended the 3rd general meeting for the Horizon 2020 AgriDemo-F2F project. The meeting was hosted by project partners at AGES (Austrian Agency for Health and Food Safety), in Vienna. The project – which looks specifically at the role of demonstration in farmer-to-farmer learning – is now in month 12 and data collection for the farm demonstration inventory (‘The Hub’) is nearing completion. The meeting provided research partners the opportunity to explore and engage with the inventory data for the first time, identify potential case studies for the next phase of the project and plan their respective country reports.
The CCRI team, made up of Dr Julie Ingram, Jane Mills and Dr Hannah Chiswell led a session introducing and testing the demonstrator interview schedule. Hannah said, “this was an important opportunity for us to familiarise partners with the interview questions and to test whether what we have designed will work across all the different geographical contexts”. The interview hopes to identify the characteristics of a good farm demonstration, so best practice can be replicated elsewhere. The CCRI team will now incorporate feedback from the interview schedule session in order to develop a final version.
As part of the visit, the research team were lucky enough to undergo a real life demonstration on a local farm. The visit was hosted by Alfred Grand – an organic vermiculture farmer and demonstrator. Dr Chiswell said “this was a great opportunity for us to think about demonstrations from a participant’s perspective and it was great to see such a passionate and innovative farmer talk about some of his techniques”.
You can follow progress of the project on the website or on Twitter.
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 728061.
