USAGE-NG (Up-skilling Agricultural Engineering in Europe – Next Generation), an Erasmus+ project focused on modernizing agricultural education. This is achieved across five work packages, including project management, development of smart farming modules, implementation of EU educational approaches like Micro-credentials, pilot courses for upskilling, and the creation of mobile learning platforms. It highlights successful collaborations, surveys to identify farmer needs, and the development of new training strategies.
Objectives
Climate change and transforming agricultural- and food- systems are challenges to European food security.
Three universities and an industry partner addresses HE students as future actors along agricultural value-chains, including small- and medium- scale farming. The project seeks also to collaborate with agro-engineering partners to share with them the highly specialized products and expertise developed in USAGE-NG.
Activities
USAGE-NG builds on previous research and comprehensive bottom-up analysis which identifies challenges, needs and adjusted solutions for major challenges of agriculture in present time. The project will develop competence-oriented modules (micro-credentials) and will establish strategies for cooperation and dissemination. These modules will be embedded in curricula of agricultural sciences, and HE courses for Lifelong Learners.
Impact
The project strengthens digital education and mobile learning of students through modules containing important topics along the agricultural value-chain. These modules follow innovative formats such as MOOCs and flipped classroom. USAGE-NG will particularly involve small-scale farmers linking them to innovative solutions of smart farming and IoT. Further, the project will contribute to the EU micro-credential approach, VNFIL/RPL, inclusive education and social growth.
Understanding Farmer Requirements and Challenges
A significant need is to identify smallholder farmers’ learning requirements for future challenges. This involves understanding their access to machinery and specific training needs.
The project also aims to identify future challenges and technological needs for agricultural production in mountain areas, such as South Tyrol. This includes exploring technologies that can mitigate the impact of climate change on valley monocultures and mountain farming.
Specific challenges identified relate to increasing safety in mountain agriculture and understanding stability models to determine rollover performances of farm machinery.
There is also a need to explore the potentials of current and existing niche markets in mountain agriculture and collect examples of recent mechanization of production processes on steep mountain slopes, including smart technologies.
Specific Smart Farming Technologies and Topics
Courses are being developed to cover recent topics such as drones in agriculture, navigation (GNSS), sensors in agriculture, field robotics, communication between sensors and microcontrollers, management information systems, IoT (Internet of Things), UI (User Interface), and UX (User Experience) in agriculture. Students are also learning to build their own IoT stack and operate these systems.
Research also aims to identify most visited advanced training topics for farmers.