Leveraging the potential of co-operative agri-advisory services in the transition to sustainable and landscape-based agriculture

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Date
2024-11-10
Authors
Byrne, Noreen
McCarthy, Olive
Ryan-Doyle, Martina
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Brill
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Abstract
Agricultural Advisory Services (AAS) have always had a central role to play at each juncture in agricultural development and innovation. A transition to sustainable agriculture requires an agri-advisory response which draws on the agency and knowledge of the farmer(s), is more tailored to a particular local context and encourages the sharing of knowledge and experimentation across farms in a landscape. Co-operatives, as collaborative, farmer-owned and embedded entities, would seem to be well placed to play a greater role in this evolving agri-advisory space. However, there would seem to be little recognition of the current or potential role of co-operatives in agri-advice either in academic literature or policy discourse. This paper explores the current agri-advisory offering of Irish dairy co-operatives and their potential to offer an enhanced collaborative and landscape-based offering. It concludes that many of the elements are in place for such an approach but there is a greater need to leverage this potential, appreciate the benefits and enable a more farmer-centred and tailored agri-advisory orientation in co-operatives.
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Keywords
Agricultural advisory services , Dairy co-operatives , Landscape-based approaches , Sustainable agriculture , J54 , Q01 , Q10
Citation
Byrne, N., McCarthy, O. and Ryan-Doyle, M. (2024) 'Leveraging the potential of co-operative agri-advisory services in the transition to sustainable and landscape-based agriculture', International Food and Agribusiness Management Review, (29 pp). https://doi.org/10.22434/IFAMR2023.0076
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