Farm-PEP logo

The initial Farm-PEP project funded under the Innovate UK competition 'UKRI Ideas to address Covid-19'.  ADAS led consortium to assess the impact of Covid-19 on knowledge exchange in agriculture, and to develop the Farm-PEP web solution at www.farmpep.net. The initial Farm-PEP project began in January 2021 and ran to February 2022.

Impact of Covid on Knowledge Exchange

The University of Gloucester’s Countryside & Community Research Institute (CCRI) in the first five months of 2021 led a rapid appraisal of the impact of Covid19 on knowledge exchange in agriculture, using workshops, surveys, and interviews across the industry.  The summary report is available here. This work was used to define the challenge statement below.

The Challenge

COVID-19 has changed knowledge exchange with a significant increase in the adoption of digital tools. While online delivery offers scale and convenience, farmers and KE practitioners can be overwhelmed by content volume, fail to translate information into useful knowledge, and suffer from online fatigue. They would like to be able to...

  • Ensure information is authentic and reliable
  • Filter out the noise and find what they want easily
  • Choose from a variety of delivery and learning approaches
  • Collaborate and interact effectively
  • Engage at a level that recognises their digital skills and abilities
  • Receive coaching and guidance for effective online delivery
  • Work synergistically with face-to-face delivery

...so that robust information can be translated into practice change at scale, to enable the UK agriculture sector to realise increased productivity and profitability in a sustainable way

Co-designing the FarmPEP knowledge exchange platform

From summer 2021 we have been co-designing the Farm-PEP web platform, aiming to connect people and projects, integrate tools and initiatives, and provide an online community space for knowledge sharing. It will be open to all to share & discuss activities, ideas, and findings, to develop collaborations, coordinate testing on-farm, and distill robust messages.

Please use the 'Co-design' page here to feedback on how we can improve the website moving forward.

 

 

 

 

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FarmPEP: a platform to support farm-centric knowledge generation and knowledge exchange - IFS Poster abstract

Poster paper given at IFS 2022 by Daniel Kindred, Roger Sylvester-Bradley, Pete Berry and colleagues. Conventional routes to generating knowledge of ‘what works’ in agriculture have relied on (i) farmers developing their experiences and passing these on locally, and (ii) researchers conducting small plot experiments on a limited number of sites, analysing data and drawing conclusions in a more generic top-down fashion. The advent of (i) the internet enabling ideas and data to be shared widely and (ii) precision farming technologies enabling comparisons or trials by farms, provides the opportunity to interconnect the top-down approach with a more robust farm-centric bottom-up approach.

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An internationally excellent Research Institute” (REF, 2021). Shaping rural development policy and practice in the UK, Europe and further afield.

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