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Small farms make a considerable contribution to territorial development, they provide specialised local and regional products as well as support social, cultural, and environmental services. Farming activities which respect the landscape value and heritage bring added value to the landscape and create potential for agri-tourism development. However, agricultural production depends on unpredictable natural conditions and the direct sale of agricultural products from farms is not easy. These reasons motivate farmers to start doing complementary business in non-agricultural activities. The targeted group of the FEAL project are young farmers, young rural entrepreneurs and family farmers. The share of population participating in lifelong learning courses in rural areas of the EU-27, reaches only 6.6% (European Commission, 2013). People living in rural areas may represent a group at risk of exclusion. Therefore, free access to vocational education and training material for people living in rural areas is crucial. Digital training material of the project is available under a Creative Commons License allowing the use and the distribution free of charges thus granting the access to education for everyone. The project’s training concept is adopted to be accessible through the Open Educational Resources (OER).The FEAL project aimed at developing a flexible training system based on case studies that will provide young farmers, young rural entrepreneurs and family farmers the skills and knowledge to implement sustainable farming activities within different European Agricultural Landscapes (EALs). Outputs are available in 7 languages: English, Slovak, German, Spanish, Italian, Slovenian and French, thus making the results accessible to around the 70% of European citizens speaking these languages as mother tongue (European Commission, June 2012).The FEAL consortium consists of eight partners' organisations from Belgium, Germany, Italy, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain. The variety of organisations guarantees a multidisciplinary approach reflecting in educational material; two institutions are public and provide education and research, three agencies focus on project management and provide advisory services for farmers, one is a local action group and one residing in Brussels is a unique federation of national associations from the EU28 representing the interests of the landowners, land and forest managers and rural entrepreneurs at the European political level.The project's conceptual research framework consists of a methodology to compare farming practices in different EALs considering landscape value. The project resulted into the development of a comprehensive and flexible e-learning training system. It is adapted to the learners' heterogeneous conditions showing sustainable and multifunctional farming practices improving the quality of EALs in a pan-European context. The project implemented several innovative elements mirroring in its intellectual outputs: O1: Summary report about the state of the art of the relation between sustainable / multifunctional farming practices and EALs; O2: Case studies. Online database represents best practices of farms situated in different EALs with specific regional and local features reflecting the variety of social and economic systems. Case studies implementing win-win-situations provide the opportunity for trainees to learn through real, successful experiences and, for the first time, an entrepreneurial exchange about the topic on regional, national and European levels; O3: FEAL complementary to OER includes training modules and interactive E-Atlas and both materials are linked with other outputs; O4: Pilot testing and development of the definitive training system – FEAL-EDUWEB and its adaptation to VALOR platform and Moodle. FEAL-EDUWEB contains educational material and online self-evaluation forms for knowledge testing.Farmers, rural development organisations, farmers associations, local action groups and representatives of policy makers were invited to multiplier events organized at the end of the project by the consortium partners. The aim was to raise awareness to stakeholders about the possibilities offered by sustainable farming activities, the win-win-situations within different EALs and to integrate the results of the FEAL project into wider national and European practices and programmes.
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