Farmers’ Training Evidence Using Structural Instruments, a Starting Point to Improve Agricultural Practices with Focus on Romanian Farmers

Abstract

Reviews of the recent literature, emphasize the importance of farmers training and the topic of knowledge transfer from the final customers to the farmers is becoming more and more fashionable. Training farmers and farm managers supports not only an important step to better agricultural practices and products, but also the diversification into non-agricultural activities, encouraging the rural truism sector or developing new skills and competences among the involved actors. Having a clear evidence on how the structural instruments of the 2007-2013 rural development framework helped both demanders and suppliers of specialized training, offers more answers to the problem of professionalizing the agricultural sector, increases the interest in qualitative results and make them a competitive advantage. Our work wants to provide an overview of how executive institutions created the frame of accessing training by assigning public expenditures and resources from European Agricultural Fund for Rural Development and how farmers and farm managers proved their willing and interest in achieving those results. The conclusions revealed the anticipated hypothesis, meaning that the member states with an emerging economy level started the implementation of the training measures in a hesitating manner and did not have a coherent behavior in absorbing the existing funds, while other states registered the highest values in indicators like number of participants, number of applications for advisory services, number of economic actors in trainings or public expenditures assignment, and the results where indeed in the same direction.