An army of young people looks at agriculture
The national general meeting of AGIA, the association of young agricultural entrepreneurs, was held at EIMA.More than 50 thousand Italian farms run by young people.The school/work alternation is fundamental for bringing new generations closer to agriculture. The portrait of the italian farmer 4.0, by a research conducted by Nomisma/L'Informatore Agrario
In the last four years, the farms managed by young farmers have increased by 12%, reaching the current number of over 50 thousand.
These farms are efficient from an economic point of view, more profitable than similar European companies (73 thousand euros is the average turnover of Italian youth farms, compared to 45 thousand of similar farms in the EU area). The data - released during the general meeting of the young agricultural entrepreneurs association AGIA (CIA), held last November 7 at EIMA in Bologna - reveals an interesting phenomenon, which can be driven further thanks to the school/work alternation.
An agricultural business - it was said during the general meeting, which was opened by the speeches of FederUnacoma’s president Alessandro Malavolti and AGIA’s president Fabio Girometta - needs an integrated system that starts from school and reaches the fields. Before an audience of over a thousand young farmers and students who aspire to work as entrepreneurs and technicians in agriculture, the speakers highlighted how, even with inevitable adjustments, the school/work alternation (which the new budget law will transform into “Pathways for cross-functional skills and for orientation”) constitutes a valuable tool to bring students in direct contact with the productive world. More than 130 thousand companies have joined alternation projects in the 2016-2017 school year.
The “millennials” dominate the Italian agriculture 4.0 scene
Worldwide, digital systems for agriculture are worth 3.5 billion, a figure that is significantly lower in Europe (700 million) and in Italy (100 million), where the “digitized” agricultural surface area represents only 1% of the total. And yet a group of new entrepreneurs are advancing, seeing in agriculture 4.0 the response to climate change and to population growth: belonging to the millennial generation, they are capable of revolutionizing this sector, especially in the northern regions of the country, to reduce the gap that still separates Italy from Northern Europe.
These new ranks of entrepreneurs is made up of young people, mostly men, with a degree or diploma in their pockets, almost always at the head of large farms with agricultural land exceeding 50 hectares.
The portrait of the Italian farmer 4.0 was outlined by a research conducted by Nomisma and promoted by the L’Informatore Agrario in collaboration with FederUnacoma, presented at the conference “Agricoltura 4.0. The approach of Italian agricultural companies”, as part of EIMA. The survey involved about a thousand farmers, through a questionnaire, starting from a national scenario that includes 1.1 million farms, 60% of which are small, and which must also deal with the digital divide: in rural areas no more than 77% of the population has access to the Internet.
These unfavourable conditions, however, do not affect the propensity for innovation, considered fundamental for the survival of the company by 72% of respondents. The vast majority of the entrepreneurs involved in the research own the tractors they use, purchased in three quarters of cases with their own capital. 18% of farmers use driver-assisted or semi-automatic tractors. Lastly, if they had 10 thousand euros to invest, 22% of them would use the funds to increase the technological fleet of their farm.
