Main goal of Newbie
The main goal of the NEWBIE network is to increase innovation, entrepreneurship, and resilience in the European farming sector by enabling new entrants to successfully establish sustainable farm businesses in Europe.
Newbie challenges
New entrants face quite a number of barriers in developing new sustainable farming businesses. Newbie wants to help new entrants to overcome these barriers. Examples of these challenges (barriers) are:
- Access to land: rising land prices and leasing rates make it hard to start new businesses, specifically in these region new entrants will experience competition with existing farmers expanding their farms for economy of scale
- Access to capital: often land is needed for securing the loan
- Access to information: newcomers may have problems getting access to the traditional agricultural information system
- Access to markets: new entrants maybe unaware or enable to break into established marketing channels. It can be difficult to get integrated into established supply chains
Newbie activities
- Describe the state of the art of new entrant business and entry models
- Collect examples of best-practices throughout Europe
- Develop new entrant support networks which will identify, further develop and promote innovative business models and entry models for new entrants. Networks will consist of at least 50 members per country.
- Develop a practical set of tools (toolkit) with recommendations and guidelines targeted at specific stakeholder groups.
Expected Outputs
- Increased user acceptance of ‘new entry’ models (i.e. share farming, joint ventures and farming incubators)
- An inventory of business models and entry models currently succeeding in enabling new entrants.
- Establishment of regional/national new entrant support networks: ~50 members in each consortium member’s country
- 20 bilateral exchange visits and two European conferences offering seminars, field visits and networking between advisors, new entrants, researchers and policy makers
- A set of new entrant ambassadors: an International Advisory Board, as well as regional advisory groups and ambassadors
- A library of ‘visual storytelling’ videos of the successful innovative new entrant business models promotion of selected models
- A substantive set of pedagogical materials for educators and advisors relating to new entrant business models and entry models
- Targeted recommendations with associated toolkits for new entrants and farming groups and for policy on how to stimulate or facilitate new entrants on different levels.
