What Skills Do Agricultural Professionals Need in the Transition towards a Sustainable Agriculture? A Qualitative Literature Review

Laura Brandt Sørensen,Stine Rosenlund Hansen,Lisa Blix Germundsson,Claudia Rojas,Niels Heine Kristensen

doi:10.3390/su132413556

Laura Brandt Sørensen, Stine Rosenlund Hansen + Show 3 more

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https://doi.org/10.3390/su132413556

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Abstract

Agriculture is facing mounting challenges across the globe and must move towards more sustainable practices to combat climate change and meet changed production requirements. Education has been acknowledged as highly important in a sustainable transition, but there is no clear agreement about what skills are needed for professionals in the agricultural system. The purpose of this paper is to identify and analyse skills needed for professionals in the agricultural system to engage in the transition towards sustainable agriculture and elaborate on the implications of this for a transition towards sustainable agriculture. The review is based on a qualitative semi-systematic literature review of 20 peer-reviewed articles concerned with sustainability, skills, and agriculture. Five categories of skills were identified and analysed, including systems perspective, lifelong learning, knowledge integration, building and maintaining networks and learning communities, and technical and subject-specific knowledge and technology. As the identified categories of skills have emerged from different contextual settings and a diverse group of actors, these five categories encourage a broad and inclusive understanding of skills that can be translated into different contextual settings, scales, and professions within the agricultural system. The article concludes that professionals engaged in the transition towards sustainable agriculture need skills that encourage a perspective that moves beyond generic discipline-based skills and instead builds on heterogeneity, inclusion, and use of different actors’ knowledge, practices, and experiences, and the ability to respond and be proactive in a constantly changing world.

Highlights

Introduction iationsWhat skills are needed for professionals in the agricultural system to engage in sustainable agriculture, and how are these skills represented in the scientific literature today?Agriculture and food production are facing mounting challenges across the globe and must move towards more sustainable practices to combat climate change, environmental degradation, hunger and malnutrition, food safety and security, and a still-growing population [1–3]
It became clear that the skills emphasised in the scientific literature selected for this review are more about directing the perspective in order to succeed in making a transition towards sustainable agriculture, rather than training professionals in specific skills
This literature review was designed to identify and analyse skills needed for professionals in the agricultural system to move towards, and navigate within, sustainable agricultural practices

Summary

Introduction

Introduction iationsWhat skills are needed for professionals in the agricultural system to engage in sustainable agriculture, and how are these skills represented in the scientific literature today?Agriculture and food production are facing mounting challenges across the globe and must move towards more sustainable practices to combat climate change, environmental degradation, hunger and malnutrition, food safety and security, and a still-growing population [1–3]. Sustainable agriculture and our future food production play an important role and need to be perceived within a broad and integrated perspective that accommodates the three pillars; the environmental, economic, and social dimension, while at the same time keeping within a safe operating space of the planetary boundaries [1]. This insight has resulted in various policy documents and strategies in the past decade, e.g., the EU. Commission’s 2020 Target, FAO, and the United Nations 17’s sustainable developments.

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