The Project

The European Union’s Erasmus+ programme is a funding scheme to support activities in the fields of Education, Training, Youth and Sport.

The Programme is made up of three so-called “Key Actions” and two additional actions.

The TakeOff Project is part of the key action 2: Cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices.

The European Commission is responsible for Erasmus+ policies and oversees the overall programme implementation. 

More Information

The major, long-term, challenges that the world faces are sustainable food production, climate change mitigation/adaptation and biodiversity loss. These are linked to the majority of the UN SDGs (Sustainable Development Goals). Agriculture is responsible for the production of approx. 20% of the GHG (Greenhouse Gas) emissions, it is considered as the main freshwater user (>70%) and is responsible for many environmental problems (e.g., water contamination, biodiversity loss, deforestation). Climate change threatens food production (e.g., less rain, extreme events, fire) as well as infrastructure (e.g., recent floods/megafires in developed and developing nations).

Farmers remain the real countryside managers and if targets for these ambitious, global and EU policies/strategies are to be met they have to be involved in their implementation. More often, the problem is that the farmers deal with policies and incomprehensive scientific terms and lack opportunities for VET. Additionally, many pilot projects have to be implemented for selecting practices that benefit the environment and/or mitigate climate change. Due to the lack of VET related to the agriculture/food production sector, the majority of farmers are often reluctant to participate in any kind of projects which are led by local authorities or Universities and offer their land to what they see as 'one more experiment'. A direct result is that very few are willing to embrace/adopt an environmentally friendly approach (env. stewardship) on their day to day routine. Inevitably this will not change as long as a) what is proposed does not provide real financial returns; b) the benefits of the proposed measures are not visible to the farmers themselves; c) the administrative effort/complexity for adopting these measures requires too much of their time (e.g. some CAP Agri/environmental measures).

The environmental challenges of our times are taking place at a large scale while our efforts for managing the countryside are piecemeal and lack coordination, particularly in areas where landholdings are really small and ownership fragmented. 

TAKEOFF aims to tackle the above problems by increasing farmers’ environmental education level, including VET/adult education, awareness-raising and training. Therefore, they will understand the implications of their farming practices and be enabled to modify them, by adopting more EEF solutions. In a way, only large scale measures may reverse the impacts of human actions on the planet and this can be achieved either by committing large areas and/or with many people committed to such a cause so that large scale synergies can be reached.

- Produce an e-learning course for Environmental Friendly Farming (EFF) - Activity 1

- Built an online tool for promoting EFF practices - Activity 2

- Produce a replicability e-package for education & training activities related to EFF - Activity 3

- Interact with the target groups and increase outputs uptake by implementing 2 multiplier events, in Cyprus and Italy - Activities 4,5

The TAKE OFF project will allow VET providers to build education and training activities related to EFF. The e-learning course (Activity 1) will be developed according to the farmers’ IT literacy and contain four modules (Biodiversity Strategy; Climate Change Mitigation/Adaptation; EcoSchemes/Farm to Fork; Financial opportunities and EFF). The material will seek to present in layman terms the key EU policies for the environment and climate change. In addition, an interactive online tool (Activity 2) will aim to support/train farmers in making informed decisions among plausible practices/approaches for EFF. Finally, a replicability e-package (Activity 3) will concentrate, in the form of a database, additional resources and material required for EFF, proposing appropriate curricula for various cases of VET (e.g., 1-hour introduction to EFF for low IT literacy farmers; a 1-day workshop for policymakers). The further uptake of TAKE OFF outputs will be promoted through two Multiplier events (Activities 4,5) conducted in Cyprus and Italy, respectively.