Leveraging the potential of co-operative agri-advisory services in the transition to sustainable and landscape-based agriculture

Agricultural Advisory Services (AAS) have always had a central role to play at each juncture in agricultural development and innovation. A transition to sustainable agriculture requires an agri-advisory response which draws on the agency and knowledge of the farmer(s), is more tailored to a particular local context and encourages the sharing of knowledge and experimentation across farms in a landscape. Co-operatives, as collaborative, farmer-owned and embedded entities, would seem to be well placed to play a greater role in this evolving agri-advisory space. However, there would seem to be little recognition of the current or potential role of co-operatives in agri-advice either in academic literature or policy discourse. This paper explores the current agri-advisory offering of Irish dairy co-operatives and their potential to offer an enhanced collaborative and landscape-based offering. It concludes that many of the elements are in place for such an approach but there is a greater need to leverage this potential, appreciate the benefits and enable a more farmer-centred and tailored agri-advisory orientation in co-operatives.