AGRIACADEMY - A Distance Education Module to Increase the Level of Agricultural Knowledge of Young People and Their Willingness to Work in the Agricultural Sector

Agriculture and agricultural sectors will gain more importance than ever because of population growth and food shortages that will be experienced in the next 50 years. The prevalent use of sensor systems and intelligent production mechanisms developed with Industry 4.0 technologies has already given way to the era of Agriculture 4.0. However, technology adoption process in the agricultural sector is slower than other sectors. At this point, the issues of how and at what level farmers will adopt smart farming practices are gaining importance, too. Therefore, for the future of agricultural sector, a workforce that is able to adopt technological developments quickly and to use cutting-edge digital production systems needs to be created. In other words, young people should be educated for this purpose. However, young people are neither interested in agriculture nor working in agricultural sector. The lack of such a young workforce and the academic research, carried out by Mustafa Özsarı in Konya Food and Agriculture University (KFAU) in 2018 with 306 students of 40 different universities in Turkey, is the starting point of this project. This research showed that young people are not motivated sufficiently to work in the agricultural sector. However, the rate of willingness to work in agricultural sector is 80.56% among the students whose father or mother works in the agricultural sector. Moreover, the rate of willingness to work in agricultural sector is 62.9% among the students who started the primary education in a village. In addition to those statistics, willingness to work in agricultural sector is higher among those who participated in any agricultural events or in any stage of agricultural production process. At the end of this research, it is seen that young people who have some knowledge about agriculture or who have little acquaintance with agriculture are more likely to work in agriculture sector than those who have no knowledge about agriculture.
Depending on this fact, as Konya Food and Agriculture University, we are planning to develop a free (and dual language – English & Turkish) Learning Management System to educate both young people who are willing to train themselves in agricultural sector and the farmers who did not have any chance for schooling in their youth. By doing so, we aim to develop a new approach to empower agricultural sector in Turkey. By educating young people on agricultural sector, we aim to increase the young people’s involvement and their employment in agricultural sector. As a result, we expect that average age of an agricultural worker will be lowered, average education level of an agricultural worker will increase and the number of new initiatives in agricultural sector will expand. As a result of these, the agricultural productivity will increase in the long term. Moreover, smart agriculture technologies will be efficiently used in agriculture by the educated-young people who involved agricultural sector. By educating the farmers and the ones who work in agricultural sector, we aim to increase their knowledge about soil, plant
production, plant protection, organic agriculture, good agricultural practices, farm management, animal husbandry, animal health, plant and animal diseases and plant and animal characteristics. As a result, we expect a decrease