Six years ago the ADER programme and land-based colleges’ wished to help farmers with agricultural diversification advice and developed short courses to improve their business skills. As ADER has remained fiercely customer-focussed the offering has now developed into one where any rurally-located business can have free, impartial business guidance confidentially in their workplace and also be invited to awareness raising events and smaller focused groups where topics are covered in more detail.
With over 4,000 one to one clients and nearly twice that number of group attendees ADER has reached a significant proportion of the rural population in the East of England.
However it is not so much the quantity but the quality of the guidance that the ADER team are justifiably proud of. Across the region this intermediary role has allowed clients to better understand how to take their business plans forward, and thus helped to make all other agencies and organisations better utilised.
Since a lot of the early stages of business development is about gaining confidence in new areas of activity the ADER county officer role is very much one of mentoring their clients, working with them not for them, assisting them to explore the potential. New skills are then soon needed, and acquiring new transferable business skills benefits not only the new enterprise but also the core business.
Regionally ADER seeks to work with both new and established partners to deliver topical events that might otherwise not happen. This non-competitive stance is greatly appreciated by the fifty organisations we regularly run events in tandem with, and also means that scarce financial resources are better utilised.
Each of the ADER team is SFEDI accredited as a rural business adviser. They have years of experience drawn from the worlds of farming and education and have attended courses on mentoring and risk awareness. They are regularly appraised in order to build up and balance each of their portfolios of knowledge and expertise.
ADER works on a number of local, regional and national initiatives. For instance in Hertfordshire we have just helped launch the Fuelsmiles Business Plan that aims to gather twenty farmers together to share ownership of a biofuels plant, across the region we have helped DEFRA develop the Whole Farm Approach that should significantly alter the regulatory burden on farmers, and nationally we are working with the pig industry on launching a Continuous Professional Development (CPD) programme in the New Year.
