With his two hats, as small-scaled olive farmer and olive oil producer and NOVATERRA consortium member, Athanasios Demeslis offers valuable insights about the difficulties and obstacles faced by end users when they implement innovative practices and tools.
For small-scale farmers such as Athanasios, the main challenges are the high cost of adopting new technologies and the segmentation of olive oil production. Small-scaled farmers don’t have much human and financial resources to deploy these various technologies that might be related to innovation. And to be profitable, innovation should be implemented in large scale farming.
He concludes with a crucial message: “It is very important for policymakers to promote adoption of innovation for small farmers. They need to find a way to reward innovative practices and behaviours.”