12th National Rural Network Meeting

Last week, the Scottish Rural Network (SRN) attended the 12^th National Rural Network (NRN) meeting in Tallinn, Estonia. We event took place over two days, and the agenda had a strong focus on the development of renewable energy, bioeconomy and circular economy practices. On day one, the NRNs spent the day in a number of travelling workshops surrounding these three themes. We attended the ‘Renewable Energy’ workshop, which included a project visit and a led discussion with other NRNs on the topic.

We first visited a family-owned strawberry farm which needed to develop its own way of producing electricity to become economically sustainable and to expand its activities. The family invested in a solar power park, giving them extra revenue from selling power to the national grid. The lower-cost associated with solar power also gave their products a market advantage, and they have also set aside a 1000m² area alongside the solar panels to encourage businesses to set up there and take advantage of the available power.

The Laastu farm used funding from the European Agricultural Fund for Rural Development (EAFRD) to construct the solar panels, with an initial start-up cost of €170,000. Now that the project has been up and running since July 2016, they have also been able to offer consulting services to others planning similar projects.

We followed up our project visit with a visit to the Tammiku Contemporary Arts centre, where we saw a presentation from Ms. Beata Allen of the Swedish NRN on their ‘Fossilfritt’ campaign.  We then participated in a round table discussion on what the various NRNs were doing to support renewable energy schemes in their area, and a key topic of conversation was how to make renewable energy profitable on a small-scale? We agreed that the easiest way to encourage uptake of these practices is when there is a financial incentive to do so.

On the second day we attended the Kultuurikatel Conference Centre, which is a renovated electrical power station which ran from 1912-1979 and still retains many of its original features. We spent the day exploring the potential involvement of NRNs in the newly launched thematic work on ‘Mainstreaming the Bioeconomy’ by the European Network for Rural Development (ENRD), as well as ways of exchanging knowledge and good practice around the topic.

‘Mainstreaming the Bioeconomy’ is the current sub-theme of the broader work undertaken by the ENRD on ‘Greening the Rural Economy’. A Thematic Group will be working on this topic with the overall objective of encouraging the development of sustainable bioeconomy in rural areas in order to promote economic growth and employment whilst preserving eco-systems.

For more information you can visit the ENRD website.