Emma Terander is Head of Labour Market at Gröna arbetsgivare, the Swedish employers’ organisation for the green industries, where she currently works as the executive responsible for labour-market issues and also as a sector contact for Swedish veterinary care. Her remit places her at the centre of employment conditions, migration and labour-supply questions, employer advocacy, and the broader workforce agenda in sectors that are structurally dependent on seasonal, specialist, and geographically dispersed labour. Emma Terander has appeared in agricultural social-dialogue settings for more than a decade, and her work in Swedish policy discussions on rural integration shows a career anchored in labour-market representation.
Billy Goodburn is Head of Learning & Development at the Irish Co-operative Organisation Society, where he has overall responsibility for learning and development, with a particular mandate for talent development and the wider human-capital agenda across Ireland’s co-operative and agri-food ecosystem. That role makes him more than an internal training manager. He is working on strategic capability-building for the sector, aligning programmes with the National Skills Strategy, raising professional standards, and representing industry interests across educational, regulatory, funding, and social-partner settings. He is therefore positioned as a specialist in workforce capability, executive development, and future-skills design for co-operative enterprise. Billy has more than twenty years of industry experience and has chaired groups while representing the sector to educators, regulators, ministerial offices, trade associations, and standards bodies. Billy has managed and participated in several European initiatives focused on future skills and workplace competencies in agri-food. Billy is a certified professional behavioural, motivators and competencies analyst.
Stéphane Jézéquel is Scientific Director at ARVALIS, France’s applied-research institute for arable crops, where he defines and promotes the institute’s scientific strategy, leads operational foresight, supports programme governance, chairs the Scientific Council, and oversees internal research calls. He has held the position since January 2021. Stéphane joined the Institut technique des céréales et des fourrages in 1990 as a regional engineer in Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur, developing more than three decades of scientific and field experience. His work has been particularly associated with durum-wheat production, the management of the Gréoux experimental station, and the creation of regional, national, and international research partnerships. An agronomic engineer graduate of the École nationale supérieure agronomique de Toulouse, Stéphane has developed recognised expertise in cropping systems, drought and heat stress, climate adaptation, agroecological transition, biodiversity, irrigation, and sustainable agricultural productivity. His career reflects a consistent focus on converting collaborative applied research into practical solutions that reconcile crop quality, farm profitability, market requirements, and environmental performance.
Afonso Cavaleiro de Ferreira Bulhão Martins is an agribusiness executive and agricultural-sector representative. He is the Manager of CFBM Agricultura and also serves as a board member of CAP – Confederação dos Agricultores de Portugal. In addition, he is a voting member of the Associação de Beneficiários do Lucefecit. His professional experience combines the practical management of agricultural activities with representation within Portugal’s organised farming sector. Through these roles, he contributes to strategic decision-making, sectoral cooperation and the continued development of agricultural organisations. Afonso has a particular interest in improving organisational management and modernising management practices. His experience is nevertheless rooted primarily in agricultural organisations that retain relatively traditional structures, giving him first-hand insight into the challenges and opportunities involved in introducing more modern approaches while preserving established agricultural practices.
Matei Titianu is the President of LAPAR, the League of Associations of Agricultural Producers in Romania. He combines institutional representation with active commercial farming in Brăila County, where Romanian business and farming press describe him as part of the family-run Agrorusava enterprise. With his background in agronomy, he has emerged as one of the more visible younger Romanian arable leaders, arguing for greater capital access, better risk management, improved digitalisation, and production resilience. Romanian coverage reports that he graduated with a Bachelors in both Agriculture and History, followed by two Master’s degrees in Agribusiness and he is currently pursuing a PhD. Matei has developed deep technical emphasis in seed production, maize and sunflower hybridisation, and agronomic optimisation suggests a profile shaped equally by management discipline and cropping expertise.
Francie Gorman is the 17th President of the Irish Farmers’ Association and was elected in October 2024 as a Vice President of Copa. He took office as IFA President in January 2024 for a four-year term, bringing to this role both practical livestock experience and years of experience inside Ireland’s most influential farm organisation. He is a beef and sheep farmer from Ballinakill, County Laois, and his day-to-day leadership remit now spans national farm lobbying, Irish and European CAP advocacy, high-level institutional representation, and board-level involvement in sector bodies. Alongside his role as President of the IFA, he is also a director of Bord Bia, the Irish food promotion authority, underscoring his position inside Ireland’s agrifood governance hierarchy. Before winning the presidency, he served as IFA South Leinster Regional Chair, chaired Laois IFA, and represented Laois IFA on the National Farm Business Committee.
Verena Scherfranz serves in the Brussels office of Landwirtschaftskammer Österreich, the Austrian Chamber of Agriculture, as interest representative of Austrian farmers and foresters. In this capacity, she operates at the junction of policy monitoring, institutional advocacy, stakeholder liaison, and strategic interpretation of legislative developments in agriculture, forestry, nature, climate, and the environment. Before joining the Austrian Chamber of Agriculture, she carried out multi-national research in the field of agricultural economics and policymaking at BOKU University (Vienna) and, before that, was an adviser on agricultural and environmental policy at the Ecosocial Forum (Ökosoziales Forum Österreich & Europa). Verena holds a Master’s degree in Agri-food Economics, and a doctorate in social and economic sciences.
Max, born on 14 March 1966, grew up on his family farm, which he took over in 1986. Stor-Tötar Gård is a historic farm combining arable farming and forestry in southwestern Finland and has been in the family for approximately 400 years. This continuity will hopefully continue into the next generation, as Max is raising three sons together with his Spanish wife, Marta. Before assuming full responsibility for running the farm, and after earning a degree in Agricultural Economics, Max worked as a grain trader for the Finnish Grain Board. He subsequently worked in the agricultural machinery sector from 2003 to 2008, a role that took him around the world, from the Americas to China. For the past 18 years, he has worked at the Central Union of Agricultural Producers and Forest Owners (MTK) as Senior Advisor for cereals, oilseeds and protein crops. From 2013 to 2019, Max served as Chairman of the Cereals Working Group of Copa-Cogeca in Brussels. He is a member of the EU Arable Crops Market Observatory and served as Chairman of the Civil Dialogue Group on Arable Crops from 2018 to 2020. Since 2020, he has been the owner of Farm-XPort Ltd, a grain-trading company specialising in special consignments. He is also a co-founder and board member of GrainSense Ltd, developer of a portable analyser for grain protein content and quality. Max served as Chairman of VYR, the Finnish Grain Committee, from 2018 to 2021. Since 2020, he has chaired the Agri-Food Chain Round Table on plant protection products (PPPs). Since 2023, he has been Chairman of the Copa-Cogeca Phytosanitary Working Group and Vice-Chairman of the Seeds Working Group. He is also a member of the EU Fertiliser Market Observatory and, from 2026, a member of the EFSA Management Board. He also serves on advisory boards for numerous projects at both Finnish national and EU level.
Pierluigi Londero is Head of Data Governance at the Directorate-General for Agriculture and Rural Development of the European Commission. An economist by training, over the last thirty years Pierluigi has contributed to several reforms of the Common Agricultural Policy and to bilateral and multilateral trade negotiations. Over the last four years, he has led the unit responsible for data and AI governance, data integration and the digitalisation of the EU agricultural sector.
Per Arfvidsson is Executive Vice President and Chef Technological Officer of the Lantmännen Group, one of Northern Europe’s leading farmer-owned cooperatives spanning agriculture, food, machinery, and bioenergy. Sitting on Group Management and holding board roles at Agronod, Sweden Food Arena and Tillväxtbolaget, Per oversees group-wide technology, operational architecture, strategic business development, and digital innovation from field to table. An engineer by training with a background spanning industrial management, logistics, and R&D, he leads Lantmännen’s strategic adoption of cutting-edge technologies, including artificial intelligence, smart data systems, and automated operations, to drive resilience, competitiveness, and sustainability across the entire agri-food value chain.
“© Photo: IP with Jan Pröbsting-Adelowo’s companyr”
Jan Pröbsting-Adelowo is Managing Director of Raiffeisen-NetWorld GmbH, the central digital-services and technology platform for Germany’s Raiffeisen co-operative network. Following the 2025 fusion of Raiffeisen-NetWorld and Land24, he led the operational consolidation of the two entities into a single market-leading organisation, overseeing core digital platforms including akoro, Ackerprofi, raiffeisen.com, and tec24. Combining corporate strategy with product-level innovation, Jan focuses on agri-channel transformation, e-commerce, software integration, and data-enabled farm management. He actively drives the integration of artificial intelligence (AI) and automated decision-support tools into agricultural software, focusing on practical AI applications for crop documentation, smart process optimization, and future-ready cooperative digital enterprise.
Visits organised by LRF
* The visits cost 50 € per person and will be included in the registration fee.
North:
Estimated arrival at Arlanda Airport at 3:45 p.m. and at the Congress Hotel at 4:30 p.m.
West:
Estimated arrival at Arlanda Airport at 3:45 p.m. and at the Congress Hotel at 4:30 p.m.
South:
Estimated arrival at the Congress Hotel at 4:45 p.m. Please observe that this tour does not stop at Arlanda Airport.
