Our conference's history starts in May 1995 when Latvia University of Agriculture (now - Latvia University of Life Sciences and Technologies) for the first time organised a conference for PhD students and doctoral candidates from Latvia. During the first years conference changed name every year. In 2000, welcoming participants from other countries, the conference called ‘Science – Latvia – Europe’ became international.

Since 2001 the conference name has become traditional, namely- ‘RESEARCH FOR RURAL DEVELOPMENT’.

From the moment the conference became international, it was attended by representatives of various countries. Apart from Latvian participants, the next largest number of participants was from Lithuania. But there were also participants from other countries, such as Azerbaijan, Belarus, Belgium, Cameroon, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Finland, Greece, Hungary, Kazakhstan, India, Indonesia, Iran, Mexico, Nepal, Netherlands, Nigeria, Norway, Poland, Romania, Russia, Spain, Slovakia, South Africa, Sweden, Tajikistan, Thailand, Turkey, Ukraine.

During 28 years of the conference's existence, 2272 presentations were presented and 1595 publications were published in the proceedings. Since 2005 conference proceedings were indexed in Scopus and since 2009 in Web of Science ™ databases. At the moment 1120 publications from conference proceedings are indexed in Scopus and 843 in Web of Science databases.

Conference proceedings are indexed in the following databases: AGRIS, CABI databases CAB Abstracts, Crossref (2017 - 2022), EBSCO (2010 - 2022), Scopus (2005, 2006, 2009 - 2022), Web of Science ™, Clarivate Analytics (former Thomson Reuters) (since 2009), Primo Central (ExLibris).

Moving with the times conference website has changed its appearance to improve the registration process and get a more modern look. With these changes, the Conference website still provides a wide range of useful guidance regarding the Conference, including many practical details and important information about the rules of the publications and information about travelling to Jelgava.