DiverIMPACTS has produced its fifth newsletter, providing readers with the opportunity to catch up with a busy six months for the project, which is striving “to achieve the full diversification potential of cropping systems for improved productivity, delivery of ecosystem services and resource-efficient and sustainable value chains”.
Highlights of the past six months have included staging September’s first European Conference on Crop Diversification in Budapest, Hungary. The event “explored the role of crop diversification and strategies towards sustainable agri-food systems” and was organised by DiverIMPACTS in collaboration with other projects in the Crop Diversification Cluster (Diverfarming, DIVERSify, ReMIX, LegValue and TRUE). The newsletter reports that the book of abstracts from the event is now available, containing all the presentations as well as the workshop results.
The newsletter also includes details of the qualitative survey work on key factors (drivers and lock-ins) for crop diversification which has been conducted. Researchers have identified “the lack of knowledge and references as main barriers to crop diversification at the farm level and logistics based on economies of scale and large volumes at the value chain level.”
They add: “Our analyses show that exchange of knowledge between farmers, researchers and advisors can benefit the expansion of crop diversification. This can take various forms such as individual exchanges, farmer groups or dissemination of information by researchers through publications, conferences and field days. Profitability is also an important concern at the farm and value chains levels, whether it is linked to input costs, investment or price of products.
“Authorities can act by implementing supportive policies and value chain players must support farmers by paying adequate prices and providing resources while also meeting consumer demand. Finally, researchers and advisors need to keep working on removing technical barriers and collaborating with farmers and value chain players to share knowledge in order to achieve crop diversification.”
The newsletter also provides access to updates on the project’s case studies and field days. The former include crop diversification in semi-arid environments. One promising approach to this is the introduction of hemp cultivation in wheat-based farming systems in Sicily. The newsletter reports that while various agronomic issues are still being investigated, valuable business opportunities for Sicilian hemp-based food products have been identified. Field days reported in the newsletter include strip cropping in Italy and soil life in Germany.
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