A couple of relatively new Horizon 2020 projects are now up and running and paving the way for more resilient, efficient and sustainable agriculture in Europe. As its name suggests, the MIXED project is exploring different types of mixed agricultural systems, such as agroforestry, in the belief that these approaches offer many benefits. Meanwhile, AGROMIX is bringing together researchers, farmers and policymakers to explore the transition towards resilient farming, efficient land use, and sustainable agricultural value chains in Europe.
MIXED is being led by Denmark’s Aarhus University, together with the International Centre for Research in Organic Food Systems (ICROFS), and brings together networks of both organic and conventional farmers and research institutions from 10 countries. They will focus on innovative solutions in mixed farming and agroforestry.
“In former times, farms were more diverse and had, for example, both crop production and livestock production in the same farm,” coordinator Tommy Dalgaard, from Aarhus University, tells the project’s website. “To a large extent we have specialized in order to be competitive, but the world is no longer as simple as that. We are more and more dependent on collaboration across systems and on being resilient to change. In addition, a lot of good things can be achieved from agricultural production carried out in greater harmony with nature.”
The project is built around networking and learning. “The backbone of the project is a network of farmers who have a lot of knowledge that others can benefit from,” Tommy tells the website. “A farmer in Denmark may work in one way, while a farmer in France does it differently, and maybe the two can learn something from each other. There are, for example, networks in the project within agroforestry, where you have trees together with crops or livestock, where the different partners can share experiences and perhaps create new and more adaptable and sustainable cultivation systems.”
AGROMIX will be adopting “participatory research to drive the transition towards resilient and efficient land use in Europe”. It brings together 28 partners from 14 countries and will utilise 12 agroforestry and mixed farming pilot sites across Europe to unlock the synergies and environmental services these alternative farming systems can provide.
Project coordinator Sara Burbi, from Coventry University’s Centre for Agroecology, Water and Resilience in the UK, told the online kick-off meeting: “We know about the impact of some land uses and that we need new options. Mixed farming and agroforestry can help building climate resilient farming systems. But we don’t know if these new options are economically viable and the environmental, socio-economic and policy contexts that would make them viable. We need to join the dots and fill the gaps. AGROMIX project aims to fill such gaps in our knowledge about the synergies at play within these farming systems and reduce uncertainty around how we can unlock their full potential in a participatory way that support our communities.”
The project says its “methodology will integrate evidence-based contributions from different disciplines (from biosciences to social sciences) with an innovative co-design approach that considers multiple stakeholders.” This methodology will be developed and tested at 12 pilot sites across Europe, many of them managed by ENDURE partners, to increase understanding and acceptance among the relevant actors across agricultural supply chains.
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