The SFARM project aims to create a new MSc programme in a specialized academic area and key regulatory/policy issue, namely “Sustainable Agriculture” that is as much absent from HEI graduate and postgraduate programmes in the region as it is needed. SFARM aims to address this absence and the needs of the region to have an MSc programme that will generate qualified personnel and experts that will work and reinforce the thriving regional agricultural industry and have a lasting impact in improving the environment in all partner countries. The qualifications acquired from the graduates of SFARM will be innovative and based on the sector’s manpower needs. The project is structured in such a way as to ensure that the developed curricula will be indeed innovative, tailor-made to specific needs and unprecedented for the region. Curriculum development will be carried out through the participatory method based on the needs of the participating countries. Novel environmental technologies and agricultural solutions, products of research in this area will be incorporated in the SFARM curricula. The new innovative curricula that will be developed will integrate the latest advancements of the “agri-tech” sector that can be immediately applied by agricultural workers in partner countries for sustainable agriculture.

It appears that a substantial amount of food waste may be due to marketing standards, yet there is very limited concrete evidence on how much, why and how to address it. There is a need to deepen our understanding and identify solutions to prevent and reduce food waste along with any trade-offs, by improving the business potential of suboptimal foods. ROSETTA sets out to deliver reliable evidence, produced through transdisciplinary research with the engagement of use case multi-actors, that a) estimates food waste generated by the use of marketing standards along the whole value chain, b) co-defines and validates sustainable solutions for the valorisation of that waste, and c) assesses trade-offs. The current framework of marketing standards of food commodities at international, EU, national and private level, will be analysed, and the reasons for their establishment will be assessed. An operational plan will be developed to deploy pilot experiments in five (5) use cases across EU countries, led by private marketing standards owners or networks/clusters in the value chain, representing four (4) main food commodities, namely fruit & vegetables, cereals, dairy and meat. A comparative analysis of data collected from both lab and field research, combined with LCSA study, will validate and optimise use-case selected solutions, which are expected to reduce food waste due to marketing standards by 60% – 80% through alternative market access for suboptimal foods, including processing and other strategies as well as changes in social practices. The validated and optimised solutions will provide insights for knowledge transfer and identify opportunities for social learning. Insights will be used to develop replication guidelines and policy recommendations, addressed to food businesses, marketing standards owners, policy makers and regulators, to help revise or design marketing standards and support future policy development, in order to prevent and reduce food waste.

BEATLES aspires to change the way agri-food systems currently operate and accelerate the systemic and systematic behavioural shift to climate-smart agriculture and smart farming technologies fully aligned with the ambitions of the Farm to Fork and Biodiversity Strategies, and the new CAP at regional and EU levels. By adopting a food systems approach, the agri-food value chain is viewed as a system of interlinked components where interactions lead to systemic innovations. Through targeted selection of agri-food value chains across the EU and by engaging multiple stakeholders in the co-creation of systemic innovations, in the context of appropriate behavioural and experimental settings, the project will provide an integrative inventory of behavioural insights about the full range of “lock-ins” and levers that hinder or motivate behavioural change, including individual, systemic and policy factors. Five different food systems representing the major crop and livestock farming systems in Europe (cereals, dairy, stone fruits, livestock, vegetables) in various EU regions (Western, Eastern, Southern and Northern Europe), will be studied to account for the diversity in agri-food systems and conditions in the EU. The behavioural insights are used to develop transformative pathways, via business strategies and policy recommendations, to encourage transition to fair, healthy and environmentally-friendly food systems. BEATLES will provide a set of business strategies establishing roadmaps for a fair shift towards climate-smart agriculture, based on environmental, social and economic sustainability assessments. Moreover, a series of policy recommendations and tools will be developed to foster behaviourally informed policy design and implementation. The active participation of multiple value chain actors, at various levels of society (public, political, professional), in the co-creation activities all along the project’s lifespan will establish a mutual understanding of the value

RADIANT implements a suite of strategic and fully inclusive multi-actor engagement methods to co-develop solutions and tools to ensure that agrobiodiversity in the form of underutilised crops (UCs) is realised via Dynamic Value Chains (DVCs). RADIANT characterises DVCs as ’a system-state where open information sharing among all value-chain actors allows resilient adaptation to disruptions and sustainable economic development’. RADIANT adopts a ‘Theory of Change’ approach, where desired system-level states, such as crop diversification, environmental and agrobiodiversity preservation, and fair economic development are monitored and mapped to identify and implement the necessary transformation avenues. RADIANT’s 28 multi-actor consortium is composed of highly skilled value chain actors, researchers, and end-users. The scientific excellence of the work plan will release the value of UCs and enable a transformation towards sustainable DVCs that foster agrobiodiversity in educational, financial, technological settings and effectively provisions UCs to farmers’ fields and consumers’ tables. This will be achieved via eight complementary work packages to: identify, collect, and multiply the genetic resources of core UCs for breeding and farming; widen UC recognition by capturing their ecosystem services; enhance their processing by co-creating novel food and non-food products; invite stakeholders and aspiring participatory farmers into a capacity-building, mentoring-network to trial, test, and embed UCs in sustainable DVCs; co-creating Apps and ‘UC-Transition Diaries’ to record their transformation; and engage stakeholders to co-design policy instruments, and deliver a decision support tool to create sustainable avenues for DVCs. In sum, the RADIANT approach will empower value chain and policy actors to reach out to 1 million farmers and more than 60 million potential consumers to promote the uptake of UCs in farming, processing, manufacturing, and retailing practices.

The DISARM thematic network (Disseminating Innovative Solutions for Antibiotic Resistance Management) is focused on disseminating best practices from innovative farms and research on how to reduce antibiotic resistance in livestock farming. Antibiotic resistance management is not only important to farming, it can also lead to reduced effectiveness of antibiotics in treating humans. Tackling antibiotic resistance is a major strategic challenge for European livestock farmers, an industry worth over 145billion euros. Evidence shows that rates of antibiotic use and resistance vary greatly from farm to farm and, that with the adoption of appropriate innovative on farm management practices that both the use of antibiotics and the development of resistance can be reduced. Disseminating these effective management practices is at the heart of the DISARM project, which will work with farmers, vets, advisors, industry and researchers to identify and disseminate widely the most cost effective and beneficial strategies. This will be delivered by: * Developing a 600 member multi-actor Community of Practice to share, debate and disseminate the most promising strategies to reduce antibiotic resistance in livestock farming; * Producing 10 best practice guides, supported by 100 best practice abstracts and 100 short videos to explain how farms have successfully adopted innovative practices to reduce antibiotic resistance; * Working with 40 farms (in 8 countries) to develop multi-actor farm health plans with at least 30 of these being used as case studies to show other farms how working with their vet, feed or equipment suppliers and advisory services can help them adopt a set of best practices suited to their farm; * Run 80 events to disseminate best practices, hosted by farmers or research centres or hosted by DISARM beneficiaries but resulting from an intensive collaboration between a DISARM beneficiary and stakeholders from the livestock industry and to speak at 60 further industry events; * Deliver 3 annual reports on the remaining challenges with antibiotic resistance which research or policy developments need to address.