Rural BioReFarmeries brings together farmers, industries and other partners across Europe, to demonstrate a farmer-centred bioeconomy model aimed at maximizing the potential of Europe’s vast grasslands. The project will demonstrate a novel small-scale, decentralized, rural green biorefinery value chain, which addresses the limitations of existing green biorefineries. This small-scale decentralized model places farmers at the centre of the biomass value creation close to their farms, allowing them to co-produce inputs for their farms, with additional high value-added intermediates and products, which will be further developed in collaboration with centralized facilities and downstream industry partners. The model provides a practical implementation of the bioeconomy among a large farmer cohort and builds on the existing farm enterprises and cooperative structures of our partners, enabling collaboration, scale-up, market access, and building synergies across primary and industrial sectors. The project advances state-of-the-art for green biorefinery in terms of operational model, logistics, processing, product development and assessment methods, which collectively deliver a more sustainable and profitable model for farmers and rural communities. The model will serve as a blueprint for farmers to sustainably diversify into the bioeconomy, reducing their farm emissions while creating new products which displace unsustainable alternatives in a range of agri-food markets. Rural BioReFarmeries model will be replicated to diverse regions of Europe, supported by the development of inclusive business models and hands-on training among multi-actor groups and communities in regions of high potential. The project represents a highly replicable model for Europe’s abundant grasslands, helping farmers to deal with sustainability and profitability challenges while helping rural communities to become more resilient while realizing the potential of their local bioresources.

The EMBEDED project aims to demonstrate alternative business models in 36 months by transforming waste from Europe traditional agrifood industries into biochar and construction boards, with a long-term carbon sink effect and short resilient value chains. The validation of the km.0 application of biochar on primary producer plantations and the regional market characterization will be conducted. Valorisation streams aim to combine marginal revenues from mainstream residues (olive pomace, olive stones, grape mark) with overlooked or underutilised ones (cork bark left on field, press-cake from fresh grass, grape stems), with five demonstration pilots planned in Portugal, Ireland, Spain, and Czech Republic. Four of the pilots will have pyrolysis for the manufacture of biochar, using a modular method that fits pre- and post-conditioning phases into a single-maned portable unit. In two of the pilots, extractive methods aimed at bio-active chemicals will be evaluated to determine the added benefit of a cascade valorisation. Using a modular but stationary pilot, the Board production plant will capitalize on the cork outputs geographical. The consortium comprises 14 participants, comprising 5 SMEs and 1 LE that includes 2 technological developers and many influential figures in the agri-food industry of each designated region. In order to implement technology replications and technical transfer using the multi-actor strategy, the EMBEDED project will use 15% of the requested grant (750 k€) as financial support.