Grasslands are vitally important for European agriculture. The 20 partners of Inno4Grass gather farmers’ organisations, extension services, education and research in eight countries (Germany, Belgium, France, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland & Sweden) where grasslands contribute a major share of the agricultural area. The overall objective of the project is to bridge the gap between practice and science to ensure the implementation of innovative systems on productive grasslands to achieve profitability while providing environmental services. The associated animal productions are dairy and beef cattle and sheep. Inno4Grass will set up a Facilitator Agents network, capture novelties from innovative farms scrutinized via 85 case studies, discuss and synthesize them in electronic farm networks and through cognitive mapping. It will upgrade this capital via multi-actor approaches and science dialogue, transfer innovation capital and boost collaboration and exchanges beyond the borders of regions and among Member States (MS). Dedicated dissemination approaches and events like national and European Wikimedia, decision support systems and grassland awards are designed and applied to convey innovations to practice with highest acceptance by practitioners and beyond the project term. Inno4Grass will ensure delivery and training of grassland knowledge at operational, tactical and strategic levels for farmers, advisors, and students (specific syllabus, materials for existing MOOCs) and for the value chain mobilizing key actors within the collaborating MS. At least 100 practice abstracts and 104 video clips describing innovative practices will be provided. The project strongly contributes to the implementation of the EIP and many consortium members are involved in their national contact points. This supports the establishment and cross linkage of Operational Groups on grasslands.

LANDMARK is a pan-European multi-actor consortium of leading academic and applied research institutes, chambers of agriculture and policy makers that will develop a coherent framework for soil management aimed at sustainable food production across Europe. The LANDMARK proposal builds on the concept that soils are a finite resource that provides a range of ecosystem services known as “soil functions”. Functions relating to agriculture include: primary productivity, water regulation & purification, carbon-sequestration & regulation, habitat for biodiversity and nutrient provision & cycling. Trade-offs between these functions may occur: for example, management aimed at maximising primary production may inadvertently affect the ‘water purification’ or ‘habitat’ functions. This has led to conflicting management recommendations and policy initiatives. There is now an urgent need to develop a coherent scientific and practical framework for the sustainable management of soils. LANDMARK will uniquely respond to the breadth of this challenge by delivering (through multi-actor development): 1. LOCAL SCALE: A toolkit for farmers with cost-effective, practical measures for sustainable (and context specific) soil management. 2. REGIONAL SCALE - A blueprint for a soil monitoring scheme, using harmonised indicators: this will facilitate the assessment of soil functions for different soil types and land-uses for all major EU climatic zones. 3. EU SCALE – An assessment of EU policy instruments for incentivising sustainable land management. There have been many individual research initiatives that either address the management & assessment of individual soil functions, or address multiple soil functions, but only at local scales. LANDMARK will build on these existing R&D initiatives: the consortium partners bring together a wide range of significant national and EU datasets, with the ambition of developing an interdisciplinary scientific framework for sustainable soil management.

modernAKIS aims to improve AKIS actors’ capacities to leverage individual, organizational and systemic resources needed for the transformation towards more coherent, effective and efficient AKIS systems and the transition to a more sustainable management and use of natural resources in farming and forestry. To this end it will build and foster a European network of at least 1.000 key AKIS actors, including AKIS coordination bodies, from all EU MS, who will act as linchpins in the transformation of the AKIS systems towards a more effective governance and the modernization of the European agri-food sector. The project will also build the capacities of these key AKIS actors towards systems understanding and engagement, enabling them to enact long-term system changes that will improve the AKIS. In addition, it will set up at least 1 Community of Practice in each Member State, enabling thus participants to act as vectors of change in their communities. In addition, modernAKIS will provide a comprehensive digital catalogue with new know-how, and at least 80 tools and methods supporting key AKIS actors to improve the knowledge flows and develop a well-functioning AKIS in line with relevant policy objectives, e.g the Green Deal, Farm2Fork, SDGs.

Agriculture and food industry having a high dependence on resources in their production and striving for long-term sustainability. In this context there is an urgent need to optimise resource use and smooth the transition to a knowledgedriven agriculture. The NUTRIMAN is a Nitrogen and Phosphorus thematic network compiling knowledge “ready for practice” for such recovered product applications, practices and technologies, interconnecting applied science and industrial practice, for the user interest and benefits of the agricultural practitioners. There is an urgent need to spread knowledge and network information towards agricultural practitioners about the insufficiently exploited N/P recovery innovative research results (technologies, products, practices). The project objective is to improve the exploitation of the N/P nutrient management/recovery potential for the ready for practice cases not sufficiently known by practitioners. Our action will open new opportunities for farmers to develop connections between applied researches with practical usefulness results and farming practice in the priority area of nutrient management and nutrient recovery. Uses a bottom-up approach to identify incentives and bottlenecks for adoption and to prioritise between technologies/products and will ensure larger willingness to adopt innovations and improve multiplicator effects. Large scale take up of the recovered N/P innovative fertilisers targeted, produced from un-exploited resources of organic or secondary raw materials in line with the circular economy model, and economical/environmental efficiently used by farmers. Effective dissemination and exploitation promoted by multilingual web platform, other communications and best practice field demonstrations for farmers. This action is contributing to the successful deployment of the vast reservoir of existing scientific/practical knowledge on the N/P recovery theme, including multi lingual abstracts in EIP-AGRI format.

Over the past few decades, rural areas have experienced profound socio-demographic transformations, driven by their roles in ecological, digital, and bio-economic transitions. These transformations, further accelerated by the Covid-19 pandemic, have led to significant diversification, rendering rural regions complex and unequal—similar in many ways to major cities. Thus a key problem concerns our knowledge about- and perception of these places because the tools, concepts, and above all the public policies traditionally applied are no longer suited to address the increasing diversity of contemporary rural areas. Our consortium, RURALITIC, is academically armed and well-prepared and to tackle these challenges. The first step, involves rethinking ’the rural’ and examining the intricate relationship between social groups and geographical spaces. This conceptual requalification of what rural areas are, and can be, will enable the production of new scientific concepts and tools, including new data, surveys, indicators, knowledge and typologies, enabling a new and synthesized view of the current dynamics and processes of change and aid in foresight for public authorities. Secondly these new concepts and typologies will then be deployed to analyze the drivers of attractiveness, existing public policies, and innovative initiatives within rural areas. By implementing pilot projects and creating an initiative library, we’ll tailor recommendations to diverse social and rural contexts. Finally, RURALITIC aims to envision and produce various scenarios for Europe’s rural future. The main outcome will be a reorientation of public policies, from general policies to policies tailored to different rural areas, while maintaining the main orientations of European policies, focusing on sustainable prosperity, resilience, connectivity, and infrastructure.