Europe faces huge and urgent challenges of increasing crop productivity whilst reducing use of synthetic fertilisers and nutrient losses. This proposal is to establish a self-sustaining, multi-actor, Thematic Network called “NUTRI-CHECK NET” that builds farm-level adoption of best field-specific nutrient management practices across Europe. In nine countries farmers’ Crop Nutrition Clubs (CNC) will identify and share the nature of their uncertainties about crop nutrition, their challenges and barriers to change. Decision-systems and nutrition tools (including commercial products, services, and recent research outputs) will be assembled by national experts from across Europe, including leading farmers, into a common online NUTRI-CHECK NET platform. CNCs will then evaluate effectiveness of new protocols and tools selected from the a toolbox to meet their main challenges. Thence they will co-create and adopt farm- and field-specific ‘measure-to-manage’ approaches that address their crop nutrition challenge(s). Evaluations of protocols and tools by farmers and experts will address their ease of use, trustworthiness, costs, and benefits. Initial and final evaluations will be shared across the Network to define ‘best practices’, which will be demonstrated and disseminated widely, including through liaison with other relevant Thematic Networks and EIP-AGRI. The toolbox and best practices will be held accessible and improvable in perpetua on EU FarmBook. Widespread adoption of ‘measure-to-manage’ or ‘check-to-change’ approaches to crop nutrition will enhance nutrient recycling and crop productivity, whilst reducing synthetic fertiliser use and nutrient losses across Europe.

The agricultural sector is known for its demanding and hazardous working environments, leading to high rates of accidents and health issues among workers. Furthermore, drudgery due to physical work and repetitive tasks diminishes the attractiveness of the sector for youth. Emerging challenges such as digitalisation, technological intensification, structural change, environmental targets, and new risks due to climate change, coupled with global economic implications demand more and more from farmers and farm workers, exacerbate the need for timely information, and have new implications for occupational safety and health (OSH). AGRO-WELL follows a highly interdisciplinary approach to enhance knowledge for technological transitions towards an environmentally, economically, and socially sustainable agricultural sector. It brings together leading scientists from a multitude of OSH-related disciplines, various regions across Europe, key technology providers and farmer representatives. The project will assess farmer needs and explore ways to increase awareness with respect to smart farming. AGRO-WELL builds on five technologies to leverage the potential of robotics, augmented reality, and artificial intelligence to enhance working conditions and farm safety, enable faster and better-informed farm management decisions, and reduce the environmental impact of four different farming systems. Potential effects of the technologies will be multidimensionally assessed. To support market uptake, AGRO-WELL will design and explore the viability of business models based on novel technologies that are predominantly focused on improving OSH. To support other promising technologies, AGRO-WELL will incorporate an open technology competition enabled by cascade funding. All project results will be synthesized in effective dissemination strategies and meaningful policy recommendations to foster promising technological solutions and sustainable business models.

Healthy soils are of major importance for the future of the European horticultural and agricultural crop production. Especially in intensive production systems, soilborne diseases are a major factor with a negative impact on soil health. Newly developed best practices and sound crop rotations permit to maintain, improve or re-establish soil health in Europe. The BEST4SOIL project will build a community of practice network across Europe by inter-connecting growers, advisers, educators and researchers. Through this network, knowledge ready for practice on 4 best practices for the control of soilborne diseases (compost/organic amendments; green manures/cover crops; anaerobic soil disinfestation (ASD); and (bio)solarisation) will be promoted. Open-access databases with information on the range of pathogens affecting host plants will help the practitioners to build appropriate crop rotations and innovative control strategies. As innovative tool will BEST4SOIL provide tutorial videos (youtube), easily understandable also to growers with limited language skills. Videos, databases and factsheets are edited in 22 official EU languages to facilitate the innovation management of practitioners throughout Europe. The information will be freely accessible and highly comprehensible to guarantee a smooth knowledge transfer from research to practice. BEST4SOIL will deploy local facilitators to set up a network with active communities of practice resulting in an intensive knowledge exchange. The consortium of BEST4SOIL includes advisers, breeder, communicators, educators, growers, and researchers from eight European countries. Together with facilitators in at least twelve more countries, the network will interconnect an important part of the European growers, advisers and educators, the main stakeholders of BEST4SOIL.

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.

The vision of the HORIZON-MISS-2023-CLIMA-01-01 call is that Europe’s Regions will be responsible for their sustainable and resilient adaptation to climate change (CC), by developing Roadmaps for adaptation of agriculture to CC. These roadmaps will need to empower regional stakeholders to innovate new, nature-based solutions that meet society’s needs for CC adaptation through better planning that is compatible with national and international policy. TRANSFORM proposes that innovating new crop rotations – the sequences of crops that farmers use to achieve their farming goals – will deliver nature-based solutions for sustainable and resilient CC adaptation in arable and mixed farming. Working in the Atlantic Biogeographic Region (Bio-region) of Europe, we adopt an explicitly multi-actor approach in which stakeholders are in charge of the innovation. TRANSFORM will co-create with stakeholders tools and methods: for Regional-level Roadmaps that describe the needs for adaptation of local people in agriculture; for farmers to innovate crop rotations for their region using the Future Rotations Explorer tool; and, a Toolbox of spatio-temporal methods and tools for stakeholders to explore and evaluate the societal, economic and environmental indicators of impact of rotations. When embedded within our social science methods, these methods and tools will leverage an iterative ‘pipeline to innovation’ for CC adaptation in agriculture that produces lists of acceptable crop rotations, and maps for planning, across the Atlantic Bio-region, and ultimately the whole of Europe. This will allow the European Commission, EU Member States and associated countries and their regions and stakeholders to make progress in attaining the goals of the EU Mission: Adaptation to Climate Change.