The proposed project: Initiative of Fostering cross-border knowledge exchange and co-creation on sustainable soil and farm management (Soil-X-Change) will help to connect farmers, actors, policy makers, projects, and initiatives to speed up innovation and promote faster, wider co-creation and transposition of innovative solutions into practice. It will contribute to effective AKIS by intensifying thematic cooperation between researchers, farmers, and other stakeholders in the EU. Soil-X-Change will also contribute to the green transition, smart agriculture, climate-neutrality, and sustainability areas, as well as enhancing and exchanging the knowledge of the main actors. Soil-X-Change, initiated by EIP-AGRI Operational Group practitioners (OGs), reflects the needs of 151 direct partners. It will collect, combine, harmonise, analyse and integrate the results and data product developed by the different EIP-AGRI OGs and the project partners. Soil-X-Change will disseminate and share innovative practices across 9 member countries. Furthermore, the Soil-X-Change project will bring together EIP OGs and key stakeholders working on sustainable soil and farm management to create an EU-wide network, share knowledge, and introduce ready-to-use practices that will enable farmers to make the right decisions related to agricultural production practices. At the end of the project the extended knowledge and innovative ideas of member and non-member OGs will widen the scope of their activities and showcasing their result to an increased number of stakeholders and farmers in an international environment and network across EU countries. Soil-X-Change will use a bottom-up approach (farmers to OGs) and will reinforce and share practical knowledge using the main dissemination channels suitable for farmers and practitioners.

The PLAID project (Peer-to-peer Learning: Accessing Innovation through Demonstration) will identify, compile and make publically accessible the topics, locations, best practices and innovative approaches to demonstration on commercial farms in the EU 28, Switzerland and Norway. PLAID will enable access to demonstration activities by creating a searchable georeferenced inventory and map covering all 30 countries; developing ‘virtual’ (on-line) demonstration approaches with commercial farmers; assessing governance, commissioning, financing, topic selection, access (particularly gender), mediation techniques and impact in 24 longitudinal case studies; and comparing the impact of different governance models and financing mechanisms on learning processes and accessibility. PLAID will produce recommendations for governance and best practice in both real and virtual demonstration settings, using these to develop indicators and decision support tools for farmers, advisors, commercial companies, charities, educators, policy makers and researchers. PLAID is a multi-actor consortium, using a multi-stakeholder approach, where farmers, industry stakeholders and academics work together as to design, test and validate outputs. PLAID has been designed to achieve high impact, through generation of a substantial set of knowledge exchange activities and project outputs, which will be hosted long-term on PLAID stakeholder web-sites, You Tube and the EIP Agri Service Point. PLAID will initiate a community of practice, which together with the above activities and outputs will provide a solid foundation for RUR-12-2017: “Networking European farms to boost thematic knowledge exchanges and close the innovation gap” and provide substantive input to the EIP Agri database.

The EU Farm to Fork strategy, which is at the heart of the European Green Deal, aims to make food systems fair, healthy, and environmentally friendly. To achieve the objectives of the Farm to Fork strategy, the Commission proposed, among other, new targets to reduce the use and risks of pesticides (RURP). The main objective of AdvisoryNetPEST is to establish and upgrade a network of advisory services across the EU, increasing the knowledge sharing between advisors, and among the whole AKIS, and the adoption of innovative solutions to RURP by farmers. The project will achieve this by: 1) Developing a EU network of advisors to RURP, based on existing networks and national AKIS, covering the 27 EU Members States (MSs) and the UK. To cover all MSs, the project will adopt a twinning approach: 14 National Networks will be created by the project partners, and these will engage with 14 Associated Networks through a twining program. The network will cover all European pedo-climatic areas, integrating four EU regional clusters and the most relevant crop sectors. 2) Identifying, selecting, and shaping Novel Approaches (NAs), which are technically, economically, socially, and environmentally viable, that will be adapted and replicated across the EU. 3) Exchanging knowledge and training advisors and students to promote the adoption of the NAs. 4) Connecting the project with other national and EU projects, initiatives and policy makers. 5) Scaling up the NAs, fostering the adoption of innovative solutions by farmers and the whole value chain. The project will embrace a multi-actor approach, gathering 19 partner organisations with a vast experience in advisory and crop protection. The consortium will also represent a diversity of AKIS stakeholders, including advisors, researchers, and other value chain actors, as the cornerstone of a regional, national, and EU level network that will allow a wide sharing of technical and practical expertise to RURP in the long-term.

The i2connect project aims to fuel the competencies of advisors who will support and facilitate interactive innovation processes responding to multiple challenges in European agriculture and forestry. The strategy in i2connect is to use the existing advisor networks and the experiences of success in different contexts to create a broader network and momentum of change enabling a new culture of bottom-up led innovation support. This resource of over 40,000 advisors are critical actors supporting agriculture and forestry on the ground and must be influenced in this project to support interactively innovation with particular emphasis on EIP-AGRI 2020 target of 3,500 operational groups and beyond. An inventory will be made of the current state of advisory practices in Europe. Best Practices throughout Europe will be analysed in an interactive way to guide the development of approaches and tools, and to be studied as part of the training program for advisors. A pool of trainers will be trained to work with these materials in training and coaching advisors. Some advisors may join cross visit teams for studying interesting cases abroad. Attention will also be given to the ‘enabling environment’: ways in which managers of advisory services, research actors, policy makers and others can create conditions. These activities feed into a professional network with many local branches, supported by the project through a moderated on line platform for mutual coaching, sharing experiences. i2connect brings together 32 organisations (beneficiaries and third parties).

NEFERTITI is a unique project that establishes 10 interactive thematic networks and bring together 45 regional clusters (hubs) of demo-farmers and the involved actors (advisors, NGOs, industry, education, researchers and policy makers) in 17 countries. NEFERTITI focuses on creating added value from the exchange of knowledge, actors, farmers and technical content over the networks in order to boost innovation uptake, to improve peer to peer learning and network connectivity between farms actors across Europe, thus contributing to a more competitive, sustainable and climate-smart agriculture. NEFERTITI address 10 themes that have been chosen based on key concerns of the farming communities of the regional hubs in the project, covering together a balanced range of themes over three main agricultural sectors: animal production, arable farming and horticultural production. The themes have also been chosen regarding their innovation potential, their demonstration potential and the cross-fertilisation potential among the themes, the sectors and the actors. Themes are closely linked to the H2020 Thematic Networks and will connect with other organisational structures at grass root level, like EIP operational groups and study clubs that will confer to the project a key role of accelerator and empowerment of the dissemination and of the uptake of the practical-oriented knowledge delivered by all EIP related projects. A monitoring and learning program supports the systematic extraction of lessons learnt, lessons to be shared with wide audiences including AKIS actors and public authorities. A web based platform unlocks the experience, actors, demo details and the related content for wide spread sharing, enhanced by dedicated production of relevant material (including high-quality professional videos) in each language of the partners. NEFERTITI will engage a policy dialogue with EU Regions to match farmers and policy makers’ interests in view of the networks sustainability.