FAIRCHAIN addresses the growing need for a significant transformation of current food systems by developing competitive intermediate food chain alternatives adapted to small and mid-sized actors. FAIRCHAIN specifically aims to: -Foster the emergence of innovative intermediate food value chains that support the scaling-up of small and mid-sized actors facing unsustainable conventional dominant agri-food system. This requires to specific technological, organisational and social innovations as well as regulatory and policy adaptations to widely deliver food in a fair and sustainable way. -Inspire and encourage larger actors to down-scale conventional food value chains and better address the growing need of consumers to consume local high quality and safe products. The emergence of intermediate food value chains should put pressure on dominant actors, forcing them to align with best practices in terms of offering opportunities to local suppliers and ensuring an equitable distribution of costs and benefits. The main goal of FAIRCHAIN is to test, pilot and demonstrate recently developed technological, organisational and social innovations, realising a shift up to TRL7 and enabling small and mid-sized actors to scale-up and expand the production of affordable nutritious food in competitive intermediate food value chains. FAIRCHAIN will address the dairy and fruit&vegetable sectors, which hold a strategic economic position in Europe. Both are prone to integrate a large variety of innovations, correspond to an increasing consumer demand for nutritious and healthy food and need to meet the challenge of sustainably delivering perishable commodities to consumers. FAIRCHAIN will consider the entire value chain. More focus is given to postharvest steps rather than the production step in itself because the power imbalances created in market relationships are mainly attributed to the increasing concentration in the processing and retail sectors in conventional food supply chains

13 participants (11 beneficiaries and two affiliated entities) from 7 EU and 1 third countries join forces for supporting the Strategic Research Agenda of the future joint research program on the subject of Blockchain by shedding light on the current partial and fragmented picture of block chain technology (BCT) applications in the agri-food domain and by clarifying the benefits and opportunities which BCT can concretely to stakeholders throughout the food chain offer. The project intends to prepare the way for R&I activities for the decade to come, basing its assumptions on systematic monitoring and reviews of national, European and international R&I pilots/use cases, experiences and best practices and on consolidated and balanced stakeholder views. The active involvement of users is required from the very beginning for the identification of needs and use cases, which will be subsequently translated into operational requirements for services. The goal of the project is to understand why communities, i.e. users, accept/reject blockchain-based projects, the mistakes done by others for not repeating them, the best and innovative practices in blockchain development in agri-food sector (considering its complexity) for arriving to shape different possible futures for BC application. The project will investigate and discuss both technical aspects as well as non-technical barriers to BCTs deployment, but also other issues fostering BCTs deployment, such as interoperability, innovative business models, standardisation and regulatory issues and will be at the base of White Papers addressed to EC. At the same time, the project intends to provide to users some a framework of services (and guidelines) for empowering them in future BCT implementation.

RestPoll is a highly transdisciplinary project aiming to provide society with tools to reverse wild pollinator declines and to position Europe as a global leader in pollinator restoration. RestPoll will, together with stakeholders ranging from individual land managers to governments, co-design, evaluate, and refine measures and cross-sectoral approaches to restore pollinators and their services. The RestPoll consortium combines the expertise of natural and social scientists, NGOs, businesses, and ministries. Stakeholders along the food value chain will be engaged through newly developed participatory approaches at diverse social, ecological, and political scales. Central to RestPoll is the establishment of a Europe-wide network of pollinator restoration case-study areas and Living Labs (LL), which are unique hubs for experimentation, demonstration, and mutual learning. RestPoll aims to position Europe as a global leader and set the future agenda for pollinator restoration worldwide. The transdisciplinary RestPoll consortium will develop, test, evaluate and refine cross-sectoral pollinator restoration approaches to conserve biodiversity and to benefit nature and society. To restore wild pollinator diversity and their vital pollination services, RestPoll will co-design measures with different stakeholders (ranging from individual land managers to governments) at various spatial scales (field, farm, landscape, European scales), in agricultural landscapes that are dominated by intensively managed crops or grasslands. Our holistic approach, informed by cutting-edge transdisciplinary research, will integrate stakeholders and actors at multiple levels as well as natural and social science disciplines to engage in participatory planning and development of new business models. Learning outcomes will be disseminated by regional to European multi-actor partners and collaborators, which will ensure impact beyond the end of the project.

Competitive conflicts for land use between the energy and food sectors have appeared, which could be mitigated by the vertical integration of RES in farms through new circular business models. By this approach, farms will become climate neutral, optimising their production and reducing their impact on natural resources and biodiversity, on top of providing energy services to communities and diversifying their economic income. However, there is a need to identify, understand and overcome major existing barriers perceived by agricultural communities. Moreover, current initiatives do not to effectively consider and address the complex interactions and factors from the farming and RES context, thus missing to support decision making based on accurate projections, estimations and forecasts. HarvRESt will work on these needs by improving the existing knowledge and its fragmented status, which will be feed to an Agricultural Virtual Power Plant able to run different scenarios and farm configurations to determine the best operation procedures for a given RES solution. This data will be then provided to a decision support system able to weight trade-offs and key indicators to provide ad-hoc recommendations to farmers and policy makers, thus enabling the consecution of improved production rates on renewable energy, food & feed within agro communities. For the successful execution of HarvRESt and implementation of recommendations, a multi-actor approach fostering co-creation sessions together with the provision of training materials for farmers empowerment will be implemented. The full approach of HarvRESt will be supported and executed at 4 use cases representing different topologies of farms, a diversity of stakeholders and organizational structures, distinct geographical conditions and a wide variety of RES technologies. Together with HarvRESt community and mapped initiatives, the project will act as a hub for knowledge and best-practices on RES integration at farm level.

NoAW : No Agro-Waste. Innovative approaches to turn agricultural waste into ecological and economic assets. Driven by a “near zero-waste” society requirement, the goal of NoAW project is to generate innovative efficient approaches to convert growing agricultural waste issues into eco-efficient bio-based products opportunities with direct benefits for both environment, economy and EU consumer. To achieve this goal, the NoAW concept relies on developing holistic life cycle thinking able to support environmentally responsible R&D innovations on agro-waste conversion at different TRLs, in the light of regional and seasonal specificities, not forgetting risks emerging from circular management of agro-wastes (e.g. contaminants accumulation). By involving all agriculture chain stakeholders in a territorial perspective, the project will: (1) develop innovative eco-design and hybrid assessment tools of circular agro-waste management strategies and address related gap of knowledge and data via extensive exchange through the Knowledge exchange Stakeholders Platform, (2) develop breakthrough knowledge on agro-waste molecular complexity and heterogeneity in order to upgrade the most widespread mature conversion technology (anaerobic digestion) and to synergistically eco-design robust cascading processes to fully convert agro-waste into a set of high added value bio-energy, bio-fertilizers and bio-chemicals and building blocks, able to substitute a significant range of non-renewable equivalents, with favourable air, water and soil impacts and (3) get insights of the complexity of potentially new, cross-sectors, business clusters in order to fast track NoAW strategies toward the field and develop new business concepts and stakeholders platform for cross-chain valorisation of agro-waste on a territorial and seasonal basis.