Electronic data generation, analytics and communication technologies potentially enable more accurate, faster and better decision-making on farms, with huge potential to improve agricultural sustainability. There is a major focus on digitisation by EU and national/regional policy-makers to ensure that digital innovation in agriculture keeps pace with other sectors and the benefits of digitisation are available to the wider farming community. However, there is a danger that digitisation and future innovations will be hampered unless the rural advisory community is mobilised to take ownership of digital tools and to advocate at the user interface. This CSA will engage, enable and empower the independent farm advisor community, through sharing of tools, expertise and motivations. FAIRshare has two main programmes. Firstly, WPs 1, 2 and 3 will gather an evidence base of the digital tools and services used internationally, leveraging the social networks of partner institutions that span EU and non-EU countries. The inventory of tools will be accessible to end-users on an intuitively navigable online interface that has been co-designed using a multi-actor approach. Accompanying the tools in the online inventory will be information, for instance short ‘good practice’ vignettes, on how the tools may be used/adapted for use. Secondly, WPs 4, 5 and 6 will generate and resource a participatory ‘living laboratory’, empowering advisor peers from across the EU to interact with the online inventory and, in a series of workshops, to exchange, co-adapt, co-design and apply digital tools. The FAIRshare 'living lab’ will enable advisors to address challenges to embedding digital tools in different advisory and farming contexts across the EU. Special focus will be on co-designing powerful communication and engagement approaches for advisors to advocate and inspire their peers and farmer clients, driving a social movement for the wider and better use of digital tools.

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.

Although microorganisms dominate almost every ecological niche in our planet, it has only been during the past 10-15 years that we have begun to gain insights into the composition and function of microbial communities (microbiomes) as a consequence of major advances in High Throughput DNA sequencing (HTS) technologies. These approaches have allowed a comprehensive analysis of microbiomes for the first time. Following initial curiosity-driven investigations of microbiomes using HTS technologies, the field has evolved to harness the insights provided, leading to the development of a new multi-billion euro industry focused on characterisation and modulation of microbiomes. The vast majority of this investment has been in the clinical space. In contrast, far less is known about microbiomes across complex food chains, making it difficult to harness food-chain microbiome data for the development of more sustainable food systems and to yield innovative products and applications. This is despite the evident importance of microbes throughout the food chain. MASTER will take a global approach to the development of concrete microbiome products, foods/feeds, services or processes with high commercial potential, which will benefit society through improving the quantity, quality and safety of food, across multiple food chains, to include marine, plant, soil, rumen, meat, brewing, vegetable waste, and fermented foods. This will be achieved through mining microbiome data relating to the food chain, developing big data management tools to identify inter-relations between microbiomes across food chains, and generating applications which promote sustainability, circularity and contribute to waste management and climate change mitigation. We will harness microbiome knowledge to significantly enhance the health and resilience of fish, plants, soil, animals and humans, improve professional skills and competencies, and support the creation of new jobs in the food sector and bioeconomy.