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.

EURAKNOS will boost compiling of knowledge ready for practice by intensifying interaction between various agri-food or forestry networks thereby maximising outputs for practitioners. The focus of this proposal is on widening existing thematic network outputs in an interactive way, both content-wise and in terms of geographical coverage. Avoiding duplication with the existing networks, cross-fertilisation will be organised between them and among countries, regions and production systems. EURAKNOS will tackle the data management with a view to ensure sustainability of these knowledge networks and maximise their outputs for end-users. To this end, EURAKNOS will stimulate the exchange of existing approaches, methodologies and tools between the different thematic networks (and linked EIP operational groups and H2020 multi-actor projects where relevant) and search for a harmonised approach for setting up future thematic networks in order to maximise the impact on the practitioner, farmer and forester. This project will also explore the end users’ needs and possibilities of setting-up a European agricultural knowledge and innovation open source system that may connect all TNs.

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).

EUREKA has brought together 21 multi-actors (MA) from 16 member states and 48 supporting organizations, to co-create a stronger and reinforced EU wide agricultural knowledge base by developing an open source e-platform, called the FarmBook. This two-sided market platform, like Facebook, will address the needs and improve the connections between two distinct user groups: MA project partners and MA end users (farmers, foresters, advisors, scientists, policy makers,…). To realize this, EUREKA will first analyze the MA project knowledge supply (outputs, activities, dissemination,…) to get a comprehensive data overview and distinguish do’s and don’ts on how to co-create and transfer knowledge in these projects. From this analysis best practices and recommendations will be formulated into a MA bible for the current MA community and for EIP-AGRI (+ SWG SCAR AKIS) to improve the design of future MA projects. Participatory activities with many MA projects during EUREKA will lay the foundation to build a more engaged MA project community. All available resources that can be used to share amongst the community and to shape and promote the EUREKA outputs will also be mapped. Second, EUREKA will analyze the knowledge demand from potential end users by profiling them and determining their needs, barriers and preferences across four macro-regions in Europe and across the different agricultural sectors. Third, EUREKA will integrate the results of the analysis on the knowledge supply & demand by consulting various expert working groups to co-create a ranking of MA projects and to select the most relevant and high impact agricultural MA project knowledge for the rural and scientific community. Fourth, the FarmBook will be built to present this knowledge in an accessible, standards-based, easily searchable and open source way. Fifth, the FarmBook will be optimized in several iterations with end-user feedback and will be promoted to end users and the MA project community across Europe.

The European agricultural land areas provide important and valuable goods in the form of food, fibre and biomass for the world. They are also crucial for the provision of a number of environmental and climate goods and services. EU member states have implemented agri-environmental schemes, investment grants for environmental technologies, and private actors have established environmental certification and labeling schemes targeting these services. However, many initiatives are arguably not cost-effective in boosting environmental and climate service provision, may be skewed in terms of distributional impacts, increase risks to farmers, or involve excessive transaction costs. EFFECT will develop and pilot a theoretically well-founded and empirically well-adapted package of new contractual frameworks. This will enable farmers to reconcile agricultural production with enhanced delivery of environmental and climate public goods and services to the benefit of society at large. EFFECT pursues this through a transdisciplinary effort involving a review of past successes and failures; and development and test of new forms of contracts. We combine agricultural and environmental science knowledge with theoretical and empirical insights from law, political science and economics. We further combine efforts from researchers and multiple practice partners and stakeholders to ensure that lessons learned from previous initiatives and our testing of emerging contract frameworks are validated on the ground. Our ambition, which is based in the solid experience in the consortium, is to facilitate that our co-developed agri-environmental contract arrangements are being put to actual use towards the end of the project. Furthermore, to ensure durable impact of the project, EFFECT initiates a cross European innovation process, supports capacity building among decision making bodies and develops a policy evaluation framework.