The Data Driven Dairy Decisions for Farmers (4D4F) thematic network will focus on the role which dairy animal and environmental sensors can play in collecting real time information to help make more informed decisions in dairy farming. The network will develop a Community of Practice comprised of farmers, farm advisors, technology suppliers, knowledge exchange professionals and researchers who will work together to debate, collect and communicate best practice drawn from innovative farmers, industry and the research community to facilitate the co-creation of best practice. The results will be communicated to farmers using best practice guides on the use of sensors and data analysis tools supported by videos, infographics and an online virtual warehouse of dairy sensor technologies. The network will include the development of Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) which can be tailored to individual farms to help farmers and farm advisors adopt dairy sensor and data analysis technology. The SOPs will be developed by working groups of the Community of Practice including farmers, farm advisors, technology suppliers, knowledge exchange professionals and researchers, who will work together to develop farmer friendly SOPs. The on line Community of Practice and published communication tools will be complimented by on farm events and workshops to help farmers and farm advisors implement innovative sensor and data analysis technologies. The workshops and events will promote discussion between farmers and their peers on how best to use sensors and data analysis in their own businesses. This will lead to local peer to peer support to facilitate the adoption of data driven dairy decision making. The network will work closely with EIP Agri and at member state level it will work with existing EIP Operational Groups working on dairy data and sensors and, where suitable Operational Groups do not exist, it will work with local partners to develop new Operational Groups.

New genomic techniques (NGTs) can contribute to an energy-efficient, low-input and zero-pollution agricultural production and industrial processing. Despite rapid recent progress, this toolbox is still in its infancy and substantial investments are needed to optimise the methods. Also, the innovation potential is fully exploited only if economic, social, and regulatory drivers coalesce and are accompanied by transparent communication and inclusive stakeholder engagement. A problem facing NGT innovation in Europe is that regulatory uncertainty restricts investment at all levels – research, innovation and scaling up – and the impacts of NGTs, both positive and negative, are not fully assessed. It also remains to be seen if public and stakeholder acceptance of NGT products will enable their application. The consequence is that NGTs do not yet reach their full potential. The research in GeneBEcon has two facets. First, the technical potential is explored by applying gene editing to develop 1) a virus-resistant potato with an industrial tuber starch quality, and 2) microalgae-based production of industrially relevant mycosporin-like amino acids. Second, the risk-regulatory aspects, economic incentives, and social perceptions are investigated. In the latter, comparative analyses are enabled by our approach with two different production systems: open-field agricultural crop and contained-system microalgae. The results will enable technical innovations as well as allow stakeholders (incl researchers, breeders, primary producers, value chain actors, risk assessors and decision makers) to take informed decisions on the safe and responsible use of NGT-derived products. GeneBEcon has a multi-sectoral consortium and the project links to relevant stakeholders through a Stakeholder Advisory Board. This will, through communication and inclusive engagement, enable an improved understanding and awareness of the risks and benefits of NGT-derived products through societal dialogue.

PRUDENT aspires to change the way agriculture and forestry systems currently operate and to accelerate the transition to sustainable agriculture and forestry practices and smart farming technologies. The project will identify and evaluate the most effective green nudges, in the context of appropriate behavioural and experimental settings, that can enable farmer/forester behavioural change to more sustainable agriculture and forestry. Nudges will be also tested in natural contexts to evaluate the interactive effect of nudges with actual policy changes in the transition to sustainability. Innovative nudging tools, in the form of web/mobile apps, will be employed to boost farmer/forester self-regulatory capacity and enhance the durability of nudging effects. Four different systems, representing major farming and forestry systems in Europe (arable crops [wheat], perennial crops [grapevines, apples, olives], livestock [bovines] and forests [boreal forests]) in various EU regions (Northern, Southern, and Central Europe) will be studied to account for the heterogeneity of farming/forestry systems and contexts in the EU. The behavioural insights are used to develop transformative pathways, via social innovations, business models and policy recommendations, to encourage transition to fair, healthy and environmentally-friendly agriculture and forestry systems. PRUDENT will provide a set of social innovations and business models establishing roadmaps for a shift towards sustainable agriculture and forestry and will develop a series of policy recommendations and tools to foster behaviourally informed policy design and implementation. Throughout the project's lifespan, multiple value chain actors, at various levels of society, will actively participate in co-creation activities to establish a mutual understanding of the benefits and bottlenecks of the value chain, as well as effective transformation pathways to change.

DESIRA will develop the concept of Socio-Cyber-Physical Systems to advance understanding of the impact of digitisation in rural areas, linking analysis directly to the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals. Operationalising the Responsible Research and Innovation approach, DESIRA will enrol agriculture, forestry and rural stakeholders in co-developing scenarios and policies in Living Labs established in 20 European Regions, and a Rural Digitization Forum gathering 250 stakeholders from all Europe. A Virtual Research Environment tailored to the purposes of the project will connect all participants and allow to increase substantially the interaction within the network. DESIRA will provide a Taxonomy and Inventory of Digital Game changers which will be implemented into an online Visualization Tool, a Set of Socio-Economic Impact Indicators aligned to the Sustainability Development Goals implemented into an online Socio-Economic Impact Tool, a Pan-European Assessment of digitization in European rural regions, a Needs, Expectations and Impact appraisal report, a Comparative Scenario Report based on scenario development activities of Living Labs and the Rural Digitization Forum, a Policy analysis and Roadmap, an Ethical Code to be adopted by researchers and innovators and recommended by policy bodies, five Use Cases that will report a further analysis – co-created by Living Labs with the support of ICT specialists - of the most promising solutions identified by Living Labs, Showcase Technologies - including a Virtual Farm Platform - that will create a selection of proof of concepts suggested by Use Cases. A detailed, multi-media dissemination, engagement and communication strategy will accompany the project from the beginning, looking at research as a multifunctional (research, engagement and communication) process and at the same time involving communication specialists in the development of adequate messages and in the choice of the most effective media.

CYBELE generates innovation and create value in the domain of agri-food, and its verticals in the sub-domains of PA and PLF in specific, as demonstrated by the real-life industrial cases to be supported, empowering capacity building within the industrial and research community. Since agriculture is a high volume business with low operational efficiency, CYBELE aspires at demonstrating how the convergence of HPC, Big Data, Cloud Computing and the IoT can revolutionize farming, reduce scarcity and increase food supply, bringing social, economic, and environmental benefits. CYBELE intends to safeguard that stakeholders have integrated, unmediated access to a vast amount of large scale datasets of diverse types from a variety of sources, and they are capable of generating value and extracting insights, by providing secure and unmediated access to large-scale HPC infrastructures supporting data discovery, processing, combination and visualization services, solving challenges modelled as mathematical algorithms requiring high computing power. CYBELE develops large scale HPC-enabled test beds and delivers a distributed big data management architecture and a data management strategy providing 1) integrated, unmediated access to large scale datasets of diverse types from a multitude of distributed data sources, 2) a data and service driven virtual HPC-enabled environment supporting the execution of multi-parametric agri-food related impact model experiments, optimizing the features of processing large scale datasets and 3) a bouquet of domain specific and generic services on top of the virtual research environment facilitating the elicitation of knowledge from big agri-food related data, addressing the issue of increasing responsiveness and empowering automation-assisted decision making, empowering the stakeholders to use resources in a more environmentally responsible manner, improve sourcing decisions, and implement circular-economy solutions in the food chain.