Research: Successful Kick off Meeting for AgroFossilFree

“Strategies and technologies to achieve a European Fossil-energy-free agriculture”

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Horizon 2020’s AgroFossilFree - Strategies and technologies to achieve a European Fossil-energy-free agriculture successfully launched in October 2020 and had its kick-off meeting on 14^th October 2020.

The project, a 3-year collaborative Coordination and Support Action (CSA) selected for funding by the European Commission under H2020 (LC-FNR-06-2020 - Defossilising agriculture – solutions and pathways for fossil-energy-free farming), Call for proposals H2020-FNR-2020-1,  will be coordinated by Centre for Research & Technology Hellas (CERTH) leading a consortium of 16 partners coming from 9 EU countries, with an overall budget of € 2 mil. CEMA is among the participating partners.

AgroFossilFree aims to create  a framework under which critical stakeholders will cooperate to evaluate and promote currently available fossil-energy-free strategies and technologies (FEFTS) in EU agriculture to diminish in the short term and eliminate in the long run fossil fuels use in any farming process from cradle to farm gate, while maintaining yield and quality of the end-product. . Such a framework will contribute to closing the gap between the available FEFTS either commercial or from applicable research results with the everyday EU agricultural practices by promoting effective exchange of novel ideas and information between research, industry, extension and the farming community so that existing research and commercial solutions can be widely communicated, while capturing grassroots level needs and innovative ideas from the farming and related industry communities. Financing opportunities for de-fossilizing EU agriculture will be investigated and highlighted.

Project specific objectives:

Objective 1: Consider and evaluate the current status in EU agriculture regarding energy use and assess existing needs and interests for the future farm energy profile

Objective 2: Identify and register currently available and directly applicable FEFTS, spanning from applied research results to market solutions and investigate available financing tools for de-fossilizing activities

Objective 3: Create an online platform containing all available FEFTS to be assessed and provide a Decision Support Toolkit to provide proposed interventions based on user inputs as well as links for those interventions financing

Objective 4: Collaborate with all relative stakeholders in thematic groups using interactive physical and online methodologies to produce community-based ideas for FEFTS integration in agricultural systems in a regional and EU-basis

Objective 5: Create policy recommendations and communicate them to increase visibility and promote the proposed strategies and technologies in real agricultural activities in the near future.

CLICK HERE to read the project’s first Press Release and find out more details.

Stay tuned for more information on project activities in the following months and follow AgroFossilFree on social networks (Twitter; LinkedIn).

https://www.agrofossilfree.eu/

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement no. 101000496