MIND STEP is a European research project aiming to support public decision making in agricultural, rural, environmental and climate policies, taking into account the behaviour of individual decision-making units in agriculture and the rural society.

Policies like the EU CAP are widening the scope to contribute to the Paris climate agreement and the Sustainability Development Goals, hence there is a move of the CAP to farm specific measures and an improved link to environment, climate change and ecosystem services to build a a fair, healthy and environmentally friendly food system. Member States and regions develop their own CAP strategic plan with more attention to the regional implementation of the CAP. This wider scope and measures with a focus on individual farmers ask for a new generation of impact assessment tools. Current state-of-the-art agricultural models are not able to deliver individual farm and local effects as they are specified at higher levels of aggregation.

Making use of improved possibilities opened up by progress in the ICT area MIND STEP will improve exploitation of available agricultural and biophysical data and will include the individual decision making (IDM) unit in policy models. Based on a common data framework MIND will develop IDM models, including agent-based models, focussing on different topics in an integrated manner in different regional case studies. The IDM models will be estimated and calibrated using agricultural statistics and big datasets, drawing on established econometric and evolving machine learning techniques and using both traditional models of optimising behaviour and theories from behavioural economics.

MIND STEP closely cooperates with a range of stakeholders to co-create and apply the MIND STEP model toolbox to selected regional, national and EU wide policy cases.

MIND STEP is a partner to the AGRIMODELS cluster (https://agrimodels-cluster.eu/) bringing together research projects which operate in countries across Europe to increase the modelling capabilities in the agriculture sector.

Coordinated by Stichting Wageningen Research (The Netherlands) the MIND STEP consortium includes 11 partners from 8 countries.

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under Grant Agreement Nr. 817566.

Today, in the CONSOLE project we want to present another of the sister projects.

The LIVERUR project pays special attention to Living Labs as they foster more sustainable resource mobilization, better cooperation between operators throughout the value chain, and lead to new services.

Therefore, Living Lab uses the concept of open innovation in a broader sense, with a success / failure rate determined by empirically based key research factors.

With empirically proven studies still lacking, LIVERUR’s short-term goal is to improve knowledge of business models growing in rural areas, including understanding their potential. In the long term, the project will increase the potential for rural economic diversification.

LIVERUR project is presented at the ‘III Meeting of Rural Professional Women’

Partners

The project is developed by 24 entities from different countries of the European Union and led by the Catholic University of Murcia.

Don’t be scared. We are sure that when you have seen the word “Excalibur” in our Brother Projects section, you will have thought that in the CONSOLE project we have gone crazy.

Well, none of that. Excalibur, in addition to being that legendary sword that King Arthur managed to remove from a rock, is also a European project on the dynamics of soil biodiversity and its synergistic effects with prebiotic and probiotic approaches in horticulture.

But … exactly what it is about

In the Excalibur project logo the sword appears rooted in the ground, rather than nailed to a solid rock. And we believe it symbolizes the strength of biodiversity (the sword) in and on the ground.

Its promoters argue that Excalibur will develop a comprehensive soil management strategy to increase the effectiveness of biocontrol and biofertilization practices in agriculture; increasing the force between that sword and that ground, right?

Excalibur goals

To achieve their purposes, they have developed a series of objectives:

1. Focus on multi-scale interactions between plants and underground organisms to exploit the potential of bioefectors and multifunctional bioinoculants.
2. Optimize the formulation and application methods of these products according to the dynamics of the native biodiversity of the soil.
3. Develop a strategy to improve the exploitation of interactions of soil biodiversity with bioefectors and bioinoculants by evaluating their impacts on crops and biodiversity with different agricultural management practices (conventional, organic) and conditions of biotic stress / abiotic.
4. Create a multi-criteria model to assess the state of the soil biodiversity of farming systems with the aim of using bioefectors and bioinoculants more efficiently.
5. Develop technical tools to monitor the persistence and dispersal of bioinoculants under field conditions for ecotoxicological and agronomic purposes.
6. Assess the effects of the new strategy on the economy, environmental quality, and ecosystem functions.
7. Disseminate the results among all stakeholders with a dynamic and comprehensive methodology and encourage the adoption of recommended practices derived from the new strategy at the local, regional and international levels.

Who are the Knights of the Round Table?

The Excalibur project is developed by public and private entities in Europe that have developed their strategy in three main activities subdivided into six Work Packages (WP).

There is no doubt that the results of the Excalibur project will be exciting.

Kick-off meeting of the H2020 project EXCALIBUR (On 19-21 June 2019)