BRESOV – Green Innovation: Tackling the Future of Resilient and Sustainable Farming and Food Systems

The EU has set ambitious targets for the agricultural sector. Not only do Europe’s farmers need to ensure a reliable supply of high-quality food – fruit, vegetables, nuts, cereals and animal products – and non-food products at competitive prices, they must also deliver on the environmental commitments of the EU Green Deal and farm to fork strategy. Over the last 70 years, the farming sector has achieved great success in the first goal, but this has often come at the cost of environmental degradation, land and water pollution, negative impacts on biodiversity, and a high carbon footprint.

Moreover, the importance and potential of agroecology have been underscored by the food security crisis caused by the war in Ukraine, and the need for sustainable farming approaches that reduce the agricultural sector’s reliance on inputs from outside of the EU.

With BRESOV, Eurice is about to finish an R&I project addressing the nutritional challenges for a growing world population in a context of changing climatic conditions – with a specific focus on enhancing the productivity of vegetable crops in organic farming.

Organic agriculture must both increase and evolve to face these challenges. Farmers will need crops that maintain nutritional value and are able to deal with multiple unprecedented stressors in the coming decades. Without new climate-resilient crops, many small farmers across the EU will go out of business as their plants stop producing seeds.

To implement agroecological practices, various practice abstracts have so far resulted from the project activities and are openly available via the European CAP Network’s EIP-AGRI website or the BRESOV website.

Learn more about the outcomes of BRESOV and other related R&I initiatives within Horizon 2020 in a recent EC publication on Agroecology.

In addition, BRESOV results and the elite crop genotypes will be further presented during the final project conference between 29 and 30 March 2023 in Agrigento, Italy.