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IntercropVALUES partners meet to share vision, achievements and plans

A group of roughly 50 people standing in front of a building, smiling.

The project consortium of IntercropVALUES. (Photo: Iniciativas Innovadoras)

A group of people standing in front of a wall and discussing the various notes that are hung up.

After one year of activities, the consortium is now sharing its first results. (Photo: Iniciativas Innovadoras)

The second annual meeting of the IntercropVALUES project was held in October this year in Bonn, Germany. More than 60 participants, representing research teams from national or regional universities and technology institutes, development agencies, cooperatives, SMEs and rural networks, met at the hosting University of Bonn. FiBL Switzerland is one of the 27 partners of the project.

The project aims to exploit the advantages of intercropping to design and manage productive, diversified, resilient, profitable and environmentally-friendly cropping systems that are acceptable to farmers and agri-food chain actors. This ambitious aim involves developing 13 co-innovation case studies (CICS) from the EU, the UK, Serbia, Switzerland and Mozambique. The members of these CICS, representing both conventional and organic farming, as well as short and long value chains, have set their own objectives and agenda during this first year.

FiBL Switzerland is leading one case study and on-station experiments to explore the benefits of intercropping wheat with legumes for food:

  • The case study is focussing on wheat – fava bean intercropping with on-farm trials
  • Scientific set-up with on-station trials on wheat – pea combination

The project started in November 2022, and after one year of activities, the consortium is now sharing its first results. At this year`s meeting, the CICS leaders explained their objectives and planned activities to the scientists and other members of the consortium. These other members included researchers from the environmental and social sciences, humanities, and agronomists who will collaborate with them throughout the process. The participants identified blockages to intercropping and presented the results of an extensive survey that was designed and completed prior to the meeting by the Case Study members. They also described and measured the ecosystem services of intercropping.

Further, they discussed ways of integrating modelling tasks into the overall project to address partners' research questions with the models, explained the data management system to project partners, and even held a workshop to learn how to write convincing policy briefs. All agreed that researchers need to communicate the knowledge derived from their experiments to society and policymakers in a comprehensive way. This is key if a project is to have a real impact.

The first sown crops last August in Austria were a good opportunity to lay the groundwork for the rest of the seasons. Some additional intercropping experiments will start in autumn 2023 and others in the spring of 2024. Combinations include oat-lentil, wheat and legumes such as fava bean and pea, pea-barley or oat-lupin, sugar cane and cover crop (on Réunion island), and even vegetable intercropping, such as broccoli and vetch.

Intercropping has proven to be beneficial for many reasons (such as less use of fertilisers and pesticides, more biodiversity, more water retention, and benefits for pollinator diversity), although new research results will come after four years. A step forward in this project will be to find market opportunities for intercropping products, such as bread, pasta or beer, based on attributes such as taste, health, price or reduced environmental impact.

Further information

Contact

Ludivine Nicod, FiBL Switzerland

Links

About the project

IntercropVALUES, funded by the European Commission through the Horizon Europe Research and Innovation Program, has a project website and several social media channels where interested parties will be able to find more information about its activities and results in the coming years. A calendar with events, a section for scientific publications, and news are already available on the site.  The project is also planning two summer/winter courses for postgraduates, webinars for the processing and machinery industry, training courses for farmers and advisors, and two multi-actor conferences.