EU-FarmBook: supporting knowledge exchange between all AKIS actors in the European Union

Project Information

EU-FarmBook

Grant agreement ID: 101060382

DOI

10.3030/101060382

EC signature date 7 June 2022

Start date 1 August 2022

End date 31 July 2029

Funded under

• Food, Bioeconomy Natural Resources, Agriculture and Environment

Total cost

€ 15 002 553,75

EU contribution

€ 15 002 553,75

Coordinated by

UNIVERSITEIT GENT
Belgium

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - EU-FarmBook (EU-FarmBook: supporting knowledge exchange between all AKIS actors in the European Union)

Reporting period: 2024-02-01 to 2025-07-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

The EU-FarmBook platform is an online, open-source, European knowledge reservoir about agriculture and forestry practical solutions. It makes it easy to search for and share practical knowledge about farming and forestry from regional, national and EU research and innovation projects. This is the first long-term, EU-wide digital knowledge reservoir. EU-FarmBook will connect many AKIS actors, provide training materials as input to the advisors and serve education institutes.

In terms of dissemination, EU-FarmBook will form links to traditional channels, such as agricultural journals. The overall aim is for the platform to stimulate knowledge exchange, users interaction and collaboration, ultimately resulting in innovation for environmentally, socially and economically sustainable agriculture and forestry.

The aim of the EU-FarmBook project is that the concept of the platform will evolve to an exploitable product that will stimulate the exchange and collaboration between the AKIS actors at an EU wide scale. Targeted and efficient management of data and information to support agriculture and forestry practice from different sources will not only support the CAP but also the Green Deal and Farm to Fork objectives and targets, ultimately resulting in innovation for an environmentally, socially and economically sustainable agriculture and forestry

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

To support the transition to sustainable agriculture and forestry, EU-FarmBook builds a digital multilingual meeting place that helps farmers, foresters and other rural actors to find innovative solutions to the daily challenges they face.
During the first reporting period the EU-FarmBook team worked towards the pre-launch of the EU-FarmBook digital online platform. An exclusive first look was offered to EU project coordinators and agricultural journalists as well as EU, regional and national policymakers on the 8th of February 2024. The EU-FarmBook online platform makes it easy to look for and share practical knowledge about forestry and farming. The project’s technical team demonstrated its material upload process and the platform’s current features and already planned future improvements.

The main goal of the second reporting period was to populate the platform with high-quality Knowledge Objects from EU-funded multi-actor projects, essential for enabling core platform features. Managing authorities, project coordinators, AKIS planners, and policymakers were invited to stay informed and contribute. Advisors played a pivotal role in amplifying content to practitioners. Over 18 months, Ambassadors strengthened ties with Horizon project coordinators and national CAP networks, significantly boosting content uploads. By the end of RP2, 2042 projects had registered, with Knowledge Objects from 1838 projects uploaded, including 261 Horizon R&I projects (51 Thematic, 10 Advisory Networks), 1537 EIP-AGRI Operational Group projects, 40 other R&I projects with rural development funding.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

The EU-FarmBook Online Platform is being developed to test the idea to bring together all the tangible outputs of EU-funded research and innovation projects and organize them in one user-friendly platform to help get practical knowledge into the hands of the farmers, foresters, and advisors across Europe who need it most. In addition to ordinary documents, contributions can be in the form of slideshows, audio files, videos, apps, data sets and images. Contributors can upload materials on forestry, crop farming, livestock, environment, society and economics in any European language they choose. Agricultural knowledge is now safely stored in the long term and made easily accessible across Europe. Today, users are able to refine their search for information by selecting the resource types, topics, sub-topics and countries they are interested in, as well as the projects whose results they are looking for. In the next phase of the project, based on the principles of AI, an intelligent search engine will better adapt the search outcome to the specific interest of the individual user of the EU-FarmBook.

The EU-FarmBook Platform

The EU-FarmBook project consortium