DiverIMPACTS provided new insights on crop diversification barriers and enablers and making it possible to identify key “ingredients” to a successful implementation at farm level, avoid trade-offs between performances and help reach Green Deal objectives:
o Maintain a significant part of dominant species in the diversified system, with an ad hoc adaptation of their crop management, to maintain sequence productivity;
o Add minor crops, such as legumes to increase global ecosystem services provision;
o Use “compensatory strategies”, i.e. intercropping and multiple cropping, to increase and secure yields while further increasing ecosystem services delivery;
o Combine these levers a judicious combination of practices which is required to maintain high ecosystem service provision and to face different risks;
o As no crop sequence would reach all expected services anywhere and anytime, use an adaptive management to continuously cope with to changing and evolving pedo-climatic and socio-economic factors.
To implement these ingredients in practice, multicriteria assessment tools have been developed at field, farm and territory levels to help actors drive their own pathway to sustainable agrifood systems. Also, crop diversification requires adjusting existing value chains, or developing new ones as well as fostering collaborative approaches between all actors of the value chains to coordinate and align their strategies. In this context, all resources, solutions, tools and open-access databases have been made available to all actors as well as to upcoming projects to further develop them.
Beyond the farm and value chain levels, successful crop diversification also implies changes in the wider sociotechnical system (policy, regulation, education and research). DiverIMPACTS has produced insights and recommendations to make the sociotechnical landscape more prone to crop diversification: (i) a training and education strategy for farmers, advisors and teachers to enhance crop diversification which is being implemented in schools and universities of agriculture in Europe and (ii) practical solutions to produce actionable knowledge through co-innovation processes and enhanced networking anchoring as well as to make multiactor research projects more efficient.
At the policy level, recommendations have also been made:
o Expand the scope of CAP and enrich CAP instruments to support both farmers and other value chain actors to align and coordinate their diversification strategies, including risk insurances mechanisms and payment for ecosystem services;
o Further enrich the upcoming EU farm sustainability data network by including crop management practices at the field level, so as to help actors select their best practices, monitor the sustainability of crop diversification and coherently drive the transition;
o Adapt research funding instruments to sustain systems approaches over time, ensure better capitalization of research results across projects while increasing flexibility in Research Innovation Action projects to help foster farmer-led approaches that are crucial to develop tailor-made solutions;
o Reallocate public and private R&D resources towards minor and diversification crops, including breeding and farming practices on these specific crops, which are currently lacking, to increase their relative competitiveness compared to major crops and facilitate the uptake of their benefits.
DiverIMPACTS established provisions for the project legacy and maintenance of case studies and field experiments so as to sustain efforts among key actors in agri-food systems as a basis for wider adoption of crop diversification beyond the project lifetime.
