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One of the main tasks in the EUREKA project is developing the design and software of the FarmBook, and the data development team responsible for this is very much dependent on the results and input from other partner teams analyzing end-user needs.

In late August this year, EUREKA held its second consortium meeting, following up on the kick-off meeting held in Bruges, Belgium in January. Due to the Covid-19 situation, the August meeting was arranged as a three-day online event, where consortium members from all corners of Europe met up virtually to tell and learn more about the progress of the different activities and tasks in the EUREKA project.

A huge quantitative end-user survey with altogether 2407 respondents has recently been completed in the EUREKA-project. The purpose of the survey is to better understand the needs and preferences of end-users (farmers, foresters, advisors) when searching for relevant information within the field of agriculture, both online and through other communication channels.

This November, EUREKAs sister project, EURAKNOS, marks a key milestone: publication of the EURAKNOS Explorer’s Guide to Thematic Networks.

Recently, the Farmer Led Innovation Network (FLIN) and EURAKNOS, the “sister project” of EUREKA, hosted a webinar on Farmer Led Innovation, facilitated by Dr Lisa Williams van Dijk. FLIN is a group of organisations in the UK who advocate funding for farmer led research, development and innovation. 40 persons attended, ranging from researchers, industry representatives, journalists, facilitators, advisors, welfare organisations, farmers, vets and environmentalists, to project managers who joined the workshop from across Europe and even Australia.

The Smart Farming Technology Group is creating the architecture and developing the repository to store the data collected from the multi-actor projects

At the EUREKA consortium meeting in August 2020, Laurens Van der Cruyssen presented a technique called “User journeys” - a tool that ensures that you have considered everything to optimize the user-experience.

Do you believe that making key information and knowledge about the latest innovations in agriculture & forestry more easily findable and accessible could benefit you, or others you know working in these sectors?

In this first edition of the EUREKA newsletter, you can read about the EUREKA Kick off meeting, learn more about how EUREKA is related to the sister project EURAKNOS and meet Alice Minichini from CEJA, who represents the voice of young European farmers in the EUREKA project. Plus much more! To follow the work in EUREKA sign up for this newsletter or follow us on twitter.

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An important process before building the open knowledge platform, the Farmbook, which is one of the main outputs of the EUREKA project, is to understand who the potential FarmBook users are: Their requirements for accessing knowledge and how farmers, foresters and advisors would normally tackle issues within their agricultural sector.

EUREKA is one of a growing ‘family’ of Horizon 2020 multi-actor projects that aim to improve and strengthen the creation, exchange and practical use of agriculture and forestry-related knowledge at European, national and regional level. These family connections do not get any closer or stronger than the unique relationship that exists between EUREKA and EURAKNOS. These two sister projects are both led by the University of Gent with largely the same consortium partners. Together they are exploring the feasibility of constructing an EU-wide open source knowledge platform that will intensify knowledge exchange between H2020 multi-actor projects and the farmers and foresters that can make practical use of their outcomes. The key difference between the two sister projects is the type of H2020 multi-actor project they are focusing upon.

Plant protection against pests and diseases is a big issue for organic fruit growers, as fruit is a very sensitive produce. Many organic farmers in Europe have adapted locally their own practices and techniques to succesfully deal with the challenge of organic crop protection. However, this valuable practical knowledge often remains at the local level, instead of being shared with fruit growers in other regions facing the same problems. The BIOFRUITNETproject aims at connecting practitioners in the organic fruit sector throughout Europe and making these successful methods of crop protection available to all.

More than 100 multi-actor projects examined to pick out the best practices; The work of investigating a broad spectrum of multi actor projects in order to identify best practices within a number of key areas is in full progress in the work package 1 of the EUREKA project. A thorough desktop investigation of more than 100 multi actor projects has been carried out.

Project Officer at the CEJA secretariat located in Brussels, Alice Minichini, explains CEJA's role in the EUREKA project.

The EUREKA Project kick-off meeting took place in Brugge, Belgium in late January 2020. The scope of the meeting was to plan the work ahead and getting the process of mapping the multi-actor projects and building mulit-actor communities started.