General Description

General Description

Agroforestry (AF) is a type of climate-smart agricultural (CSA) practice that involves intentionally integrating woody vegetation (trees or shrubs) with crop and/or animal systems to benefit from the resulting ecological and economic interactions.

AF4EU is based on the excellent results of our previous project – AFINET – with more than 1300 unique stakeholders reached and the creation of 12 innovation videos, 45 factsheets, 30 technical articles and more than 100 practice abstracts – check them out!

In this new project, our partners from the previous initiative have team up with new others, to both extend the knowledge gather in other areas of Europe and complete the innovations with the creation of business models and the strengthen of extension services.

The AF4EU Consortium is composed by 12 partners from 10 different countries and counts with the contribution of 5 associations.

AF4EU will continue promoting agroforestry in Europe through the development of an interactive, innovation-driven, and multi-actor agroforestry network.

Objectives

  • Enlarging the Agroforestry Innovation Network created in AFINET, stablishing 8 new RAINs (Portugal, Belgium, Ireland, Greece, France, Andalucía-Spain, Slovakia and Germany) connected to a Lighthouse RAIN (already created in AFINET – Galicia-Spain, Italy and Finland). New RAINs are connected to a Lighthouse RAIN with similar biogeographic regions, being all connected through a network of Innovation Brokers. All RAINs include a balanced representation of the key actors with complementary type of knowledge: farmers, policy makers, advisory services, different multipliers, etc.
  • Improving the knowledge of agroforestry through specific dissemination activities, training and development of the advisory capacity, in order to promote sustainable land management and GD and F2F objectives across Europe.
  • Developing an AF Knowledge Platform (KP) that will foster knowledge exchange by integrating and synthesizing existing best practices and research findings. This platform will then be integrated in the EU-FarmBook platform – a EU-wide interactive knowledge reservoir.
  • Maximizing synergies with International, European, national and regional projects and policies. AF4EU will support the implementation of the European Innovation Partnership (EIP) ‘Agricultural Productivity and Sustainability’ through interaction with Operational Groups, communicating network outcomes to the EIP-AGRI service point (including operational groups) and national, regional and local AKIS, European Commission CDG, and other international farmer networks and extension services (such asICRAF, AFTA, European National and Regional Rural Development Networks, EUFRAS, IFOAM,A2C France, ProAgria Finland, ELO, GRA) besides the European, national and regional policy makers.