The third workshop of the Galician RAIN was held on 14th of June 2024, organized by the University of Santiago de Compostela (USC) team, led by Rosa Mosquera.
The meeting took place at the facilities of Fundación Juana de Vega, a benchmark in promoting knowledge of the rural environment in Galicia, located in Oleiros, A Coruña.The event ended with a field visit to Os Biosbardos and Bosques Naturales.
The workshop started with a first session of agroforestry consulting, focusing on the different modules associated with Galicia and the validation of the protocol for the main extension services. The discussion that arose was based on the figure of the advisor and her/his difficulty in connecting in a practical way the different agents, innovations and the territory. An important role is also played by the autonomous administration, considering that it also fails in this matter.
In the following session, the main topics were the AF4EU Knowledge Platform and Agroforestry Business Models. A practical exercise was conducted in order to detect flaws on a range of selected value chains in Europe. It consisted on proposing new developments or items, and study possible applications in the Galician territory, taking into consideration its possibilities and resources. Later on, there was a presentation of the first design of the AFI-BUS DSS, encouraging participants to comment on whether they found the tool useful and possible improvements.
After that, the fisrt field visit took place in Os Biosbardos, an ecological agricultural project based on the principles of permaculture: permanent and sustaibable agriculture that favors the conscious design of environments that reproduce the patterns of nature, care for the land and people, and a model of syntropic agriculture, promoting the creation of agro-ecosystems, which is the creation of agroforestry ecosystems inspired by forests in order to produce food and conserve nature (edible forests).
The last session presented the different dissemination materials, widely received among the participants. The workshop was rounded off with a visit after lunch to Bosques Naturales, three exploitations with a fundamentally agronomic-livestock use, as well as forestry in some cases.
