Analysing one year of activities on intercropping – IntercropVALUES second annual meeting

More than 60 participants, representing research teams from national or regional universities and technology institutes, development agencies, cooperatives, SMEs, and rural networks, met at the premises of the University of Bonn for the second annual meeting of IntercropVALUES.

The IntercropVALUES project aims to exploit the advantages of intercropping to design and manage productive, diversified, resilient, profitable, and environmentally friendly cropping systems that are acceptable to farmers and agri-food chain actors. This ambitious objective involves the development of 13 co-innovation case studies from the EU (9), UK (1), Serbia (1), Switzerland (1) and Mozambique (1). The members of the so-called CICS, representing both conventional and organic farming, as well as short and long value chains, have set their own objectives and agenda during this first year.

After the participatory project’s first year of activities, participants shared their first results and the planned activities for the coming year.

On their agenda were topics such as:

• Identifying the blockages to intercropping,
• Describing, and measuring the ecosystem services of intercropping,
• Integrating modelling tasks into the overall research project to address partners’ research questions, and
• A workshop on writing strong policy briefs.

All participants agreed that, nowadays, researchers are asked to explain society and policymakers the knowledge derived from their experiments in a comprehensive way – which is key if project members are to have a real impact.

The IntercropVALUES project aims to exploit the advantages of intercropping to design and manage productive, diversified, resilient, profitable, and environmentally friendly cropping systems that are acceptable to farmers and agri-food chain actors. This ambitious objective involves the development of 13 co-innovation case studies from the EU (9), UK (1), Serbia (1), Switzerland (1) and Mozambique (1). The members of the so-called CICS, representing both conventional and organic farming, as well as short and long value chains, have set their own objectives and agenda during this first year.

IntercropValuES is a multi-disciplinary and multi-actor project, bringing together scientists and local actor of the agri-food chain. 27 participants, 15 countries and 3 continents from a wide diversity of organisations and stakeholders. IFOAM Organics Europe represents the organic movement.

Follow the project on www.intercropvalues.eu, X, Facebook & LinkedIn and learn about intercropping and the IntercropVALUES project.