Organic living labs develop and test food security & resilience scenarios

Helping to create and support “living labs” (LLs) is an important strategy within EU research and innovation to promote the transfer of useful knowledge into practice – often on a field or farm.

Living labs?

In an agricultural context, the goal of living labs is most often to create a field site or farm for testing and demonstrating new farming techniques, or equip an existing farm with the right tools and equipment to do so. A living lab is a place that farmers, advisors and other groups can visit and learn from directly, becoming a part of the larger LL community themselves.

In the ECO-READY project, which seeks to create a real-time surveillance system for emerging threats to food security and biodiversity as well as knowledge-based resilience strategies, 10 living labs have been selected through an open call and evaluation process during the spring of this year (2024). They represent 10 different countries from across Europe’s climatic regions. Two of the ECO-READY living labs are focused fully on organic farming, one in Denmark and the other in the Czech Republic. In this article we will highlight these organic LLs and our collaboration with them so far.

Developing scenarios for modelling food security

But first just a wee bit of background on the goals of the collaboration with the living labs. ECO-READY has chosen the years 2030 and 2050 as the future anchors around which to develop possible future scenarios for agriculture and food production. Each LL was asked to choose 5 agricultural products important in their region and to identify drivers of change or potential shocks to the current system, with climate change and extreme weather being the two most obvious.

With these products and drivers as the starting point, the LLs met individually with small groups of ECO-READY partners to co-develop 5 food security scenarios each. The scenarios will serve as the basis for modelling led by a team of ECO-READY experts at Wageningen University with support from others at the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre (JRC). They can include both challenges & risks as well as opportunities.

The goal of the modelling is to project how each of the scenario storylines could play out, looking ahead to 2030 and 2050. It will look at how the production of the selected products of each LL will be impacted and explore the overall impact on the larger food system. Most importantly, possible mitigation and resilience strategies may be identified, which will serve as a basis for policy recommendations as well as actual field experiments or trials to be tested in the living labs. All the key insights and project outcomes will be available to anyone through the ECO-READY Observatory, a mobile and web application that is the project’s primary tangible output.

OK, without further ado, let’s meet these organic pioneers!

LivOrganic, Denmark

Four Danish organisations comprise this living lab:

1. The Institute for Food Studies & Agri Industrial Development (IFAU) brings experience in applied social sciences with agri-food systems, value chains and food markets, and leads the LivOrganic lab.
2. Aarhus University’s Department of Agroecology, which brings expertise in climate change modelling and scenarios, precision farming tools and arable crops.
3. Organic Denmark frames the Danish organic community from farm to fork and provides expertise in organic farming and framing policy recommendations.
4. Lastly MAA.C ApS, an SME that specialises in promotion and outreach for organic products and gathers the network Bio Aus Dänemark to connect producers with markets.

LivOrganic has chosen to focus on milk & dairy, apples, potatoes, spring barley, oats, sugar beet, and rapeseed – a few more than 5, which reflects their enthusiasm. In their proposal for the ECO-READY living-lab call, they framed their main objective as follows: “To organize a sustainable thematic living lab in Denmark to investigate the impact from climate change, biodiversity, agronomy and markets on actors’ decision to enhance or reduce organic food production, thus food security.” In doing this, LivOrganic will position themselves to address two central dilemmas: i) the use of farmland for food production versus other purposes and ii) the use of crops and other agricultural products for food or non-food purposes.

The group also highlights the issue of the lack of data – both environmental and socio-economic – for many organic crops and products. In their work with ECO-READY, they aim to help fill these data gaps. The literal grounds for doing so include a 5-hectare state-of-the-art experimental site operated by Aarhus University, as well as the fields of 10 growers who will be invited to particate and supply additional critical data and practical feedback. On the socio-economic side of the equation, LivOrganic will engage students, farmers, companies, food processors, wholesalers, & retailers, consumers, and policy makers in a variety of targeted events and activities during the two-year collaboration with ECO-READY. This multidimensional approach to gathering data will aid both in disseminating the project as well as provide a useful tool for aligning academia, industry and policy actors.

Scenarios

LivOrganic and ECO-READY partners (including IFOAM Organics Europe) co-developed a varied set of scenarios, each of which “describes an “anticipated future and the assumed impact on organic agricultural production.” In brief, the questions at the heart of the different scenarios are:

• How will predicted changes in temperature and precipitation affect the products selected by the living lab? One scenario examines increased precipitation and higher temperatures in the winter season, affecting dairy, sugar beet, and potato sectors; a second focuses on warmer temperatures and periodic risk of drought in the summer season.
• How can biodiversity benefit agricultural production? LivOrganic lists many benefits and examples, such as actively reducing pests and fungi, achieving resilience through intercropping and mixed livestock-crop farms, diversifying the market through introduction of new and heirloom varieties, and buffering against extreme weather events.
• How will national-level land-use regulations that incentivise farmers to take land out of production and use it instead for nature restoration or energy production (e.g., solar farms) impact organic farms and their decision making?

LivOrganic emphasised that these scenarios are a “first draft”, a starting point, and that they are still to be validated by Danish organic farmers in their community, and possibly refined. Upcoming activities organised by LivOrganic include one workshop co-developed with young organic farmers to define the future of organic farming in Denmark and another that will bring organic producers to the table to discuss production in the context of future climate change.

Living Lab PROBIO, Czech Republic

The PROBIO Living Lab is coordinated by Czech Organics, s.r.o., who is represented in the project by its founder, Jan Trávníček. Czech organics is a young, rapidly developing company providing complex advisory services and research on organic farming in the Czech Republic. The second partner is Ekofarma PROBIO, s.r.o., a 371-hectare working organic farm established in 2007 and also an official demonstration farm of the Czech Ministry of Agriculture since 2018. The farm has long been in involved in applied research on organic farming. Michael Vrána is the current farm manager and will be involved in the collaboration. The third official member, with a very similar yet dashingly different name, is PRO-BIO, obchodní společnost (trading company) s.r.o. The PRO-BIO trading co. was established in 1992 and is one of the biggest organic food processors in the Czech Republic. The company is currently collaborating with more than 100 domestic farmers and is a producer of certified organic seeds. Adam Brezáni is involved in both Ekofarma PROBIO and PRO-BIO trading Co., and will represent them in ECO-READY.

The PROBIO living lab partners are located in the Velke Hosteradky agricultural area in the South Moravia region which, due to the local climate, is one of the most drought-prone areas of the country and consequently has seen significant soil erosion. In the collaboration with ECO-READY they will focus on pork, buckwheat, spelt, alfalfa, and crimson clover.

In addition to organic-certified practices, Ekofarma PROBIO and partners have reintroduced and cultivated heritage varieties of cereals and buckwheat to better adapt crop production to climate change and to prevent further degradation of soil quality. They identify for their region gaps, data requirements, and how they will help to address them through the collaboration with ECO-READY and beyond. Most of the gaps are related to lack of data or resources at the local level. As examples, a lack of data on the impacts of various environmental and climatic factors on crops grown in the region, insufficient knowledge-and-technology transfer amongst the local farming community due to a lack of advisors, and insufficient opportunities for collaboration at local and regional level.

Already in their proposal, PROBIO touched on potential policy recommendations related to their five chosen products. For example, “policy incentives for adopting climate-smart practices in pig farming”, “policies that encourage perennial grass-clover mixtures, such as subsidies for crop rotation that include, for example, clover or alfalfa”, and “policies that support the development and adoption of resilient spelt varieties.” We as IFOAM Organics Europe will work closely with the living labs on these policy recommendations – a key project outcome.

Scenarios

The Czech Republic has been experiencing warmer winters and summers, with overall less but more intense rain, resulting in drier conditions on average. These trends are projected by the IPCC to continue and intensify in coming decades.

To start addressing these current and future challenges, PROBIO and ECO-READY partners will focus on modelling and experiments around five main scenarios:

1. The status quo: What will the situation likely be in 2030 and 2050 for the 5 selected products?
2. Extreme weather fluctuations and their impacts
3. Sustainable practices that can mitigate against extreme weather events, such as enhancing soil health and biodiversity
4. Organic market disruption caused by “economic/trade matters, inflation pressures, combined with increasing prices of farming
5. Contribution to the sustainability of local organic supply chains by “seeding organic stewards” through education programmes, as well as revamping policies around organic farming.

Impacts and promising mitigation & adaptation strategies will be investigated for all scenarios.

To conclude, we are delighted to have these two passionate organic living labs involved in the ECO-READY project, and we are looking forward to continuing our collaboration in earnest now that the summer holidays are behind us. This map lists all ECO-READY Living Labs, including descriptions and more info.

About the ECO-READY project

The Horizon Europe-funded ECO-READY project wants to serve policy, farms, enterprises, consumers, and society. It will assess drivers of climate change affecting food security and biodiversity across Europe. Understanding the EU’s food system vulnerabilities will allow the project to develop scenarios which will be tested by a network of 10 Living Labs. As project partner, IFOAM Organics Europe has been involved co-creating the scenario development methodology and promoting the first round of a Delphi-study to identify local challenges and interests around food security, biodiversity, and climate change.

Between 2022 and 2026, its 18 partners from 11 countries (and 10 Living Labs) will make the knowledge they produce available frequently and consistently through an e-platform and mobile application, the ECO-READY Observatory. Follow the project’s developments on YouTube, LinkedIn, Instagram, X & Facebook.

All photos are from the demonstration farm Ekofarma PROBIO in South Moravia, Czechia; Photo credit: PROBIO: Martin Matêj