ALL ORGANIC: Agroecology Living Labs to promote robust and resilient Organic production systems

Summary

The ALL-Organic research project will promote a functional network of experiences, models, and systems able to support the development of diversified organic food systems, with the aim of implementing robust and resilient organic crop productions, by involving food system actors from field to fork.The integration of agroecological approach with the enhancement of functional agro-biodiversity in organic farming systems is seen as a key lever for the development of sustainable, robust and resilient agriculture productions. This requires transformative changes based on the redesign of the organic agroecosystems to increase their spatial, temporal and genetic diversification in order to amplify ecosystem services. But more knowledge on the relations among diversification components and their agro-environmental and socio-economic performances is needed to support system redesign.The project aims to demonstrate the environmental and socio-economic quality performances of diversified agroecologically centered organic farming systems, confirming their pivotal role in the transformative pathways for transformation of food systems towards sustainability and to catalyze consumers awareness on the overall advantages of diversified system based organic food and produce evidence-based recommendations targeting different socio-economic group at national, transnational and European level.
Consolidating the Agroecology Living Lab approach, seven partners form five CORE Organic Countries of Europe and North Africa will join their efforts to test the hypotheses that the implementation of co-designed, locally developed and adapted diversified organic cropping and farming systems is an effective strategy to:
-exploit (bio)diversity functions
-reduce the impact of pests and diseases mitigating the dependency from off-farm plant protection product
-efficiently use of on-farm resources and by-products reducing wastes and nutrient losses, and to
mitigate the impact of climate change guaranteeing the stability of yields