The ocean is one of the main systems of our planetary biosphere. It accounts for almost half of the planet's biological production, but a much smaller proportion of human food – about 2% of overall calorie intake and 15% of protein intake. This is no longer tenable given the nutritional...

CEEweb for Biodiversity supports creating and maintenance of sustainable farming systems, which can ensure producing safer and healthier food and provide conditions for a thriving countryside with secured livelihoods for farmers. Well-preserved nature is a pre-requisite for those systems, as it delivers a whole array of benefits for farming, including pollination, appropriate nutrient cycling,...

The Earth’s climate has always undergone periodic changes that have affected the conditions available to life on the planet. Yet recent anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases (GHGs) are the highest in history and atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4) and nitrous oxide (N2O) are unprecedented in at least...

Sjoerd Wartena – founder of Terre de Liens, a French landrights movement – explains to Elisabeth Winkler from the Biodynamic Land Trust, how he and his wife created a civic organisation.

The path to fairer land governance in Europe reached a milestone today, as the European Parliament approved an own initiative report that recognizes the urgent problems of land concentration, and access to land in the EU and demands for adequate responses.

Skylark is based on the belief that in order to achieve sustainability, the whole crop rotation, in fact the whole farm management, should be taken into consideration. The foundation has 400 participating farmers and 60 knowledge and supply chain partners all working towards a more sustainable arable agriculture in the Netherlands....

Fifty-two new programmes aimed at promoting EU agri-food products in Europe and across the world have been approved by the European Commission. Covering a wide range of foods from dairy products and olive oil to fruit and vegetables and meat products, these programmes are supported by grants from the EU's...

'Farm-to-fork' is not just a trendy buzzword but an exciting new ethos for how we eat that's taking hold in all walks of Irish life - from an urban farm in Dublin to an open prison in Cavan and a Michelin-star restaurant in Galway

Dans les années 60, les politiques publiques ont cherché à faire diminuer drastiquement le nombre de petites exploitations agricoles (EA). Et pourtant, aujourd’hui elles, sont toujours présentes dans le paysage agricole européen et français. La persistance des petites EA questionne : ces EA ont-elles développé des stratégies économiques qui les...

Several EU lawmakers from the European Parliament’s agriculture committee expressed their concerns on Wednesday (30 August) about the introduction of new technologies in farming, claiming that it might put smallholders at risk. MEPs discussed a report on precision agriculture conducted by the Scientific and Technological Options Assessment service (STOA), a...

The potential offered by social innovation to improve the livelihoods of remote forest-dependent communities will be at the centre of discussions during a special session of the 125th Anniversary Congress of the International Union of Forest Research Organisations (IUFRO), to be held in Freiburg, Germany, from the 18th to the...

The digital revolution is now upon us and more and more technologies are available to the agricultural sector. Farmers in the UK, for example, can use Farmbench (farmbench.ahdb.org.uk). Farmbench collects and shares data from across the UK, providing farmers with useful indications on potential changes to their farm management practices which...

The potential contribution of organic farming to the public goods, ‘Nature and Biodiversity’, ‘Environment’, ‘Energy and Climate’, ‘Human Health and Welfare’ and ‘Animal Health and Welfare’ in Denmark is guided and partly secured by the principles and specific requirements of the EU Organic Regulation. However, other factors, such as the...

Urgenci was present at the “Oxford Real Farming Conference” (ORFC) in Britain, a conference that started as a small alternative conference to the “Oxford Farming Conference” (supported in 2017 by Bayer, BASF and others) but that now has overtaken the conventional farming conference in both the number of delegates and...

The path to a healthy, sustainable and fair food consumption starts already during our early years of childhood and youth. For this reason the EAThink 2015 project has developed two interactive educational games targeting Primary and Secondary school students, in order to help them better understand the different mechanisms of...

Many European rural areas are locked into a “circle of decline” by two mutually reinforcing trends–firstly, a shortage of jobs and sustainable business activity and secondly, inadequate and declining services. Over the last two years the ENRD has carried out work to look at the first of these challenges by...

This seminar is dedicated to exploring and sharing the existing experiences with implementing the EIP-AGRI via Rural Development Programmes support. This event will be held with the support of the Greek RDP Managing Authority – Network Support Unit of the National Rural Network. With over 230 Operational Groups (OGs) already...

Worldwide, the food sovereignty movement is taking root. The multitude of new food sovereignty initiatives speak to its strength as a concept, and as a source of practical responses to today’s problematic food and farming system. The stories in this issue of Farming Matters address interwoven issues of food sovereignty...

This newsletter is the third edition of the Farm-Success Project newsletter. The Farm-Success Project newsletter outlines all of the most recent Farm-Success Project developments, detailing the Project’s road to creating strategies to train farmers for a sustainable succession process in order to enable and to motivate young farmers to continue...

The forest sector has a great potential to generate jobs and income, support livelihoods and contribute to rural development by suppling goods and maintaining forest ecosystem services. The forest sector is expected to play an important role in the emerging green economy in the pan-European region. The transition to a...