Newsletter 3

Welcome to our third newsletter!

We will start this editorial with the COVID-19 pandemic crisis and its consequences…

We hope that you and your relatives are in good health and that you managed to keep this nasty coronavirus away!

Fortunately, videoconferencing technologies help all of us to keep meeting, interacting and therefore continue working towards our “passion” for intercropping, providing with enthusiasm a mere drop in the ocean of agroecology. We are creating novel scientific knowledge and we are still sharing it with all our partners, farmers, advisors and other stakeholders in the Multi-Actor Platforms; also to the society in general via social media. Thank you all for your continuous support!

The next step to boost the adoption of intercropping is probably to convince policy makers to propose new European and associated national policies that strongly support intercropping in Europe, in order to overcome blockages and economic barriers. We know about the ecosystem services provided by species mixtures, although some assumed functions still need to be assessed and researched in the ongoing work at ReMIX and beyond. But this knowledge needs to be widely disseminated. We are therefore strongly encouraging all of you to continue working hard at ReMIX to finalise the work on promising results and to disseminate the new knowledge produced.

The last key message we want to transmit is that we are also counting on you to contribute to the drafting of dissemination materials and policy briefs for policy makers, which will be managed by appointed topic coordinators, who will contact ReMIX partners to contribute with information, materials and ideas.

Finally, we want to remind you our key events:  ReMIX final meeting, (24^th and 25^th March, 2021) and the Final Conference, open to the public, which will be taking place the day before in Brussels (23^th March, 2021). In addition, we remind you that you can still submit abstracts until September 30^th for the online scientific conference “Intercropping for sustainability” January 19-20 2021, co-organised by with the Association of Applied Biologists in UK (AAB), together with H2020 project DIVERSify and ReMIX.

We wish you all the best and take care!

Eric Justes (CIRAD), Elodie Tan (INRAe IT) and Jean-Noël Aubertot (INRAe), ReMIX coordination team