Know more

The Third Annual meeting of H2020 European project ReMIX was held online on April 21-22 2020. Project partners had booked that date to meet in Alnarp (Sweden), in a yearly reunion that would be hosted by the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU). COVID19 pandemia made it impossible for participants to travel, so a 2 days online-meeting was held instead. Around 50 researchers from 11 countries in Europe, as well as Switzerland and China, attended the event.

ReMIX coordinators, Jean Noel Aubertot (French National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and the Environment, INRAE) and Eric Justes (Agricultural Research Centre for International Development CIRAD) welcomed the meeting, offering an overview of the work carried out since previous reunion in Pamplona (May 2019) and introducing the meeting agenda and goals. Sessions covering the different work packages followed afterwards, showing a very good dynamic in Multi-actors Platforms with demonstration activities very attractive for farmers and advisors and many interesting results from the research activities both in the field and the lab (despite various weather accidents or the sanitary crisis). Already many scientific essays are being published; it appears important to identify key messages to transfer to practitioners. A wide range of online and offline tools are now ready to be made available to farmers and advisers in the coming months.

Implementing intercropping is not only a matter of agronomic and technological challenges. Farmers willing to try intercropping face marketing challenges and policy makers do not always know what policies work best to support them. At the meeting, a policy brief session was held to discuss the key messages ReMIX will bring to policy makers in Europe. Subjects like the contribution of intercropping to pesticides reduction and different ways in which Intercropping contributes to sustain diversity were discussed. A series of Policy Recommendations will be presented at final conference in Brussels in April 2021, for which a steering committee with representatives from other H2020 projects in the Crop Diversification Cluster (https://www.cropdiversification.eu/) has been established. Practice abstracts with practical information and tips for farmers and advisers have also been elaborated by ReMIX partners, and a summer course on intercropping will be delivered targeting post grad students in Europe.