Overirrigation and excessive use of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides increase yield cost, contaminate the aquifer and destroy the biodiversity, while suboptimal livestock production increases GhG emissions, contributing to the global warming. The solution on the triangle a) global food needs, b) competitiveness/farmers’ fair income and c) sustainable farming/protection of the environment lies in knowledge. Modern farms create a huge amount of data based on IoT sensors and drones, while vast EO data become available via Copernicus Hubs. AgriDataSpace aims to establish itself as the “Game Changer” in Smart Farming and agri-environmental monitoring, and strengthen the smart-farming capacities, competitiveness and fair income by introducing an innovative, intelligent and multi-technology, fully distributed platform of platforms. To achieve technological maturity and massive acceptance, AgriDataSpace adopts and adapts a multidimensional approach that combines state of the art big data and data-spaces’ technologies (BDVA/IDSA/GAIA-X) with agricultural knowledge, new business models and agri-environment policies, leverages on existing platforms and edge computing, and introduces novel concepts, methods, tools, pilots and engagement campaigns to go beyond today’s state of the art, perform breakthrough research and create sustainable innovation in upscaling (real-time) sensor data, already evident within the project lifetime. AgriDataSpace will be validated via 24 Use cases in 23 pilots in 9 countries, representing more than 181,000ha with 25 types of crops that span from southwest to northeast Europe, outdoor and greenhouse crops, organic and non-organic production, and more than 2,000 animals of 5 types. More than 4,200 farmers will provide insights and more than 89,000 will be directly informed. More than 1,600 sensors will be utilized and more than 4,500 additional sensors will be installed to measure (real-time) data, including more than 2,500 RFID tags.

Research has shown that well-designed integrated pest management programmes (IPM) are a viable solution to reduce the dependency on use of chemical pesticides. However, the uptake of IPM practices by farmers remains low, creating a challenge to support adoption of those techniques. This requires thorough understanding of the decision-making process of farmers and other involved stakeholders in order to improve strategies and policies that enables and stimulates the application of IPM. SUPPORT responds to this challenge by increasing the capacity to understand the environmental, social and economic impacts of existing and future crop protection systems in which IPM is applied, by creation of an inventory of IPM tools and techniques and the development an impact monitoring system. Farmers behave in an economic, social and institutional environment. SUPPORT will identify barriers and opportunities in the entire agrifood-chain for the adoption of IPM and analyse qualitatively and quantitatively their role in farmer decision-making. Data will be collected by interviews, surveys, choice experiments and derived from the FADN. The results of this analysis will be used as a basis for the development of strategies and policies enabling and supporting farmers and other stakeholders to apply IPM. The develop takes place in a co-creation process with stakeholders. Therefore, a multi-actor approach will be the backbone of the research process. 26 National Crop Clusters (NCCs) will be used for data collection. In 9 of those NCCs, Community of Practices (CoPs) will be developed with public and private stakeholders to co-create strategies and policies. The CoPs will be embedded in a Network of Practice (NoP), an overarching platform connecting all stakeholders. This NoP will be used to communicate, discuss and disseminate results of SUPPORT with the entire community of stakeholders in the EU.