Rural BioReFarmeries brings together farmers, industries and other partners across Europe, to demonstrate a farmer-centred bioeconomy model aimed at maximizing the potential of Europe’s vast grasslands. The project will demonstrate a novel small-scale, decentralized, rural green biorefinery value chain, which addresses the limitations of existing green biorefineries. This small-scale decentralized model places farmers at the centre of the biomass value creation close to their farms, allowing them to co-produce inputs for their farms, with additional high value-added intermediates and products, which will be further developed in collaboration with centralized facilities and downstream industry partners. The model provides a practical implementation of the bioeconomy among a large farmer cohort and builds on the existing farm enterprises and cooperative structures of our partners, enabling collaboration, scale-up, market access, and building synergies across primary and industrial sectors. The project advances state-of-the-art for green biorefinery in terms of operational model, logistics, processing, product development and assessment methods, which collectively deliver a more sustainable and profitable model for farmers and rural communities. The model will serve as a blueprint for farmers to sustainably diversify into the bioeconomy, reducing their farm emissions while creating new products which displace unsustainable alternatives in a range of agri-food markets. Rural BioReFarmeries model will be replicated to diverse regions of Europe, supported by the development of inclusive business models and hands-on training among multi-actor groups and communities in regions of high potential. The project represents a highly replicable model for Europe’s abundant grasslands, helping farmers to deal with sustainability and profitability challenges while helping rural communities to become more resilient while realizing the potential of their local bioresources.

Ensuring a sustainable food system requires, above all other factors, re-entrusting our primary production to the guardians of our territory, the owners of small- and medium-sized farms and farm structures in rural areas. GUARDIANS focuses on understanding their challenges and empowering them with a set of digital innovative solutions that will help them to bridge the current technological gap between small and large farms. GUARDIANS will put in place a set of cost-effective and human-centric digital solutions, which aim to support and empower the penetration, sustainability and resilience of more agroecological farming models, like regenerative agriculture, natural grazing, alternative managed grazing strategies, and the promotion of pollinators in different farm structures. To do this, a multi-actor co-creation methodology, a set of adoption pathways and 9 different technologies, combining software and hardware (i.e. drones, sensors), will be customized to cover the farmers' needs. These digital solutions will be tested through a total of 24 small- and medium-sized farms and farm structures with a wide range of production types (arable crops, woody crops, grassland and livestock production) in 6 pilots represented by farming cooperatives (acting as one stop shops) from 5 different countries with diverse environmental, climatic and socio-economic conditions. As a result, GUARDIANS will increase the uptake of innovative digital technologies by farmers, guaranteed by the use of a multi-actor approach, integrating farmers and agricultural stakeholders at all stages of the project, as well as scientists, technicians and SMEs. Cascade funding and connections to specific stakeholders (agricultural cooperatives, agrifood hubs, DIHs, OGs) will be used as multipliers to allow GUARDIANS to roll up its impact throughout Europe. It is expected to roll-out and replicate GUARDIANS results up to 92 farms around Europe during the project duration.