The Pact for Skill roundtable raised several issues the Agrifood secThe Pact for Skill roundtable raised several issues the Agrifood sector is facing and identified potential ways of overcoming them: upskilling and reskilling workers; intersectoral skill transfers; increased attractiveness of the sector to youth; digital transition; partnerships between learning institutions and companies.The I-RESTART project aims at reskilling and upskilling the workforce in the agrifood and veterinary sectors, retrain the employees leaving the heavy industry to hire them in the agrifood sector, and engage some students that want to enter the agrifood labor market, to improve their digital skills and facilitate the transition to the Green Deal initiative.To reach the above-mentioned objectives, I-RESTART will facilitate the inter-sectoral and intergenerational skills transfers through the adoption of an innovative micro-credentials methodology and the work-based learning experiences that will provide inclusive, flexible and engaging work-based patterns with mentors while opening the ecosystem also to external workers.The project, complementing the FIELDS Blueprint on agriculture and forestry, will provide the tools to tackle future challenges with the offering of 10 occupational profiles for a total of 3200 hours of training. In total 16 trainers and 200 trainees will benefit from the pilot training, and 40 students will complete the work-based learning scheme that also includes the advanced entrepreneurial skills.The 29 partners consortium from 11 countries will identify skills needed and gaps, create occupational profiles, detailed curricula, design European strategies and 10 country roadmaps to reflect the country's needs while keeping EU quality standards (ESCO, EQAVET) to address the mobility of learners through Europe.A strong connection will be established with the Pact for Skills initiative, in order to make useful content for the members that will implement the pact.

The mEATquality project aims to provide consumers with quality pork and broiler meat, by developing novel solutions that address societal demands, environmental concerns and economic needs on farm and in the chain. The ‘extensiveness’ of production is a key issue, and will be developed in a stepwise approach. The first step surveys extensive husbandry factors in relation to intrinsic meat quality, through data collection on conventional, free-range and organic farms, and through consumer expectation studies. The second will include controlled experiments on-farm to investigate intrinsic meat quality characteristics in relation to husbandry factors: genetics, forage, space and enrichment. It will also develop innovative techniques for automated meat quality assessment at high line speeds, and combat food fraud through authentication of the final product via ‘fingerprinting techniques’ and blockchain technology. The third step will check the novel farming practices against sustainability aspects: animal welfare, environmental impact and economic viability. Market acceptance of the new products and ways to communicate them to consumers will be studied. The fourth and final step will communicate and disseminate the results. Key outputs are an ‘Extensive Practices’ app, animated movies and EIP Practice Abstracts for farmers, educational tutorials for consumers, retailers and restaurants, and an EU Meat Database for authentication purposes. mEATquality is proposed and co-designed by organic sector representatives Ecovalia and Naturland, in collaboration with CLITRAVI, the Liaison Centre for the Meat Processing Industry in the European Union. They joined forces with academic partners (including 5 of Europe’s leading meat quality laboratories), Marel (poultry, fish, meat & further processing equipment) and poultry breeder Hubbard. Finally, Plukon Food Group supports the project in-kind. Collectively these partners span the chain from Farm to Fork