The European Innovation Partnership for agricultural productivity and sustainability (EIP-AGRI), which can be perceived as a platform based on interaction among farmers, researchers, and advisors/extensionists, represents a useful tool for a better understanding of applied innovation processes.

This report explores the role of rural networks in enhancing innovation processes, questioning the features of the agricultural/rural networks could enhance farmers’ ability to co-innovate in cooperation with other actors. The prospect of this investigation is also to provide interesting and significant experiences that constitute examples for the ‘European Innovation Partnership’ by increasing farmers’ capacities to create, test, implement and evaluate innovations in cooperation with other rural actors.

Innovation is the process whereby individuals or organizations bring new or existing products, processes or ways of organization into use for the first time in a specific context. Innovation in agriculture cuts across all dimensions of the production cycle along the entire value chain - from crop, forestry, fishery or livestock production to the management of inputs and resources to market access. This book represents the proceedings of the first International Symposium on Agricultural Innovation for Family Farmers which FAO organized at its headquarters in Rome, on 21–23 November 2018.

This study aims at contributing to a better understanding of the linkage between supply chain performance and possible performance improvement with respect to food quality and safety. Therefore, the paper addresses the question whether the level of collaborative planning and close supply chain relationships could help improve quality and safety of organic supply chains. The study was conducted as a part of the multi-disciplinary EU-wide survey of organic supply chains, carried out in 8 European countries.

This publications is a review and compilation of technologies and management practices for smallholder organic farmers. This manual is a joint activity between the Climate, Energy and Tenure Division (NRC) and the Technologies and practices for smallholder farmers (TECA) Team from the Research and Extension team AGDR of FAO Headquarters in Rome, Italy.

Sustainability is becoming a pivotal guide for driving the governance strategies of value chains. Sustainable policy should have as its objective the perpetuation of production models over time to maintain its environmental, economic and social dimensions. Therefore, measuring the sustainability of a production system is fundamental to deepening the understanding of ongoing trends, considering the pressure exerted by agricultural policies, market dynamics and innovations introduced in the production system.

The study proposes a knowledge-intensive and qualitative research methodology based on researcher-farmer participatory approach, with the aim to improve the state of knowledge on organic rice, explore the yield potential and variability, and identify the successful agronomic practices. A wide range of cropping systems placed in North Italy were monitored and analysed during three years by a multi-actor network.

Industrial agriculture and its requirement for standardized approaches is driving the world towards a global food system, shrinking the role of farmers and shifting decision-making power. On the contrary, a holistic perspective towards a new food-system design could meet the needs of a larger share of stakeholders. Long-term experiments are crucial in this transition, being the hub of knowledge and the workshop of ‘participation in’ and ‘appropriation of’ the research in agriculture over a long term.

Since the Green Revolution, worldwide agriculture has been characterized by a typical top–down approach. The degree of autonomy, creativity, and responsibility of farmers has been limited by the continuous external inputs of chemicals, machinery, advice, subsidies and knowledge. The issue of sustainability has brought complexity and uncertainty to this mainly linear process of innovation, steering agriculture toward alternative models. Agroecology represents an innovative paradigm of agriculture in which external inputs are minimized, and the assets of the farm are greatly valued.

Indicator-based tools are widely used for the assessment of farm sustainability, but analysts still face methodological and conceptual issues, including data availability, the complexity of the concept of sustainability and the heterogeneity of agricultural systems. This study contributes to this debate through the illustration of a procedure for farm sustainability assessment focussed on the case study of the South Milan Agricultural Park, Italy. The application is based on a set of environmental, social and economic indicators retrieved from the literature review.