The role of Agroscope
Agroscope coordinates the on-farm experiments, runs the Living Lab Switzerland and assumes an intermediary role between the farms, technical experts, researchers and policy decision-makers.
The SIMONE Project pursues ambitious collaborative goals:
- Developing innovative solutions for farms through co-creation with regional stakeholders;
- Testing and provision of multifunctional solutions in real agricultural situations;
- Providing farmers with easy-to-use tools and methods to improve technical, environmental and economic performance.
An innovative multi-stakeholder project
SIMONE is a European cross-border participatory research project for farmers, regional stakeholders and researchers. Its goal is to collaborate with farmers to expedite practicable innovations tailored to the respective region whilst taking economic, ecological, social and societal factors into account.
To achieve the project goals, an innovative approach is pursued:
- Seven cross-border territorial networks (‘living labs’) are being created with stakeholders from agriculture and adjacent sectors. Their task will be to work together to expedite the agroecological transition whilst meeting the specific challenges of the region in question.
- Various agroecological measures or combinations of such measures are identified and tested directly on the farms to encourage their use by farmers.
- The innovative methods validated and evaluated in this manner are made available to supply-chain stakeholders, authorities and policy-makers, among others. In this project, the area-based multi-stakeholder approach in itself is already a methodological innovation for the further development of more integrative research.
