The IntercropValueES project—Developing Intercropping for agrifood Value chains and Ecosystem Services delivery in Europe and Southern countries—aims to harness the benefits of intercropping to design and manage productive, diversified, resilient, profitable, and environmentally friendly cropping systems that are acceptable to farmers and stakeholders across the agri‑food chain. The project is both a scientific research initiative to better understand and model how intercrops function and a detailed analysis of barriers and levers at the value-chain level, with the goal of identifying credible solutions that farmers and value-chain actors can adopt. As a multidisciplinary, cross-actor project, it brings together scientists and local stakeholders from the food value chain. It involves 27 participants from 15 countries (across 3 continents), representing a wide range of organizations and interest groups.

IntercropValueES pursues six objectives:

  1. Support the development of locally relevant, legitimate, and innovative agri‑food value chains through 13 co‑innovation case studies.
  2. Understand system functioning and G×G×E×M interactions to enable the selection of compatible ideotypes and the optimization of machinery and management strategies, with the goal of maximizing productivity and the delivery of ecosystem services—improving soil health and mitigating greenhouse gas emissions—via a multi‑site “metatrial” at 15 locations.
  3. Generate new information, improved methods, and tools for managing intercrops and assessing their performance and profitability.
  4. Unravel intercropping performance through modeling.
  5. Analyze the grain and food quality of cereal–legume intercrops, including functional qualities for food processing and the development of new products.
  6. Identify the main barriers and levers along the value chain to drive uptake, and find new market opportunities and solutions to increase the economic added value of intercropping.

The communication plan aims to disseminate results through appropriate channels to various end users—such as farmers, advisers, food processors and machinery manufacturers, retailers and citizens, higher education institutions, policymakers, and influential bodies.

Project website: https://intercropvalues.eu/