• The European CAP Network is launching a call for European Task Forces to host so-called "cross-visits": information exchange meetings on common innovation topics.
• The 2025 call revolves around three themes: water management, pollinators, and animal welfare.

Information sharing has become the main objective in the field of innovation, given the multitude of open research projects seeking practical and efficient solutions to the challenges currently facing the agricultural and rural sectors. This is especially true given that data has become the new oil, which is the basis for metadata or Big Data. Therefore, cross-referencing information is crucial to making knowledge fully accessible and shared, and to enabling the drawing of significant and relevant conclusions for the maximum number of interested parties.

Thus, the existence of platforms such as EU-farmbook (a virtual project working at regional, national and European levels to build an online platform that gathers and shares knowledge on agriculture and forestry) or the AKIS Platform (a platform of the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (MAPA) that facilitates the meeting point and exchange of knowledge between the agents of the so-called “Agricultural Knowledge and Innovation Systems” (AKIS) throughout the country, clearly demonstrate the importance of this data sharing.

In this context, the European CAP Network proposes three for 2025 cross-visits for Operational Groups from across Europe, belonging to the European Innovation Partnership for Agricultural Productivity and Sustainability (AEI-Agri), to meet and share information on three specific topics.

Themes

The 2025 call for applications to host Operational Groups involves applying to become a host for one of the three planned cross-country visits.

Thus, each cross-country visit is organized by an Operational Group, which welcomes the other Operational Groups working on similar or complementary topics during the visit. The host Operational Group should be able to demonstrate concrete and relevant results of its project, as well as help provide practical information about the cross-country visit (logistics, etc.) and participate in the entire event program.

The topics chosen in this first call are:

• Water management.
• Pollinators.
• Animal welfare.

Those Operational Groups interested in participating must complete the application form before February 23, 2025 at 11:59 p.m.

If an Operational Group is not selected to host a cross-country visit, it may reapply in the second call for proposals, which is scheduled to be launched in late January or early February 2025.