A new European project, coordinated by CIRAD and involving 27 organizations in 14 countries, launched recently. Named IntercropValuES, it aims to use the advantages of intercrops to build productive, diverse, resilient, profitable, environmentally friendly cropping systems that are acceptable to farmers and agrifood chain stakeholders.

Food production is resource-intensive, and currently faces a range of challenges. The ancestral technique of intercropping, which consists in growing together different grain and legume species (or other mixed crops) in a given area at the same time, could be a solution. 

“Although it is scientifically recognized as an agroecological solution, intercropping has been largely abandoned in Europe since the advent of fertilizers, in favour of monospecies cropping”, says CIRAD agronomist researcher Eric Justes and project coordinator. “Diversifying by means of intercrops is seen as both costly and complicated, since the majority of stakeholders in value chains are structured around standard processes, to produce, process and market those monocrops.” 

A large-scale action research project was launched recently to lift the barriers to the adoption of intercrops: IntercropValuES. The four-year project, coordinated by CIRAD and with 7.4 million euros of funding from the EU Horizon Europe programme, centres on a range of innovations to be tested on three continents (in Europe, Africa and China).