Living Lab: Rebuilding a local food community starting from sustainable farming and collective actions
Friuli Venezia Giulia, Italy
Friuli Venezia Giulia, Italy
The Italian Living Lab aimed to facilitate the co-creation of services and tools for supporting a diverse group of small and medium farms, plus other stakeholders, in the consolidation of a wheat-based food supply chain connected with the cooperative management of common land.
Context, theme and target group
| Friuli Venezia Giulia is a small autonomous region in the North-Eastern part of Italy that borders with Austria and Slovenia. |
| Some sectors of agriculture in the region, notably viticulture, are very well-developed. Other sectors suffer from numerous structural limitations, including small farm size, ageing farmers, limited number of new entrants and poorly organized processing facilities in the region. There is also a lack of affordable and independent advice for small and medium size farms. Arable farming is especially vulnerable with low economic viability leading to a high levels of land abandonment. |
| New ideas and innovative solutions are needed in the region, but the role of “usual” advisory suppliers in supporting and promoting innovation is limited. Innovations for small and medium size farms are mainly supported by other actors, such as Universities and local NGOs. These actors do not have farm advice as a primary task, but they are very effective sources of new ideas and have supported the consistent growth of social innovation by farmers in the region. For example, a number of initiatives for the common management of natural resources have been developed in the last 10-20 years. |
| The ‘Cooperative D.E.S. Friul di Miec’ is one of the most innovative examples of common land management in the region. This initiative started around 2015 when a group of farmers and citizens started to manage a parcel of common land cooperatively in the surroundings of the city of Udine. |
| The aim was to create a food supply chain based on wheat production and processing that would: a) help mitigate the abandonment of farmland; b) preserve the rural landscape; c) reduce soil depletion and pollution, and; d) at the same time provide a local and sustainable source of food. The majority of farmers involved have small to medium size farms and most are part time or hobby farmers. Local municipalities and citizens are also involved in the management of the land. The initiative has an on-going need for services and tools providing better advisory support. The knowledge required to run the operation is mainly agronomic (crop rotation, minimization of tillage, variety choice etc.), but clear legal guidelines and advice on more efficient management / organization are also needed. |
Partner and responsible person contact
Vinidea srl
Gianni Trioli, gianni.trioli@vinidea.it
Vinidea is a micro-enterprise founded in 1999 that provides information transfer and innovation brokerage for the wine industry. Vinidea looks for scientific and practical news from all over the world and then makes it available to agronomists and enologists. The Vinidea team make full and effective use of all available tools to promote the sharing of information among the different categories of wine specialists: from classic conferences to webinars and internet tools, study trips, written articles, audiovideos, translations from and into different languages and surveys.
The Living Lab story
| The ‘Cooperative D.E.S. Friul di Miec’ is a pioneering initiative regarding common land management, but at the same time also addresses many of the typical challenges faced by arable farmers in the region, such as the economic sustainability of production and the transparency / efficiency of storage, milling, processing and marketing. |
| Vinidea carried out a number of interviews, meetings and events with the farmers involved in the cooperative and were able to define the needs of the group. This stage of the Living Lab process was also important to understand the social and power dynamics within the cooperative, and to define the role of the Living Lab in this context. |
| Participants in the Living Lab identified that the main need of the cooperative was for an advisory tool to guide farmers and other local businesses through the different stages of sustainable wheat production and processing in the context of the specific challenges experienced managing common land in the region. This led to the idea of co-creating a “booklet” with guidelines for good practice and problem solving.The farmers were enthusiastic about this idea and helped to prepare the first version with local experts. Further information and expert knowledge were then collected to continue developing the guidelines. |
| The end result was a resource that will help farmers and other actors in the process of growing, storing and processing locally grown wheat, as well as dealing with the legal, economical and administrative issues associated with cooperative farming on common land. This is a novel resource for common land management projects which often fail to find appropriate advice directed at their unique needs. |
Lessons learned
| Engagement Despite the successful outcome of the Living Lab, the engagement of local farmers and other actors in the co-creation processes and design thinking activities facilitated in the Living Lab was not easy. This was most likely due to the socio-demographic profile of the group. |
More information about this Living Lab (in English)
Practice Abstract 3 – Advice for diversified farming systems: the case of organic farming in Friuli Venezia Giulia, Italy (Vinidea)