EU-FarmBook at AgRI 2040 Conference
Brussels (24 September 2026)
The EU-FarmBook team kept Europe’s agri-food community informed with a stand at the AgRI 2040 Conference in the Charlemagne Building in Brussels on 24 and 25 September.
The online platform directly supports the new EU agri-food strategy’s focus on the dissemination and uptake of research and innovation (R&I) results. This was precisely the message that Prof Christopher Brewster (EU-FarmBook/Maastricht University) and Peter Rakers (EU-FarmBook/Esset Engage) shared with Elisabeth Werner, Director-General of DG AGRI.
Christopher Brewster (left) and Peter Rakers (right) discussed the benefits of EU-FarmBook with Elisabeth Werner/DG AGRI about. Foto: EU-FarmBook
Werner, along with other senior DG AGRI representatives such as Diego Canga Fano, took part in panels discussing one central question: how can research and innovation policy help to make EU agriculture, forestry, and rural areas more competitive, resilient, and sustainable? Iulia Blagu, President of the Romanian National Association of Women in Agriculture (ANFA), delivered a statement that left her fellow panellists visibly struck: “I want innovation now, not in 10 years,” she demanded and exposed the gap between desk top policy making and the harsh reality faced by farmers across Europe’s rural areas.
EU-FarmBook will play its modest role in the bigger picture of biodiversity, climate change, geopolitical turmoil and new EU rules in the making. It serves as a key hub for finding reliable R&I knowledge. This free, open-access initiative brings together practice-oriented results from research and innovation projects, including Horizon Europe and Operational Groups, and makes them available to the EU’s wider farming and forestry community. By centralising knowledge and making it easy to find, the platform helps to ensure that research is translated into practical, usable insights on the ground. Important features are dedicated project pages, automated metadata extraction, an AI-generated farm assistant and instant translation into any EU language.
The EU-FarmBook team at the AgRI 2040 Conference (from left to right: Prof Christopher Brewster/Maastricht University, Elena-Theodora Miron/LKO, Peter Rakers/Esset Engage, Dr Susanne von Münchhausen/HNEE, Pille Koorberg/METK and Yaite Cuesta Arenas/ZLTO). Foto: EU-FarmBook
