Scientists, policy experts, NGOs and farmers gathered in Brussels Thursday and Friday to tackle a tough question: How can the European Union’s agricultural research be turned into scalable businesses when public funding is tight?
The EU AgRI 2040 conference, hosted by the European Commission, sought input on the strategic framework adopted September 8 for “future-proofing” agriculture, forestry and rural areas. The roadmap aims to complement a separate but “interlinked” one, called Food 2040, dealing with food processing, aquaculture, healthy diets and more.
“We’re as good at innovation as any other continent in the world, but then it doesn’t actually find its way to deployment,” said Elisabeth Werner, the EC’s director-general for agriculture and rural development.
To close that gap, AgRI 2040 addresses eight “action areas” from soil health and animal welfare to rural demographics and AI. The commission says these are starting points and can be adapted based on stakeholder input about where R&I can make the biggest impact.
The approach comes as policymakers face “a lot of pressure on the farming budget,” said Christophe Hansen, the European commissioner for agriculture and food. He called to “strengthen the link” between the Horizon Europe R&I program and the Common Agricultural Policy budget, whose dimensions for 2028-2034 are now being haggled over. In addition, authorities hope to attract more private capital with a proposed €234 billion ($264 billion) European Competitiveness Fund that, when combined with Horizon’s proposed €175 billion ($197 billion) pot, would unlock €409 billion ($461 billion) for multisector innovation, including in agriculture.
Whatever the final funding mix, jumpstarting commercialization requires not just “moving faster from lab to farm,” said Ekaterina Zaharieva, the European commissioner for startups, research and innovation, but “better focusing our efforts” amid limited resources.
A few themes emerged as agrifood stakeholders discussed ways to strike that balance.
Cut red tape and prioritize speed
There was a broad agreement that Europe “must fast-track promising innovation with commercial potential,” as Zaharieva put it.
“There’s a global race going on,” Werner said. “If you want to have an idea about speed, look to China,” she added. “We have to step up.”
Bureaucracy and regulation were repeatedly flagged as hindrances. During a Q&A, one attendee raised concerns about the Horizon program’s administrative burdens. He joked about having to conduct 45-question surveys with farmers, who after the third question typically say, “I have to go, my cow is calling.”
A Finnish farmer described an EU certification process requiring interactions with three or four entities, versus one in the U.S.—where the only hiccup was one of the government’s recent shutdowns.
EU authorities acknowledged these issues and said responses to some were in the pipeline. Hansen said he’d also heard entrepreneurs tell him, “We did the research here, but now we are going to move to the United States” since getting to market there takes a year or two, whereas in Europe “it takes around 10 years and we are bankrupt by the time we get there.”
Farmers said the financial and climate shocks they’re facing require speedier outcomes from R&I.
“Everything that comes to our farm is just coming too late and too expensive,” said Iulia Blagu, who manages a 920-hectare family farm in Romania and leads ANFA, which represents women in the country’s agricultural sector.
“I don’t even know how we survived,” she said of prolonged droughts. “There are solutions out there…in the past six years that were not accessible to my farm, and that is very frustrating.”
Partnerships count more, including with corporates
Tight public financing raises the importance of striking partnerships and making agrifood innovations more investable. But when the moderator asked a packed plenary session if big businesses were risk-averse, at least half the room’s hands shot up.
Zaharieva said the public sector should “lead by example.” “European governments and public institutions should procure more from our innovators,” she said. If promising startups and scale-ups can clinch a crucial first contract with a public entity, corporations may feel more confident about investing or partnering.
“We have to have an appetite for risk because not everything will succeed,” said Bill Callanan, chief inspector at Ireland’s Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine. He urged policymakers to look at “the nonfinancial elements” that may be keeping industry on the sidelines. Demonstration facilities were one area where “government can help,” he said, by expanding opportunities for companies to validate their processes and test for issues that may arise in production.
Demand generation needs work
Stakeholders repeatedly described a need to stoke demand for novel products and services.
Richard Zaltzman, CEO of EIT Food, pointed out that the agrifood system’s complexity poses a challenge. “You need to have concurrent innovation through the value chain” for adoption to occur, he said, but added that there’s room to shift more attention from projects to end products.
While it came in for a drubbing in other ways, regulation was also positioned as a tool for generating demand. “If you’re a startup, you need money and you need to know that there’s a demand. The two things are linked,” said James Morrison, who leads the “Healthy Planet” Directorate in the EC’s directorate-general for R&I. “Regulation creates markets…as much as being a menace.”
He said expanded regulatory sandboxes could help, while the proposed Competitiveness Fund, as a “twin” of the Horizon program, would propel more startups past the “second valley of death” to scale.
Improve communication
Callanan said better communication “is critical for researchers” to get their innovations out of labs and technical reports and into markets where farmers can take them up. While scientists are constantly urged to publish, volume “isn’t the right metric,” he said. “Effort and impact are not the same thing. Who’s listening?”
The point came up frequently, but there were few concrete ideas about how to transmit information more effectively and speedily. Aside from some approving remarks about farmers using WhatsApp and AI for timely advice, discussions around communication largely centered on the need to build stronger relationships between the R&I ecosystem and external stakeholders. (At the same time, it was hard to overlook how many deeply knowledgeable experts took the main stage for panel discussions only to read prepared remarks from tablets. One farmer in the audience groused that this should be a fireable offense for EU officials.)
Blagu, for her part, communicated the next test clearly: “We need to translate your research and your innovation and your policies” into scalable solutions, without spending too long deliberating over which ones to test in the market.
“If something works in your labs but fails in 10 farms, then we have the answer,” she said. “As a farmer, we are failing 10,000 times a year. Every year, it’s a battle for the right decision…You don’t know, but you try your best.”
