Project: High quality and nutrient rich food through crop waste-derived biostimulant and biopesticide
| Acronym | Bio4Food |
| Project Topic | It is generally accepted that the wide scale use of persistent synthetic pesticides in agriculture is a major risk to the biodiversity and the environment. In addition, the public views pesticides as problematic and seeks pesticide-free products. Addressing these concerns poses an important challenge for farmers to find a sustainable balance between "environmentally-friendly" and "profitable" crop production. To match the concerns of the farmers and consumers, we need to create innovative solutions to secure crop yield, to minimise food and crop wastes and to produce vegetables and fruits with health-promoting properties. The Bio4Food project addresses these three problems following a strategy of crop waste valorisation. We are proposing to take advantage of the presence of secondary metabolites, including natural defence molecules in crop wastes generated at the farm and at the food-processing factory and transform these into new types of biostimulants and biopesticides. Bio4Food will exploit the biostimulatory properties to promote plant yield and quality, aiming to increase the content of the health promoting minerals, iron, magnesium and zinc, in vegetable and fruit crops. The socio-economic acceptance of our approach and the market opportunities will be studied to develop a road map for the implementation of bio-based methodology for crop production and protection. The possibility to recycle waste will be evaluated at the level of the farm up to the food processing industry, taking into account the profitability of the technology. Bio4Food will contribute to the reduction in crop waste, providing natural plant protection products, and offer consumers vegetables rich in health-promoting minerals. |
| Network | CORE Organic Cofund |
| Call | CORE Organic & SUSFOOD Joint Call 2019 |
Project partner
| Number | Name | Role | Country |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Ghent University/Fac of Bioscience Engineering/Horticell lab | = | Belgium |
| 2 | Consiglio per la ricerca in agricoltura e l’analisi dell’economia agraria | = | Italy |
| 3 | Abdelmalek Essaadi University, Faculty of Sciences and Techniques of Tangier (FSTT) | = | Morocco |
| 4 | Center for International Climate Research | = | Norway |
| 5 | Institute for Food and Environmental Research | = | Germany |
| 6 | Ajinomoto Omnichem | = | Belgium |