Abstract: Organic food is progressively boosting the market and getting more attractive to consumers, who usually feel more confident about these products because of their safer, healthier, and more eco-friendly characteristics when compared to conventional agriculture products (Gomiero, 2018). On the other hand, the agricultural sector needs to face specific challenges and find long-lasting solutions towards agricultural and food sustainability. With this objective, some tools such as better farming systems, new technologies, quality education, and effective business models have been proposed as potential tools (Movilla-Pateiro et al., 2020). The EcoChestnut European project offers an innovative vocational training process to support the development of organic chestnut production in Europe, integrating into a common curriculum all aspects of the development of organic farming, processing, and production of chestnut products; from farming techniques and production methods of organic chestnuts and chestnut products as a specific and traditional product to more transversal topics such as marketing, communication, and corporate social responsibility. The project aims to develop a comprehensive training course on organic chestnut farming and chestnut products manufacturing that will help to bring organic agriculture within reach of traditional farmers. EcoChestnut will also provide the vocational trainers with learning methods and material to encourage farmers in their initiative. In this context, the updating on the latest techniques and methods of farming to be competitive and up to date together with socioeconomic factors must be considered since all this knowledge claims to be transmitted to farmers, to set and apply the basis of a sustainable business in the field of agronomy and organic production.

Acknowledgments: The research leading to these results was supported by MICINN supporting the Ramón y Cajal grant for M.A. Prieto (RYC-2017-22891); by Xunta de Galicia for supporting the program EXCELENCIA-ED431F 2020/12, and the pre-doctoral grant of M. Carpena (ED481A 2021/313). Authors are grateful to Ibero-American Program on Science and Technology (CYTED—AQUA-CIBUS, P317RT0003), to the Bio Based Industries Joint Undertaking (JU) under grant agreement No 888003 UP4HEALTH Project (H2020-BBI-JTI-2019). The JU receives support from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program and the Bio Based Industries Consortium. The project SYSTEMIC Knowledge hub on Nutrition and Food Security, has received funding from national research funding parties in Belgium (FWO), France (INRA), Germany (BLE), Italy (MIPAAF), Latvia (IZM), Norway (RCN), Portugal (FCT), and Spain (AEI) in a joint action of JPI HDHL, JPI-OCEANS and FACCE-JPI launched in 2019 under the ERA-NET ERA-HDHL (n° 696295). The authors would like to thank EcoChestnut Project (Erasmus+ KA202) supporting this research and initiative.

Bibliography:

Gomiero, T. (2018). Food quality assessment in organic vs. conventional agricultural produce: Findings and issues. Applied Soil Ecology, 123, 714–728. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.apsoil.2017.10.014

Movilla-Pateiro, L., Mahou-Lago, X. M., Doval, M. I., & Simal-Gandara, J. (2020). Toward a sustainable metric and indicators for the goal of sustainability in agricultural and food production. Critical Reviews in Food Science and Nutrition, April, 1–22. https://doi.org/10.1080/10408398.2020.1754161