BBioNets partners Munster Technological University, American Farm School and Tepro Consultores Agrícolas attended the EU CAP Network conference “EIP-AGRI Operational Groups: Innovation in practice” held on 6^th – 8^th May 2024 in Estoril, Portugal making it their mission to highlight the role of BBioNets as a key tool for innovation and knowledge exchange.

On 7^th April, the BBioNets team attended the opening session of the conference with the Portuguese Minister of Agriculture and Fisheries highlighting several key aspects when talking about Operational Groups and their interaction with farmers and foresters. He particularly stressed the fact that there are two types of audience within the primary production sector, namely the younger generation and people with more than 20-30 years of experience. This means that we not only need to consider diversified approaches and solutions at multiple levels, but also cater for a renewal of the image projected by the sector, moving from an old and antiquated perception to a new and innovative one. Achieving a progressive primary sector that targets both types of audiences will not be an easy endeavour, but it certainly aligns with the BBioNets core and main aims of the project. Building on the Portuguese Minister’s message, BBioNets will work on communicating and transferring viable solutions to both audiences, while being at the same time innovative and attractive in an efficient and economical way, caring and protecting our ecosystem services.

Besides merely attending the conference, the BBioNets team was also assigned a booth right at the entrance of the conference venue, alongside its sister project, Soil-X-Change, forming a first line of Operational Group-oriented Horizon Europe projects, accompanied by several Operation Group stands located right behind it!

There, the representatives of the project had the chance to welcome people and introduce them to the main concepts of BBioNets, exchanging views, debating perspectives and networking during this Innovation exhibition featuring over 85 stands.

On the last day of the conference, BBioNets participated in the “Preparing the next generation Operational Groups” workshop, more specifically the “Fostering transnational Operational Groups (‘TRANSNATIONAL’)” trying to provide answers to questions such as:

• “What are the needs to foster transnational, including cross-border Operational Groups?”
• “What are the steps needed to establish transnational Operational Groups?”
• “What could these Operational Group projects possibly look like?”

The outputs of this specific workshop could be summarised as “Act locally, think globally”. Transnational and cross-border Operational Groups need to start rolling and, to do so, the idea was brought forward to generate seed money and initiate a pilot cross-border/transnational Operational Group, thus creating a “learning by doing” process. This should be an interesting concept to consider whenever spotting future Operational Group opportunities within regions of individual countries or other countries as well!

Last but not least, the BBioNets team had the pleasure of winning a mini game organised during the conference and generating traffic on our coordinator’s LinkedIn account! What a great way to say “Farewell, Portugal” !