The Project

The LEGENDARY project’s ambition is to remove the barriers that hamper a significant and stable increase of the growing area of legumes in Europe. Therefore, LEGENDARY will develop tools that considerably go beyond the state-of-the-art to quantify the Ecosystem Services of legumes, considering different agro-climatic zones.

Field experiments with perennial and annual species grown is diversified cropping systems and rotations, will be intensively monitored using classical observation methods on the one hand and advanced sensing systems and machine learning on the other. The focus of LEGENDARY is to develop tools and methods for the valuation of the regulating and cultural/social ecosystem services resulting in ready-to-use indicators that allow farmers and advisors to better evaluate and value the benefits of growing legumes.

The LEGENDARY project aims for a strong stakeholders’ involvement by organising co-creation workshops with farmers, agricultural advisors and other stakeholders at various times during the project. In this way, LEGENDARY aligns its research strategy with the actual needs in the field, ensures a strong penetration of the project results into practice and contributes to more agrobiodiversity and diversified farming systems in the EU and its associated countries.

Approach

LEGENDARY aims to provide a substantial contribution to the realisation of the European farm to-fork strategy by implementing a cutting-edge research program on perennial and annual legumes in new and diversified cropping systems and rotations.

To achieve this ambition, the LEGENDARY activities will fill existing knowledge gaps and focus on
1 – data collection in field experiments and on-farm trials in different agroclimatic zones,
2 – innovative sensing tools in combination with statistical and machine learning methods to quantify the ecosystem services provided by legumes,
3 – development of interpretable indicators by quantifying ecosystem services in known units (kg, EUR, CO2 equivalents), to support farmers and advisers in managing farmland.

In particular, based on the results of the ecosystem services, a user-friendly application will be developed, to assist farmers in the choice of legume species and cropping systems suitable for their farm.

Focus and co-creation meetings will be organised after each growing season to discuss the results with stakeholders and to ensure that project results are incorporated into practice.