A group of about 25 international students (representing several Countries from Europe, Africa and Asia) engaged in the Master’s course on Agri-food Sustainability at the University of Pavia, Italy, visited CREA Lodi on April 11th. They were accompanied by Dr Valentina Vaglia, who teaches in the course, and Prof. Georg Carlsson, from the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU) in Alnarp, Sweden. Prof. Carlsson is a Visiting Professor in the course and the leader of Work Package 2 in the IntercropVALUES project.
Students in the Master’s course are taught following the sustainable vision of “one health” through a multidisciplinary approach aimed at achieving high food production with attention to the environment, the producers and the consumers. Interestingly, the need to create fairer, healthier, and more environmentally friendly food systems is also a driving factor of the IntercropVALUES project.
Dr Luciano Pecetti described the breeding activity on legume crops carried out at CREA Lodi and highlighted how the selection of new cultivars is meant to respond to the need for increased sustainability in agriculture. Wider and more profitable legume crop cultivation is an advisable means for the agroecological transition of agri-food systems, but it represents a challenge that can be addressed by plant breeding. The tools deployed by CREA to reach its goals were presented, such as the use of large germplasm collections, the selection for tolerance to stresses, the exploitation of environmental adaptation, an evolutionary breeding approach, and the implementation of genomic selection models.
Prof. Georg Carlsson introduced the IntercropVALUES project to the students, displaying the project’s aims and structure, and giving special attention to the network of trials that is pivotal in the Work Package 2 of the project. The common protocol across trials in the network but also the possible peculiarities of different trials in different countries were described.
The visit continued in the CREA’s experimental field where one of the previously-mentioned trials of the Work Package 2 is ongoing. Dr Daniele Cavalli, CREA, led the field visit, during which the students had the chance to see the white lupin-cereal intercrops sown in two distinct periods (autumn and late winter), and answered numerous questions that were posed about the crops and the trial management. For many of them, this was the first direct experience with intercropping, even at an experimental scale, and it certainly raised their interest in such a cropping system.
This news item was written by Dr Luciano Pecetti, CREA