The Walloon living lab is situated in the northern part of the Sambre-Meuse corridor in Wallonia in Belgium. This region was selected strategically, as it contains the highest proportion of arable land in the region due to its superior soils, which has historically led to more intensive agricultural practices. Consequently, this area also faces the greatest challenges related to pesticide use, being the key concern the LL seeks to address. The overarching goal of the Walloon LL is to explore and implement alternatives to pesticide use in arable crop systems, with a particular emphasis on weed management. This is framed within a broader ambition of reducing phytopharmaceutical inputs through collaborative experimentation and co-learning. To reach this goal a living lab has been setting up, coupled with on-farm experiment in 12 farms.
Call-for-participation efforts framed the initiative as a pesticide-reduction focused program and involved a variety of communication channels: articles in agricultural newspapers, informational flyers distributed at events, public presentations, and messages and emails circulated by local associations to their networks. The efforts had successfully attracted a core group of a dozen of self-motivated farmers ready to engage in SIMONE. The 12 most relevant farmers for the project were selected based on individual interviews to assess each farmer’s motivations and challenges, to present the structure and expectations of the project, and to begin identifying the problem areas that might be tackled collaboratively.
Farmers in the living lab are primarily motivated by the opportunity to receive structured, empirical feedback on practices they have so far evaluated only through visual or informal assessment. They value CRA-W’s offer to follow their practices closely and quantify impacts in a rigorous way. Another key motivation is peer learning. Participants are keen to exchange insights with one another and to learn from external experts, whose contributions will enrich the group’s collective understanding.
In addition to famers, the Living lab is also composed of value chain actors and advisors who are informed about the project results and are consulted for decisions and ideas. Farmers on their side are co-designing solutions they are tested on 1 ha in their farms.
Field trials will be set up on the same parcel during 3 years with a focus this year on wheat, rapeseed, beets and potatoes. Those solutions are late seeding, seed density, different pesticides concentration, mechanical weeding, … Training, field visits and meetings to exchange knowledge and experiences are organised throughout the year.
More info about all the OFE's can be found in these factsheets