The aim of the European Innovation Partnership (EIP) is to bring more sustainability and efficiency into agriculture and to foster a better exchange between science and practice. The EU's new bottom-up approach seeks to bring fresh impetus into agricultural innovation through operational groups (OGs) and to foster better exchange between practice and research. The OGs are to the germ cells of an innovative project that aims for sustainable and efficient agriculture.
European Commission’s idea is simple: in the future, production should be "more with less". This means that agriculture and forestry should be more productive on the one hand, but consume less resources during production and therefore become more sustainable on the other hand. The goal is to use innovation to close the quantitative and qualitative gap that exists between the current mode of production and a more resource-efficient one. This may be through product innovations, such as a new extraction filter in a barn, as well as process innovations that bring existing technologies into a new context.
The German federal states started with EIP Agri at different times.