What is EIP-Agri?
EIP-Agri is the abbreviation for the "European Innovation Partnerships for Agricultural Productivity and Sustainability". The aim of the EIP-Agri funding measure is to increase agricultural production while using fewer resources and thereby making it more sustainable.
Agriculture and research are better interlinked through EIP in order to bring innovations into practice more quickly. The bottom-up approach helps to achieve this: problems of practical agriculture are worked on jointly by partners from consulting, companies, associations and societies as well as science and research in so-called operational groups (OGs).
The implementation of EIP has started very early in Schleswig-Holstein compared to other European countries. To support the new funding measure, the then Ministry of Agriculture established the EIP Agrar innovation office at the Schleswig-Holstein Chamber of Agriculture in Rendsburg back in 2014.
The task of the coordination office is to support idea providers, innovators from the field and operational groups (OG) as a nucleus for innovative projects in the state. The Innovation Office organizes both networking and knowledge transfer within the framework of EIP and provides advice to applicants in all phases of their project development and application.
43 projects from 4 calls have been selected by a jury since 2015 and have been or are being implemented since then. The projects have so far received funding of around €12 million in Schleswig-Holstein.