Cereal - renaissance in the field: embedding diversity in organic and low input food systems

4 April 2020. The documentary entitled “Cereal - renaissance in the field” presents the new local value chains, from seeds to final products, through the words, stories, emotions of five key players: farmers, researchers and producers.

Around them and with them, the communities and networks that bring their passion to the field, convinced that agriculture should not be treated as an industrial process. People who know that agricultural diversity is the key to keep together communities, territories, cultures, environment and health, tradition and innovation.

It is the final product of the European project CERERE ( http://cerere2020.eu/ ) about embedding diversity in organic and low input food systems. The CERERE consortium consists of 13 partners. The network forms a good balance between participants with a scientific and technological outlook, practitioners including all actors of cereal food systems (from farm to fork) interested in agrobiodiversity, organisations engaged in extension, advisory services, training and communication activities as well as participants who have a focus on rural studies and participatory approaches.

• Farmers, scientists, bread makers and food producers, local communities, demanding consumers: these are all players of a new movement that has accepted a great challenge, the challenge of changing the agricultural practice. 
• A goal to be reached by doing research and promoting innovation taking advantage of the enormous amount of knowledge offered by those who have been producing and transforming agricultural goods for a long time.
• In the past decades, many farmers and agronomists are bringing back to the field local and traditional cereal varieties that were being lost to give way to very few, uniform and identical ones that are best suited to be employed in large industrial transformation processes.
• Local varieties, on the contrary, are very diverse, selected through centuries in many different climates, soil conditions and food preparations. Their restoration today, through the practice of participatory breeding by those who have long term experience in farming and those who know well their chemical and genetic features, opens the door to a vast range of products and new local value chains.
• Local and international networks of farmers, producers, consumers and researchers are bringing back high quality productions and cultural values that differ in each territory and that are not indistinctly uniform everywhere in the world. 
• Rural networks promote the role of farmers as major players in food production. At the same time they highlight that agrobiodiversity is a key value for development, resilience to climate change, social and cultural growth as well as local sustainable management.