Grazing-based production systems have the proven potential to produce high quality food, to be beneficial to the competitiveness of farmers and animal welfare, as well as for other ecosystem services. However, for many reasons grazing is generally declining in Europe, which is a threat for many ecosystem services. In Grazing4AgroEcology (G4AE), grazing farmers are for the first time at the centre of a thematic network, complementing other thematic networks such as Inno4Grass, EuroDairy, SheepNet, BovINE, HNVLink, etc. in providing solutions for sustainable, integrated grazing-based animal production systems. G4AE has 18 partners including farmers’ organisations, extension services, education, and research in eight countries (France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, The Netherlands, Portugal, Romania, & Sweden). G4AE puts the farmer at the centre through the establishment of the Partner Farm Network of 120 Partner farms (15 per country). These networks will enable the capture and implementation of best-practices and innovations to promote grazing for agroecology. Our 3-tier multi-actor approach based on co-creation and knowledge sharing will actively involve all relevant actors of the grazing AKIS including farmers, industry, researchers, advisors, society, etc. This will improve the uptake of the innovation capital and significantly contribute to the improvement of the transferability of best practices and innovations and will also enable cross linkage of OGs. G4AE will innovate the grazing sector by strengthening the capacity of farmers to understand more objectively their own agroecological performance through an integrated self-assessment. This will trigger farmers to strive for innovation. G4AE will boost digitalization through webinars, digital interactions, videos and multi-media training. G4AE will provide a rich set of practical hands-on knowledge and training material for a vast community of grazing farmers, available in a Knowledge & Information Management System.
