A shared European mission

The webinar featured five Horizon Europe projects – AGRO4AGRI, BioBIVE, CITRUSBUSTERS, PHAntastic, and VINNY – all working toward reducing dependency on conventional agrochemicals while strengthening crop resilience, soil health, and environmental protection.

Despite targeting different crops and value chains, the projects are united by a common vision aligned with the European Green Deal and the Farm to Fork Strategy: enabling safer, nature-based and scalable solutions for European agriculture.

Within this context, CITRUSBUSTERS contributes expertise in plant health surveillance, early detection, and biotechnological pest control, with a specific focus on protecting citrus production from emerging and devastating diseases such as Citrus Greening and Citrus Black Spot.

Advancing crop protection research: from biotechnology to digital precision diagnostics

Short “flash” presentations highlighted how EU-funded research is advancing crop protection technologies that are both effective and environmentally responsible. Across projects, solutions ranged from RNA interference–based biopesticides, biodegradable delivery systems, and nano-enabled fertilisers, to precision diagnostics and digital tools supporting data-driven farming.

These approaches share a common objective: reducing chemical inputs while maintaining productivity and ensuring that innovations are designed to be Safe and Sustainable by Design (SSbD) and suitable for real farming conditions.

Stakeholder perspectives: what still holds adoption back?

A central part of the webinar was an interactive Mentimeter session, which collected stakeholder views on the future of sustainable crop protection.

Participants recognized that progress toward greener solutions is underway, but uneven. Key barriers identified included costs, regulatory complexity, limited digital infrastructure, and the need for farmer training and trust-building. At the same time, there was strong agreement that policy incentives, demonstration pilots, and clearer pathways to market could significantly accelerate uptake.

For CITRUSBUSTERS, these insights reinforce the importance of combining scientific development with validation, impact assessment, and stakeholder engagement – this is reflected in our engagement with local farmer communities and planned educational events.

Access the webinar materials

· Watch the recording: AGRO4AGRI YouTube channel

· Download presentations: https://zenodo.org/communities/agro4agri

Looking ahead

The From Lab to Land webinar was a small preview of what is to come ahead: targeted science-based and sustainable solutions which can strengthen European agricultural production, biodiversity and rural livelihoods at the same time. For CITRUSBUSTERS, it reaffirmed the value of collaboration, dialogue, and stakeholder involvement in turning plant health research into practical, sustainable solutions. Such collaboration is essential: no single project can address plant health challenges alone. By working together, EU projects can build complementary solutions and contribute to a more resilient and connected agricultural innovation ecosystem. We thank the AGRO4AGRI project for organizing the webinar, the first of a series of joint activities.