📋 Tender Overview
Start Date: 01/07/2023
End Date: 30/06/2028
Total Eligible Budget: 5,466,812 €
EU Contribution: 3,280,087 €
PROJECT DESCRIPTION
BACKGROUND
The EU is acutely challenged by the lack of effective and sustainable agricultural pest control strategies. As a result, growers continue to depend on chemical intensive pest control protocols. While the EU intends to transition away from excessive usage of agrochemicals and widely adopt environmentally safe farming (farm2fork strategy), plant-based formulations and well-established control strategies to tackle pest/disease outbreaks are limited. This challenge is even more amplified in fruit crops such as Grapevine. Grapevine is highly susceptible to fungal diseases, mainly Downy Mildew (DM) and Grapevine Trunk Disease (GTD) that depend on Copper (Cu) intensive molecules for control often resulting in deposition of excess Cu in soil and potentially fruit tissues. Our aim is to reduce the environmental impact of pest control in vineyards by introducing breakthrough, mineral-based, natural Plant Protection Products (PPPs) for disease control and circular approaches to effectively handle the vineyard biomass. We will transform the ecosystem of crop protection in grapevines by launching first-of-its-kind, sustainable PPP formulations that cost-effectively and efficiently tackle DM and GTD. While the novel PPPs will disrupt the existing DM control products market, for GTD, our PPPs will be ground-breaking as there are no commercial control methods available yet.
