The Inno-Farming project: innovative urban farming applications for future urban farmers

Urban agriculture (UA) is spreading around the world thanks to its capability to bring together the current knowledge and advances from rural agricultural sector with a set of new skills, innovations and technologies, enabling to pursue a large set of ecosystem services within the cities (e.g., provisioning, regulating, habitat and cultural services). In the coming years, thousands of new-incomers in the UA sector are expected, including not only students of agriculture or professional farmers but also unemployed youth, social and educational bodies, environmental actors, general public, each of them requiring specific technical competences in UA. The European project Inno-Farming, founded in the framework of Erasmus+ program, have implemented an innovative methodology and online training tools to foster the acquisition of key competences in the interdisciplinary context of UA. In the present work, the main outcomes of the project will be illustrated, in order to provide an interdisciplinary framework to strengthen the role of UA for the target groups of professional actors (e.g., teachers/trainers on agro-food VET schools, agricultural consultants and academics), agro-food students in formal education and professional farmers, new-incomers (e.g., new project leaders in UA, employees in redevelopment, unemployed youth), supporting organisations for incomers (e.g., incubators, cooperatives or any supporting organisation involved in UA), local administrations as they need to understand better the development stakes of UA and the supporting tools proposed, citizens organisation (e.g., local NGO’s, neighbourhood associations, consumer associations).