About the MAiE-Team

The consortium is composed of partners from different backgrounds who are all involved in various aspects of Multifunctional Agriculture. To enhance the network-oriented and disseminative nature of the project, we attach great importance to involving partners from different sectors (social, health, education, agriculture, etc.) and partners/countries with different stages of development in terms of Multifunctional Agriculture. Partners  such as AGROBIO (Portugal), Area viva (Czech Republic) and the Agrarian University of Plovidv (Bulgaria) are still at the pioneering stage and have little experience of Multifunctional Agriculture, or at least only in isolated cases. For other partners such as  MTT (Finland), AIAB (Italy) and the LEI  Institute (Netherlands), Multifunctional Agriculture has reached the status of an recognized institutionalised system of considerable dimensions. In Germany, the situation is beginning to move from a pioneering towards a professional stage, mainly encouraged the activities organised by Petrarca and the Thüringer Ökoherz e.V..

Multifunctional Agriculture is not only an area of work related to organic agriculture. To enhance Social Farming as a multifunctional tool, we involve social institutes and ministries, politicians, education centres, prison service centres and universities in the project. They are included as core partners or associated partners, in the latter case contributing their knowledge and experience at Focus Groups meetings. 

In order to ensure high quality outcomes, the curriculum development requires theoretical, practical and methodical expertise, as well as external quality evaluation. Different types of expertise will be provided by partners within the Focus Groups, and by the following bodies:

• Universities, Research Institutes and universities of Applied Sciences, e.g. the HAS Den Bosch University of Applied Sciences (Netherlands) and MTT Agrifood Research (Finland), LEI Wageningen UR (Netherlands) and Agrarian University Plodiv (Bulgaria): theoretical knowledge and requirements in the agricultural, social, vocational, education and training sectors.
• Social groups and farmers’ associations, e.g. Petrarca, AIAB, Thüringer Ökoherz e.V., AGROBIO and the Focus Group partners: practical knowledge and inclusion of the target group.
• Education Centres, e.g. AGROBIO, AIAB, Area viva and CERCICA: methodical background to knowledge transfer.