The ‘Agritech’ project: the National Centre for the Development of New Technologies in Agriculture is based on the use of technologies enabling the sustainable development of agrifood production and aims to promote adaptation to climate change, reduce environmental impact in agrifood, develop marginal areas, ensure safety, traceability and typicality of supply chains.
The Agritech Centre, which involves 28 universities, 5 research centres and 18 companies, aims to combine the best scientific expertise to make the Italian agrifood industry more competitive and sustainable. The project aims to connect agricultural research infrastructures available at a national level, use enabling technologies to improve productivity and sustainability, promote ecological and digital transition, collaborate with companies to increase resilience and economic competitiveness in the agrifood sector and train the next generation of scholars in this field by providing human capital and the skills necessary to tackle future challenges.
The Centre will be structured according to a Hub&Spoke approach, with coordination managed by the University of Naples Federico II as the promotor of the Agritech National Centre, and there will be nine research nodes equally distributed between Northern Italy, Southern Italy and Central Italy in line with the principle of reducing inequality underlying the NRRP program. Cross-Spoke Hub activities will focus on monitoring project development management as well as creating an Agritech Academy and organizing technology transfer initiatives. Each spoke will develop one or more Living Labs to conduct research activities, try out validation technologies and support business experiments.
UNIMONT, Centre of Excellence of the University of Milan, will operate within Spoke 7 which will focus on mountain areas with the aim of studying integrated models for the development of marginal areas in order to promote a multifunctional production system that favors agro-ecological and socio-economic sustainability.
