FiBL - Research Institute of Organic Agriculture, Switzerland

FiBL is one of the world’s leading organic farming research and technology transfer centres dedicated to sustainable agriculture with 175 staff members. It is an independent, non-profit research institute with the aim of advancing cutting-edge science particularly in the field of organic farming. FiBL’s research team works together with farmers and farmers’ organisations to develop innovative and cost-effective solutions to boost agricultural productivity while never losing sight of environmental, health and socio-economic impacts. FiBL has been a partner in 46 projects under the EU’s Framework Programmes.

Role in the project

FiBL is involved in five work-packages (Work packages 1, 2, 3, 5 and 6).

• FiBL will provide data from long-term field experiments to work package 1 and co-organize stakeholder meetings to identify relevant stress situations and crops genotypes to be used in other work packages.
• In work package 2, FiBL will characterize the diversity of rhizosphere and endophytic fungal (including arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi) communities by New Generation Sequencing technologies from phenotyping experiments of work package 2.
• In work package 3, FiBL will test for two years contrasting bread wheat genotypes under different fertilization regime and tillage intensities. In addition, FiBL will be responsible to perform various soil and microbial analyses from other partners’ trials of work package 3.
• In work package 5, FiBL will directly test the best innovations within its network of on-farm trials (bread wheat) and evaluate the economic sustainability of all tested innovations, combined with an LCA approach.
• Finally, FiBL is in charge of the overall coordination of work package 6 and will be responsible for the website, PR and dissemination tasks.

Key persons involved

• Dr. Paul Mäder
• Dr. Natacha Bodenhausen
• Dr. Sarah Symanczik
• Hansueli Dierauer
• Mareike Weiner
• Dr. Helga Willer, Leader work package 6
• Laura Kemper