PROJECT

The general purpose is to adapt and disseminate the SOLIBAM TENDER LI ROSI population in the environment identified to facilitate the adaptation to climate change of organic and low-input cereals in Sicily. The protagonists will be the local networks of farmers who will contribute to the reproduction of seeds by managing their correct evolution over time and their diffusion with the technical and scientific support of the project partners. The changes promoted by the Project will have different impacts, from the farm level to the consumption of the final products, affecting farmers and the entire organic cereal sector. Some European research projects have studied the evolutionary populations (Composite Cross Population/CCP) in organic or low-input agricultural systems to respond to climate change and to make the systems themselves more resilient and sustainable: SOLIBAM (www.solibam.eu), COBRA (www.coreorganic2.org/COBRA), DIVERSIFOOD (www.diversifood.eu). These projects have shown that CCPs allow the production of gene pools capable of adapting over time to climate change by exploiting the different degrees of fitness of the genotypes that make up the pool itself since they absorb the climatic differences between one year and another much better than the uniform modern varieties. To date, many European countries are working on CCPs in their own contexts (France, UK, Germany, Denmark).The wheat CCP TENDER LI ROSI constitutes the core of the innovation to be tested with this Project through the evaluation of its adaptation in 4 climate macro-areas (plain, hill, mountain and coast) in dedicated experimental fields (1 parent company and 5 subsidiaries for each macro area) so as to have seed adapted locally to be distributed to a network of interested farmers thanks to appropriate demonstration actions. This innovation will allow us to bring back diversity in the organic or low-input cereal sector by solving the problem of the absence of varieties suitable for these cultivation systems and making Sicilian cereal farming more resilient to climate change. The innovation will be managed by farmers and disseminated under an open source licence to ensure the widest access by other users.