FARMORY kicks off in Athens to co-create digital solutions with small farms

The FARMORY kick-off in Athens on 12–13 October 2026 launched a four-year collaboration focused on a practical challenge: many digital agriculture tools are too costly or are not designed around the needs of small and medium-sized farms.

Funded by the European Union’s Horizon Europe programme and coordinated by the Agricultural University of Athens, FARMORY will work with farmers to co-create, deploy and pilot cost-effective digital solutions. The aim is to help farms monitor and manage water, nutrients and other natural resources across different farming systems, contributing to more sustainable agriculture.

The project will also catalogue more than 300 existing research and innovation results and develop a digital platform with a cost-benefit calculator, a transferability assessment service and FARMORYBot, an AI-powered chatbot. These tools will help technology providers find and adapt existing knowledge when developing solutions for farms.

At the kick-off, partners discussed farmers’ needs, barriers to technology adoption and opportunities to work with other initiatives. Contributions from European Commission representatives and the Digital Agroecology Cluster helped set the wider context for the work ahead.

A central part of FARMORY is its Open Call, which reframe.food will lead through Work Package 5. With a planned budget of €4.68 million, the call will fund 26 Sustainable Innovation Projects, with up to €180,000 available per project. Each project will bring digital technology providers and researchers together with farms or farmers’ organisations to develop and test solutions under real farming conditions.

Currently planned to launch in November 2027, the call will run through opencalls.fund, the platform developed by reframe.food. It will support the call process, from applications and evaluation to contracting and monitoring the funded projects.

At reframe.food, we’re proud to be part of FARMORY and look forward to working with our partners to make digital innovation more accessible and useful for the farms it is meant to serve.