News

TRAILS4SOIL: Turning collaboration into soil recovery 

4th June 2026

TRAILS4SOIL is a five-year EU and CH co-funded project (2025–2030)

More than 60% of Europe’s soils are degraded, driven largely by intensive land use. The result is reduced resilience, declining biodiversity and increasing pressure on food production. Restoring soil health is not just an environmental imperative. It is a prerequisite for the long-term viability of food production across the continent

TRAILS4SOIL, a five-year EU and CH co-funded project (2025–2030), addresses this challenge. Coordinated by the University of Cordoba, it brings together a consortium of 22 research and agricultural organisations across Europe to test how regenerative agriculture can restore soil health while maintaining productivity and farm viability.

A Living Blueprint for Regenerative Agriculture

What distinguishes TRAILS4SOIL is its ambition to create not just research outputs, but a lasting transformation of how agriculture is practised at landscape scale. The project’s Living Labs, embedded within working farms and designed around real farming realities, are being built to become enduring hotspots of regenerative agriculture.

Each Living Lab serves as a replicable blueprint, a locally-adapted framework that captures what works, why it works, and how it can be scaled. The ambition is that long after the project concludes, these labs remain active centres of knowledge, practice and partnership, demonstrating that the transition to regenerative agriculture is not only possible, but economically and agronomically sound.

The project’s five regional Living Labs focus on specific agroecological challenges:

• Permanent cropping systems in Mediterranean regions

• Regenerative approaches in organic systems

• Soil resilience to climate change

• Conservation of black soils

• Crop–livestock integration

By working across diverse production systems and geographies, TRAILS4SOIL is building the evidence base for landscape-level integration, showing how regenerative practices can be woven across entire crop rotations and agricultural systems, not just applied in isolated trials.

Building the Business case for Regenerative Agriculture

Scientific evidence alone will not drive the transition to regenerative agriculture at scale. Farmers and agri-food businesses need to see a credible, tangible business case, one that demonstrates economic, environmental and social benefits simultaneously, and at a scale that reflects real-world conditions.

TRAILS4SOIL is designed to do exactly that. Across its Living Labs, the project will build and document the business case for regenerative agriculture, capturing the combined value created for farmers, food businesses, ecosystems and communities. This landscape-level evidence, integrating economic return, soil health metrics, biodiversity outcomes and climate resilience, will provide the foundation that the agri-food sector needs to move from pilots to systemic adoption.

Project Partners

TRAILS4SOIL is a consortium of 22 research and agricultural organisations across Europe, coordinated by the University of Cordoba.

Partner Institutions

• University of Cordoba – Spain

• University of Evora – Portugal

• National Scientific Center Institute of Agriculture of NAAS – Ukraine

• Bern University of Applied Sciences – Switzerland

• Boden Leben – Austria

• Countryside & Community Research Institute – UK

• European Alliance for Regenerative Agriculture – Germany

• European Conservation Agriculture Federation – Belgium

• German Association for Conservation Tillage – Germany

• Institute for European Environmental Policy – Belgium

• National Center for Research and Seeds Production – Moldova

• Research Institute of Organic Agriculture – Switzerland

• Sustainable Agriculture Initiative Platform – Switzerland

• Slovenian Association for Conservation Agriculture – Slovenia

• South Westphalia University of Applied Sciences – Germany

• Spanish Conservation Agriculture Living Soils Association – Spain

• University of Cluj-Napoca – Romania

• University of Greenwich – UK

• University of Ljubljana – Slovenia

• University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences – Austria

• University of Teramo – Italy

• Young Farmer Association (ASAJA Seville) – Spain

TRAILS4SOIL is funded by the EU’s Horizon Europe Programme (Grant agreement ID: 101218949 — TRAILS4SOIL — HORIZON-MISS-2024-SOIL-01) and the Swiss State Secretariat for Education, Research and Innovation (SERI).