TALLHEDA at ECONUTRI Open Day 2026!

On 27 April 2026, the Agricultural University of Athens hosted the Open Day of the ECONUTRI project — a landmark closing event for one of Europe's most ambitious Horizon Europe initiatives on sustainable nutrient management in agriculture. TALLHEDA was invited to present at the event, with the AUA team delivering a dedicated presentation entitled "Artificial Intelligence Technologies for Potato Cultivation" — an illustration of how digital and AI-driven approaches to precision agriculture complement and extend the ambitions of sustainable nutrient and resource management.

ECONUTRI — Innovative Concepts and Technologies for Ecologically Sustainable Nutrient Management in Agriculture Aiming to Prevent, Mitigate and Eliminate Pollution in Soils, Water and Air — is coordinated by the Agricultural University of Athens under the leadership of Prof. Dimitrios Savvas, and brings together a consortium working to develop smart nutrient management tools, precision fertilisation technologies, and nature-based solutions for open field and greenhouse cropping systems. The project involves 30 partners across 13 countries, with European institutions partnered alongside six institutions from China, making it one of the most internationally extensive EU–China scientific collaborations in the agricultural sector.

Since its launch in 2022, ECONUTRI has developed and validated 10 different technologies designed to reduce nitrogen and phosphorus losses from organic biowastes, and tested fertiliser alternatives in arable fields, variable cropping systems and greenhouses, achieving measurable reductions in ammonia and nitrous oxide emissions ranging from 20 to 60%. These efforts directly support the EU Green Deal's target to reduce nutrient losses by 50% and fertiliser use by at least 20% by 2030.

TALLHEDA's contribution to the Open Day brought a complementary perspective: where ECONUTRI focuses on the biochemical and agronomic dimensions of sustainable nutrient management, TALLHEDA's presentation highlighted how AI and digital technologies are transforming decision-making in potato cultivation — from yield prediction and crop monitoring to data-driven fertilisation recommendations and field-level sensing. The presentation demonstrated how citizen science protocols, mobile data collection tools, and machine learning applications developed within TALLHEDA can equip farmers with the analytical capacity to implement precision nutrient management in practice.

The ECONUTRI Open Day, held at the close of a project that ran from November 2022 to April 2026, brought together researchers, practitioners, and stakeholders from across the consortium and beyond to share results, reflect on lessons learned, and explore pathways to commercialisation and policy uptake. TALLHEDA's participation at this event is a concrete example of the cross-project synergies that TALLHEDA's Communication, Dissemination and Exploitation strategy actively pursues — connecting the project's digital agriculture innovations to the wider European research ecosystem working on food systems sustainability.