The CORE Organic II (CO11) is a European transnational research cooperation project supported by the European Commission. The main idea of CORE Organic is the coordination of research programmes between partner countries.
Core Organic 2 held a research seminar in Amsterdam on 15th May 2013 to bring together the project co-ordinators from its projects to present and discuss their work with the COII team as well as the national funders. In all 14 projects were represented. Due to there having been three calls from COII the projects were at different stages of delivery. Some being about half way through, such as TILMAN-ORG and ICOPP while others are just starting, such as COBRA. The themes of the project ranged from management of soft fruit pest (Softpest multitrap), fast methods for authentication of organic plant based foods (AuthenticFood) and strategies to reduce environmental impact by improving health and welfare of organic pigs (ProPig). ORC are co-ordinating COBRA and Bruce Pearce represented the project at the seminar. The busy day was taken up by a rapid summary of each project by the co-ordinators so all in attendance could be brought up to speed with the project. The seminar was the split into 3 thematic groups (crops, livestock, crop protection) where with the COII team and national funders we spent more time looking at results from projects (where there were some) and also discuss our experiences as COII project co-ordinators, what worked, what didn’t and how might COII develop its processes and support. Information about all the COII projects can be found on their website.