Strengthening Legume Networks with BELIS

Last week I had the opportunity to represent LoginEKO at the second annual Horizon Europe BELIS partners’ meeting, held at the Institute of Field and Vegetable Crops (IFVC) in Novi Sad, Serbia.

The BELIS project (Breeding European Legumes for Increased Sustainability) brings together breeders, researchers, and seed companies across Europe to improve the breeding and adoption of annual legumes. This year’s meeting gathered a diverse and inspiring group of more than 60 researchers from 34 organizations across 17 EU countries, committed to advancing legumes as key crops for sustainable food systems.

For us at LoginEKO, legumes are more than just crops. They form the backbone of our plant-based sustainable farming model by fixing nitrogen, enriching soil, and making it possible to farm without synthetic pesticides, mineral fertilizers or livestock manure.

This is exactly why BELIS is so important. The project is working on making legumes more competitive and widely adopted in Europe by creating cost-effective breeding tools, improving the regulatory environment for legume breeding, and facilitating innovation transfer between research and industry.

European farming depends heavily on imported protein crops due to limited disease-resistant, high-yield legume varieties, and BELIS is working to change that.

All partners had the chance to present their progress, and I was glad to introduce our sustainable farming model within this context, focusing on how peas, broad beans, and chickpeas in particular are essential in our crop rotations, and how they make organic farming of staple crops both possible and productive at scale.

For us, the most valuable part was exchanging experiences and connecting with renowned scientists and breeders from across the EU who are dedicated to shaping the future of legumes.  By working together, we can ensure the varieties of the future match the needs of sustainable farming systems: resilient, nitrogen-fixing, climate-ready, and productive.