Innovative education in regenerative agriculture farming
Opinion Piece by Dr Maarten van der Kamp & Pamela Pokorny published in Innovation News  NetworkÂ
The learning challenges in the food system and why innovative education is key to sustainable transformation
Source : Opinion Piece published in Innovation News Network, 20 November 2025
Dr Maarten van der Kamp, Director of Education, and Pamela Pokorny, Digital Learning Unit Programme Manager at EIT Food, discuss the learning challenges in the food system and explain why innovative education is key to sustainable transformation.
Our food supply does not exist in isolation. It is part of a living and interconnected system shaped by competing pressures, shifting priorities, and stakeholder demands. External forces, including geopolitical, climate, and market agendas, are exerting outsized pressure on an increasingly precarious food system. This interplay is framed by a paradox: agritech innovation is accelerating rapidly, but there is a lag in the adoption of sustainable agriculture practices that are needed to ensure the resilience of our global food supply. We need our future workers to have the skills to meet these challenges.
So, how can we equip the future agrifood system workforce to adapt in a sustainable way?
The answer lies in education, reimagined for the challenges of today and the possibilities of tomorrow. Conventional approaches to education are no longer enough to meet the scale and complexity of the challenges we face. We need to leverage technology to scale learning in a new way.
Success depends on harnessing data-driven educational science and new learning modalities of the digital age. Bridging that gap between knowledge and practice requires a convergence of experiential learning and innovative edtech to develop skills with real-world impact. EIT Food Education is at the forefront of this learning revolution. Guided by a mission to transform the food system for sustainability, the EIT Food Skills Academies are aiming to engage 200,000 learners over the next five years.
From science to practice
Farmers, agrifood professionals, and educators need access to practical tools that translate complex research into applied decision-making. This need is even more pronounced for farmers transitioning to regenerative agricultural practices, as the shift often requires navigating a wide range of context-specific challenges. Factors such as local climate, soil type, cropping systems, and broader landscape conditions can all influence what practices are feasible and effective.
At Next Bite 2025, EIT Food’s flagship event and Europe’s leading forum for agrifood innovation, EIT Food launched the Future Farm Lab – a new digital ecosystem that offers farmers, educators, and policymakers hands-on learning in regenerative agriculture through an immersive 3D simulation.
The Future Farm Lab is built on a continuum of modules that simulate interventions in soil health, biodiversity, and climate resilience. Real farming scenarios and case studies from the EIT Food Regenerative Agriculture portfolio set the stage for micro missions like Farming through Extremes and Soil in Crisis. These simulations allow learners to test strategies, observe consequences, and view data-driven insights over long-term periods in a safe, controlled, and accessible way. In real life learning, these scenarios would be too time-consuming, costly, and logistically impossible to test.
This ‘learning by doing’ approach in a virtual setting needed to mirror real-world issues that farmers face across Europe. To achieve this, EIT Food and Metachef worked with a diverse testbed of European farmers, from Portugal to the Netherlands, to validate and refine the platform’s content, usability, and long-term relevance.
Alignment with EU and global agendas
These types of innovative educational approaches can directly support both European Union and global sustainability agendas. For instance, the Future Farm Lab is working to embed soil literacy and systems thinking across the agrifood sector, in line with EU Mission Soil goals to restore the health of 75% of Europe’s soil by 2030.
More broadly, this underscores the importance of collective action across the agrifood system. Progress depends on bringing together the complementary expertise of policymakers, industry leaders, startups, farmers, researchers, and educators, ensuring that innovation, education, and policy reinforce one another in driving sustainable transformation.
Learning innovation
The agrifood sector is constantly evolving, making it essential for farmers and agrifood professionals to retrain and upskill. New technologies, such as AI, can play a valuable role in developing educational tools that remain current and adaptable, ensuring that learners have access to the most up-to-date insights and capabilities needed to drive sustainable change.
For instance, EIT Food’s Geek4Skills platform uses AI to support professionals in upskilling, reskilling, or transitioning into new roles within the sector. Designed for learners, employers, educators, and policymakers, the platform offers real-time tools that help identify the specific skills required to meet the sector’s evolving demands, thereby aligning training opportunities with actual industry needs.
Conclusion
By 2030, over 100,000 learners will have explored the Future Farm Lab, developing new skills, systems thinking, and practical insight needed to drive food system transformation. Achieving this vision requires collaboration across the entire ecosystem. Input from educators, policymakers, industry, and farmers is vital to shape how Europe grows sustainably.
The future of food innovation is not just in a lab or a boardroom, but in collective learning and shared action to reimagine how we transform our land and our knowledge.