Research axes and themes
Research and development are the first line of action of ARVALIS – Institut du végétal, representing more than 50% of its resources.
As part of its R&D activities, the Institute engages all the available interacting scientific and technical levers and develop them across three dimensions:
- crops,
- study scales,
- and value chain from plant to finish products, as shown in the figure below.
According to its Executive Board’s recommendations, ARVALIS focuses its activities on five main priority themes:
Sustainable agriculture, organic, conservation, precision farming… agriculture is more than ever pluralistic. ARVALIS supports this diversity of agricultures by researching and developing better practices suited to every situation, including value creation by producing food and non-food biomass prodcuts, ecosystem services, compliance with product specifications…
Climate hazards are becoming more frequent and intense, and their impacts on the production’s performance and stability must be characterized and mitigated in the territories. ARVALIS is working to help farmers adapt their production and farming systems to make them more resilient against the effects of climate change.
The farming sector offers potential and multiple opportunities depending on whether productions are targeting export, domestic or local markets. To meet the markets’ needs, ARVALIS works to produce agricultural products on the French territory that are competitive and in sufficient quantities, so as to meet the requirements of consumers and processing industries in terms of technology, health and nutrition.
Reducing the use of synthetic inputs and fossil fuels represents a priority component in the farming sector’s agroecological transition. ARVALIS is striving to develop integrated and alternative solutions relevant to the internal natural regulation of agrosystems as well as external innovations, or to increase the efficiency of the existing solutions. Its efforts aim at identifying and combining multiple levers and assessing the related risk taking on an economic level.
To respond to the challenges of agroecological transition, agriculture has to reduce its environmental impact while meeting economic and food needs. In this context, ARVALIS is developing and testing agroecological infrastructures and practices that help biodiversity grow for the benefit of agriculture (plant pest control, pollination, limiting soil erosion, etc.).
