The €2.5 million initiative helping Spain’s farmers protect their next harvest

Across Navarra, in northern Spain, cereal fields change colour with the seasons. Winter brings green shoots; by early summer, the land can turn gold as wheat and barley ripen. Then comes the harvest, when months of work are translated into a measure of success: tonnes of grain gathered from the fields.

But the weather does not always cooperate, and Navarra’s farmers do not take a good harvest for granted. The region’s cereal farmers saw a 13% drop in production in 2026 compared to last year, closing at 765,000 tonnes, and sitting at a 3% below the five-year average. Grain weight was capped by intense heatwaves and an exceptionally dry spell in June and July, scorching the fields and exhausting the crops right before harvest.

This can have hard-hitting consequences for the agricultural sector. Europe was confirmed as one the fastest warming continents on Earth, with an increasing intensity of summer heat. Most EU countries expect to see declines in production this year, with around €2bn worth of cereal losses this year, reports Carbon Brief.

For farmers, the challenge is not simply to get through a difficult season. It is to prepare their land for the next one, as changing temperatures and increasingly unpredictable weather put pressure on agricultural production.

Navarra 360: farming together

One response is taking shape across Navarra, where a €2.5 million initiative is bringing farmers together to measure soil health, adopt new farming practices and track their environmental impact.

Since launching in 2024, the Navarra 360 initiative has become one of Spain's most ambitious programmes. It’s pushing for agricultural practices that are able to recover quickly from climate impacts. Today, it works with 38 farmers – including nine women – covering 5,000 hectares of farmland. It focuses on arable crops such as wheat, barley, oats, rapeseed and sunflower, which are mostly sold on as livestock feed.

Navarra 360 offers regular technical training sessions, including on crop protection, fertilisation and cover crops, and soil sampling. Each farm starts with a baseline measurement and a personalised transition plan, supported by technical advice, training and monitoring visits. Farmers receive annual results on nutrient-use efficiency, emissions and other inputs. This has helped farmers in the programme adapt the way they measure their impacted area, tailoring it to their specific crops and business needs.

For participating farmer Alberto Alfaro, the value of that support is already apparent. He has been practising direct drilling for two years, a method of sowing seeds directly into the soil without first ploughing it. By disturbing the ground less, the technique can help preserve soil structure and reduce erosion.

“The results have been positive. I think that if I had been on my own, it would have been much more difficult,” Alfaro said.

Like Alfaro, each of the 38 farms in the programme committed 100% of their land when joining. “This was very surprising and very positive”, said Laura López-Cortijo, Programme Manager at the European Institute of Innovation & Technology (EIT). The institute’s food subdivision is the administrator of Navarra 360. Farmers completely rely on Navarra 360 for the impact measurement, “so once they are committed, they are fully committed”, she added.

The initiative also depends on a network beyond the farms themselves.More than 40 stakeholders are involved, including funders, technical experts, digital platform providers, external standard auditors, soil sampling laboratories, and university research programmes. This solution is demonstrating that resilient agriculture works best when everyone involved in the food system contributes to the transition.

Why healthy soils matter

Soil health is central to Navarra 360’s approach. The region is a pioneer in agricultural management, where farmers have been using crop rotation for decades – now a sustainable agriculture policy under the EU’s normative.

“Our farmers are very interested in improving their soil health because they know this is the key to be more resilient in the future”, says Noemí Salazar-Gómez, Agriculture Manager at EIT Food. The practices are not a fixed set. They include direct seeding to reduce soil erosion, using fewer chemical products to protect crops from disease, and replacing mineral fertilisation with organic fertilisation and biostimulants. Farmers also receive advice on when to treat their crops and how to choose less toxic products.

Fifteen ways to measure and manage healthy soils

Farmers in the Navarra 360 program use 15 indicators to track improvements in soil health, biodiversity, water and climate. This includes measuring organic matter, carbon stock and microbiological life in the soil. The programme also tracks greenhouse gas emissions, measured in tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent per growing season, and biodiversity, including the area of farmland reserved for natural habitats and wildflowers.

Salazar-Gómez says the project’s pioneering role is to track how practices are implemented and translate them into impact across the 15 indicators. It also pushes farmers to apply new practices, or to apply existing ones across more hectares, each campaign.

The project also tracks how efficiently farms use nutrients and plant protection products, and how toxic those products are. By 2027, the programme is aiming for a 20% reduction in the use of chemical plant protection products, a 40% reduction in mineral fertilisation and a 30% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions across all farms.

EIT Food has run more than 700 soil analyses, collected from 200 different locations over the last two years, creating one of the region’s most complete soil health data sets. This has helped the programme advance practical solutions that farmers can implement on their land, whilst being commercially viable, and good for selling the production.

For the moment, Navarra 360 can point to the number of participating farms, the area covered and the system it has built to monitor changes in agricultural practices and environmental indicators. The real test will be whether farmers can demonstrate greater resilience in the years ahead. The programme is expected to publish results after its completion in 2027.

The cost of changing course

Beyond the fact that building resilience is a long-term process rather than a quick win, getting farmers to adopt new practices has been another challenge.

“When we first started, we had to do a very big effort to involve farmers”, said Noemi Salazar-Gómez. She seeked help from the farmers’ trade union – the Unión de Agricultores y Ganaderos de Navarra (UAGN) – and local farming cooperatives to warm participants up to the idea of private companies supporting their sustainability practices.

New machinery can cost up to tens of thousands of Euros, which is why a group of four Navarra 360 farmers came together to buy a sunflower seeding machine and share it on a rotating basis. The project works with basic products: wheat goes to both animal and human food, and most of the barley is for livestock feed. The farmers already no-till their wheat, barley and oats, Salazar-Gómez explains, but sunflowers in the rotation need a different machine. The cost sharing among farmers has provided a valuable incentive to join the program.

Beyond Navarra

The initiative’s work is part of the Action Agenda’s plan to accelerate the practice of healthy soil management, with a focus on addressing gaps linking the production of food with healthy diets. This includes generating evidence from the fields that can inform policy, practice and finance at the yearly UN Climate Change conference (COP).

The initiative is already building a foundation for the years ahead. Its experience is informing Lower Silesia 360 in Poland, where regenerative farming practices are expected to reach more than 20,000 hectares and 200 farmers. Navarra 360 was also recognised with a Peterson Sustainability Award in 2025 and named by the Instituto Cerdà in 2026 as one of Spain’s 20 leading innovations in the consumer goods sector. There is also concrete regional backing. The Navarra government granted the money for the 500-hectare innovation pilot on biostimulants and keyline.

Now, the team is working to secure the programme’s future beyond 2027, with discussions under way with stakeholders across the supply chain. The work will take time to show its full impact, but farmers already understand what is at stake. As Salazar-Gómez put it, “They are so interested in improving the soil health because they know this is the key to be more resilient in the future.”