AgroStorage

Small farms dominate the agricultural landscape of Southern and Eastern Europe: over 51% of Spanish farms and more than 70% of Greek farms are under 5 hectares, while Poland counts 1.3 million agricultural holdings. On these farms, refrigeration, cooling, and mechanised storage account for up to 40–50% of operational energy use — a burden that grew dramatically as industrial electricity prices rose by 50–70% across the three countries between 2021 and 2023.

Yet while national CAP strategic plans and energy policies target production and renewable generation, post-harvest storage is largely overlooked — and practical training on low-energy alternatives is almost absent from vocational education and training (VET) provision. Traditional and passive storage techniques that could reduce costs and environmental impact exist across Europe, but they are undocumented, unvalidated, and untaught.

AgroStorage — Skills for sustainable and energy-efficient storage solutions in agriculture — addresses this gap. It is an exploratory and preparatory project that identifies, observes, and structures existing low-energy and non-electric agricultural storage practices across three European countries, assesses what works, and converts the findings into a skills framework for future VET development.

Running for 18 months from November 2026 to April 2028, AgroStorage brings together a deliberately mixed consortium: Fundacja CoPoint (Poland), a training and advisory foundation for farmers and adult learners, as coordinator; AGS MONCAL, S.L. (Spain), a GLOBALG.A.P.-certified agri-food company whose cold storage facilities serve as the project's live case study; and VERDE, contributing research and Erasmus+ experience. The project's objectives are to:

• Promote the adoption of sustainable, low-energy and non-electric storage approaches to enhance resilience and reduce environmental impact.

• Connect theory with practice through work-based learning, peer exchange and experiential activities.

• Build the capacities of VET learners and agricultural professionals in practical post-harvest management and low-energy storage.

• Strengthen cross-border collaboration among VET providers, SMEs and research organisations.

The project will deliver three main results: a Best Practices Guidebook documenting 21 validated non-electric and low-energy storage practices, published in English, Spanish, Greek, and Polish; three transnational workshops combining technical visits, expert input, and structured reflection in real storage environments in Spain, Poland, and Greece; and a Training Framework — a compact, skills-oriented framework of roughly 25 learning hours (1 ECTS) aligned to EQF levels 3–4, piloted with agricultural training professionals in all three countries.

VERDE leads Activity 3 — the development, piloting, and publication of the Training Framework — and serves as Quality Assurance leader for the whole project. VERDE will also host the third transnational workshop in Kozani, focused on translating the project's field findings into VET competences, and coordinates the Raising Awareness Events that present the framework to farmers, learners, trainers, and policy representatives in each country.