Grain and food storage: co-design of local, resilient and low-carbon innovations by capitalizing on ancestral techniques, farmers' know-how and collective intelligence. – LocaStock

Storing grains and foodstuffs in local, healthy, resilient, low-carbon conditions, and without using fossil fuels, is a major challenge not only for food security and sovereignty, but also for the famous "One Health" concept. Yet very few scientific and technical references are available on this topic. In the south of France, organic cereal producers, archaeologists who are experts in underground medieval silos, cereal pathologists, geneticists and agronomists of cultivated diversity, biochemists, millers and bakers, an underprivileged local authority, cereal craftsmen and an artist have decided to work together on this project and to IMAGINE (co-design innovative storage ideas as alternatives to current techniques), EXPERIMENT (co-build underground silos to store harvests at farmers' and craftsmen's sites, evaluate the effect of storage conditions on the sanitary and technological quality of grains and flours) and SWARM from Occitanie to other territories.
Relying on ancestral techniques to respond to the urgent needs of the present and the challenges of the future is at the heart of this project, which aims to bring on board a collective of players with very diverse outlooks, skills and disciplines, and to deploy animation and communication methods to facilitate the emergence of a collective intelligence with operational societal spin-offs in the short term.