Meet the winners of ARIA 2025!
Meet the winners and highly commended projects of the Agricultural and Rural Inspiration Awards - ARIA 2025 and relive the emotions of the closing ceremony!
On Wednesday, 3 December, the EU agricultural and rural development community gathered to celebrate the greenest, smartest, most socially inclusive, innovative and resilient projects implemented at the local level thanks to the Common Agriculture Policy (CAP).
The third edition of the Agricultural and Rural Inspiration Awards – ARIA 2025 culminated in an exciting ceremony at the Théâtre du Vaudeville in Brussels. Some 200 participants, including National Networks and the representatives of the 24 finalist projects, came together to celebrate and network.
- Watch the recording of the ARIA 2025 ceremony
The Jury crowned one winner for each category of the competition:
- Category Smart & Competitive Agriculture: Dimitra: the way forward for Lucanian farms (Italy)
- Category Environmental Protection: Poultree – regenerative cattle and poultry farming (Spain)
- Category Socio-Economic Fabric of Rural Areas: Mutur Beltz (Spain)
- Category Generational Renewal: Digital farm succession for gender-equal entrepreneurship (Sweden)
- Special Gender Equality Award: Changing roles (Austria)
- Popular Vote: Farma Rokou - yoghurt product from freeze-dried colostrum (Greece)
Learn more about ARIA's special Gender Equality Award.
The quality of the submissions was once again outstanding, and four other projects were highly commended by the Jury:
- Category Smart & Competitive Agriculture: 'Bodenkoffer’ soil kit quality assessment box with app (Austria)
- Category Environmental Protection: Cooperative biodiversity and climate protection measures in agricultural landscapes (Germany)
- Category Socio-Economic Fabric of Rural Areas: Woppaaaa! Station Diksmuide (Belgium)
- Category Generational Renewal: Next generation – focus on farm hand-overs (Austria)
“These awards don’t just celebrate the best Europe has to offer in inspiring examples, they represent change – pushing us forward in new ways to develop smarter, more sustainable and transferrable practice and in developing solutions for gender equality and to bring young people not only into project delivery, but into local democracy” says David Lamb, Team leader at the EU CAP Network – CAP Implementation Contact Point.
“We use these projects – all of them, including those not quite fortunate enough to make it – to demonstrate the impact that EU funding can have, not only on rural places, but through the effort of the people delivering them."
This year's ceremony was also a unique opportunity to celebrate our dearest colleague and former team leader, Mike Gregory, who received a special award for his 20 years in agri-rural networking.
Coming soon...
ARIA finalists are often spotlighted in the other strands of work of the EU CAP Network, particularly in our Thematic Groups and other events, as inspiring practices that can be replicated in different contexts.
As in the previous editions of ARIA, all the finalists of the 2025 edition will be featured in the next EU CAP Network Projects Brochure, to be published in early 2026. If you can't wait, you can find the full description of each project in our Good Practice database.
Follow us via this website, our newsletters and social media (@EUCAPNetwork) for updates.
