Agriculture serves a number of essential roles in Israel: It is the primary source of food supply and livelihood for farmers, as well as an important component in the geographic and cultural landscape of the country. It preserves open spaces, enables a rural lifestyle, is integrated with Jewish heritage, and comprises an important economic branch in the state (exports). If managed intelligently, agriculture also contributes to protecting the environment: reservoirs of ground water, soil fertility, the diversity of species and clean air – while poorly managed agriculture is liable to harm its surroundings. An in-depth understanding of the many roles of agriculture is one of the challenges in the sustainable development of Israel in the 21st century.
The Nekudat Hen program was established in order to create a base of inter-disciplinary professional knowledge in the subject of multi-functional agriculture, and thus to make a modest contribution toward achieving the necessary change in the intensive agriculture prevalent in Israel. Since its inception, Nekudat Hen has supported projects that can potentially contribute to the development of multi-functional and profitable environmental-landscape agriculture. It does this by encouraging proposals from various academic disciplines (agriculture, biology, ecology, environmental quality, land and water, economics, planning, architecture, law, social sciences), from the public sector, the scientific community and the private sector (for example, planners, environmental consultants).
In 2011-2014, the program seeks to place exclusive emphasis on the connection between environmental agriculture and preserving nature and biological diversity in Israel. In this framework, the program is calling for projects of a practical nature that can contribute to the development of agricultural activity that preserves the variety of species, the diversity within species and the ecological systems that support them.
New call for proposals will be published on October - November 2011
