Table 4. Lessons-learned and comments reported in the survey for researchers involved in agroecology.

n.	Quotes
1.	“ Interest from stakeholders (particularly the not-farmer ones) is a crucial aspect, sensibilization activities should be implemented to increase stakeholders’ awareness they can become actors of the food systems”
2.	“ Collaboration with farmers need time and energy to be kept alive, this dimension of maintaining the collaboration "alive" and "dynamic" is often underestimated in the project funding and not rewarded in term of research”
3.	“ Involvement of farmers (and farmers interest to PAR activities) is easier the further away they are from large markets and the more remote the rural areas”
4.	“ Very difficult to engage actors not directly connected with the production”
5.	“More agroecology, longer projects, adding new partner every year, including small farmers as micro-business in Innovation actions, more social and food system aspects”
6.	“Projects with longer duration (over five years) in fact agro-ecological transition requires long term processes”
7.	“ Programmes are still too siloed: integration of all dimensions of agroecology are needed (environmental, social, economic, political - or across the various principles of agroecology, e.g. 13 HLPE principles)”
8.	“ Yield increase paradigm still too much in some calls”
9.	“Agroecology and ecological intensification need to be embedded into the one-health concept and clearly focussed”
10.	“Specific funding calls for agroecology are rare”
11.	“In agroecology one cannot ignore the needs of food system operators and consumers/civil society for which the bottom-up approach should be implicit. These needs should then be collected by researchers, representatives, and institutions who, together with operators in the food supply chains, consumers and other stakeholders, develop the research project, enriching it with any elements that may be overlooked and, in any case, shared by all”
12.	“Funding advocacy and implementation of input independence strategies throughout in the food systems, and particularly, the productive smallholder farming sector, should be a priority”
13.	“At a minimum, we need consultancy and technical assistance programs for businesses in the food supply chains, especially farmers and processors, to be implemented through the establishment of communities of practice and living labs, information and communication campaigns aimed at consumers to gain awareness of sustainable diets and consumption styles, their ability to induce changes in the production system in view of greater sustainability by interacting with producers”
14.	“ Deliverables, milestones and all of the like, are designed so a non-expert project evaluator (officer) can check the boxes and judge the good progress of the project. Its real impact, however, is another story”
15.	“To be funded, projects need more skills in writing and speaking bureaucratically language, than scientific skills and practical potential. Too many formalisms. Projects are written with the evaluation sheet in mind, not with innovation potential in mind. Projects are judged as good when they contain all the wizard words, rather than having real science and innovation potential.”
16.	“Less bureaucracy, more access to private companies”
17.	“More flexibility on how to spend the budget, based on need”
18.	“Programmes/calls should be build considering the possibility to enable the direct participation of stakeholders (e.g. farms, organization) as partners”;
19.	“Farmers engagement in the project need to have funds since they are key part of the project”
20.	“Individual projects should not become too big (more than 2–5Million) otherwise only the big organisations will be able to coordinate such a consortium. In contrast, smaller budgets would allow smaller organisations and consortia to profit from the programmes”