Open Call #2 – Test Before Invest

For this Open Call only small or medium-sized farms are eligible to apply (See Annex A of the GfA).

Please note the following eligibility conditions:

• The farm must provide a valid VAT number at the time of Sub-Grant Agreement preparation. Failure to provide a valid VAT number will automatically result in exclusion from the Sub-Grant Agreement preparation process.
• GUARDIANS Consortium partners, and their affiliated entities (Horizon Europe definition) are not eligible. However, for those beneficiaries that are cooperatives with “members” then regular members that do not receive financial compensation (e.g., employees) or hold decision making power (e.g. serving on the board of directors) from the Cooperatives involved in GUARDIANS are eligible to apply.
• Entities under liquidation, classified as ‘in difficulty’ according to EU regulations, excluded from EU funding, or subject to national bankruptcy laws are not eligible to apply. Entities are considered to be ‘in difficulty’ in accordance with Article 2, item 18, points a) and b) of Directive 2013/34/EU.

We are looking for entities legally registered at the time of application submission to this Test Before Invest Open Call in one of the following countries:

• The Member States of the European Union and its Overseas Countries and Territories (OCT)
• Associated Countries (AC) to Horizon Europe. Association to Horizon Europe is governed by the Horizon Europe Regulation 2021/695.

The applicants who are subject to EU restrictive measures under Article 29 of the Treaty on the European Union (TEU) and article 215 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the EU (TFEU) are not eligible to participate in this Open Call.

Your application needs to be submitted through this form (login required – the form is no loger available after the Open Call closure). Proposals submitted by other means are not eligible and will not be considered for evaluation.

Yes, it is possible to apply if you have received funding from other EU projects before. However, costs for the same activity cannot be funded twice from the EU budget. You cannot receive funding for the same project more than once.
If you are selected for multiple EU projects, you must ensure compliance with the “no double funding” rule. This means that the same costs for the same activity cannot be funded twice through public funds. You will need to confirm that any funding you received from other EU projects does not cover the same costs or tasks that are being funded through the GUARDIANS project.

The applicants will receive a notification from the system confirming that their application has been successfully submitted. If you do not receive this confirmation, please get in touch with us.
Immediately after the submission deadline on 1st July 2026 at 17:00 CEST (Brussels Time), a First Check will be conducted to verify if applicants meet the eligibility criteria outlined in the ‘Guide for Applicants’. For a complete description of the Evaluation Process, please refer to the Guide for Applicants.

Each proposal will be evaluated against the following criteria: usability potential, expected impact and applicability, and capacity.

For each criterion, a set of essential and added values has been established. The essential requirements represent the mandatory requirements that must be fulfilled in order to ensure the feasibility of applying and testing the selected technology on the farm. The added values refer to additional elements that may further enhance the suitability of the farm for the effective implementation, validation and assessment of the technology.

Both the essential and added values conditions are technology-specific. A detailed description of these requirements is provided in the Technology Factsheets document.

Each criterion (usability potential, expected impact and applicability and capacity) will be awarded by a maximum of 5 points.

Yes, extra points may be awarded as follows:

1. Proposals that select technologies coming from the Co-Creation Open Call will receive 3 extra points. This is intended to prioritize the replication of these technologies, ensuring that the solutions developed during the project are tested and replicated in additional farms, while recognizing that other project technologies are already being replicated within the scope of the GUARDIANS project.
2. Proposals from farms that have previously acted as official use case for any GUARDIANS technology (either from the project or from the Co-Creation Opean Call) will also receive 2 extra points if they apply to replicate a different technology. This recognizes the added value of farms with prior experience in testing and adopting innovative solutions, as they can provide faster, more effective and reliable implementation and feedback during the replication phase.

The extra points will be added to the final score.

For more information on the scoring and evaluation criteria, please refer to Section 4.2 of the Guide for Applicants.

The evaluators will assign a score to each award criterion (usability potential, expected impact and applicability, and capacity) on a scale from 0 to 5, with the exceptional possibility of awarding half-point increments.

The final score will be calculated as an average of the individual assessments provided by the evaluators, plus up to 5 extra point added when applicable, in accordance with the extra criteria.

Therefore, the maximum total score is 20 points.

For more information on the scoring and evaluation criteria, please refer to Section 4.2 of the Guide for Applicants.

The threshold for each individual criterion (usability potential, expected impact and applicability and capacity) is 3 out of 5 points. The overall threshold, which applies to the sum of the three individual scores, is 10 out of 15 points.

Proposals with an overall score below 10 or with any individual criterion score below 3 will not be recommended for funding.

For more information on the scoring and evaluation criteria, please refer to Section 4.2 of the Guide for Applicants.