Horizon Europe Cluster 6 — the EU research-and-deployment funder for agrifood AI; 2026-2027 work programme, named AI call topics, and the instruments outside Cluster 6 that carry the deployment money

Europe (EU member states + Horizon Europe associated countries)

Content

The July 2026 EU funder scan established that Cluster 6 exists and that its 2026-2027 work programme was published in December 2025, but left the calls unenumerated (G-201). This unit closes that gap with the call table read directly off the adopted work programme, and corrects one figure the July scan carried. The substantive finding: the AI-labelled money in Cluster 6 is roughly €58m a year inside a €676m programme, and the largest single EU instrument for agrifood-AI data is a €60m co-funded partnership rather than an AI call.

Headline. Cluster 6’s 2026-2027 work programme is adopted (Decision C(2025) 8493 of 11 December 2025) with €676.40m for 2026 and €630.85m for 2027; eight call topics name AI or digital explicitly, between €7.8m and €60m each; and the instruments that carry deployment money for agrifood AI — agrifoodTEF, AgData, RAISE, CEADS — sit outside Cluster 6, across Horizon Europe’s partnership lines and the Digital Europe Programme.

The instrument, verified 2026-09

Horizon Europe Work Programme 2026-2027, Part 9: Food, Bioeconomy, Natural Resources, Agriculture and Environment, is adopted by European Commission Decision C(2025) 8493 of 11 December 2025. Its own budget table gives an estimated total of €676.40m (2026) and €630.85m (2027); Cluster 6 additionally contributes €148.38m (2026) / €146.97m (2027) to the Missions work programme part and €13m (2026) / €15m (2027) to EIC Challenges (biotech for regenerating agricultural soils; ocean observation technologies).

Seven destinations structure the programme; the digital one is Destination 7 — “Innovative governance, environmental observations and digital solutions in support of the Green Deal”, organised into environmental observations, digital and data technologies as key enablers, and AKIS knowledge-flow strands. Twelve calls run across 2026 and 2027. The largest calls by indicative budget: €210.00m (HORIZON-CL6-2026-01, deadline 17 September 2026), €166.40m (CL6-2026-02, closed 14 April 2026), €261.80m (CL6-2027-01, deadline 22 September 2027), €182.85m (CL6-2027-02, deadline 23 September 2027).

The 2027 calls are not draft. They sit inside the same adopted work programme as the 2026 calls, with real deadlines and the standing caveat that the Director-General may delay a deadline by up to two months. This matters for anyone planning against the EU’s agrifood AI agenda: the 2026-2027 programme is the last under the current multiannual financial framework.

Where the AI is — the named topics

Read verbatim off the work programme:

Two scope details are worth carrying into talks. The 2027 advisory-AI topic obliges proposals to “develop, test, validate and pilot cost-effective AI-based solutions that make use of the various existing reliable and trustable knowledge reservoirs and provide contextual, effective and impartial advice for advisors, farmers and foresters”, with activities “expected to achieve TRL 8 by the end of the project” — i.e. the EU is funding AI advisory at demonstrated-operational maturity, not at research maturity. The 2026 Earth Intelligence topic requires use of Copernicus and/or Galileo/EGNOS, builds on Destination Earth digital twins, and names “EURO HPC and EU AI Factory tools and facilities” as the compute substrate — the corpus’s first hard link between the AI Factory layer and agricultural research funding. The foodomics topic cites “the Centre of Excellence in the Periodic Table of Food Initiative from Wageningen University” and asks for validated AI algorithms for high-throughput foodomics data.

The award record so far

On 6 July 2026 the European Research Executive Agency formalised the 2025 call results: 117 new projects, €742,532,598.71 in EU funding, of which Destination 7 (digital/governance) took 22 projects and €129,944,584.91. That is the first hard per-destination award breakdown for Cluster 6, and it makes Destination 7 the second-largest destination by money in that round. Per-project AI identification is not published (G-403).

The instruments that actually carry agrifood-AI deployment money

Cluster 6’s research grants are not where the deployment funding sits. Four adjacent instruments do the deployment work:

• agrifoodTEF (Digital Europe Programme) — the EU’s agrifood AI Testing and Experimentation Facility. €30m EU co-funding inside a €40-60m per-project envelope, 34 partners in 9 countries, five-year project started January 2023, coordinated by Raffaele Giaffreda at Fondazione Bruno Kessler (FBK, Italy). It publishes “more than 200 AI services”, over 50 already being delivered, with a stated target of helping “over 5,000 innovators, with a minimum of 75% being SMEs”, and validates third-party AI and robotics at TRL 6-8. TEFs overall are co-funded with member states at €40-60m each, over €220m in total.
• AgData (Agriculture of Data partnership) — co-funded Horizon Europe partnership launched 1 October 2025, 61 partners from 22 countries, seven-year contract (2025-2032), €300m total: €90m from the European Commission and €210m from member states and associated countries. First joint call opened 5 November 2025, full-proposal deadline 21 July 2026, evaluation completed 4 September 2026. ERA-LEARN states AgData “is an integral part of the Coordinated Plan on Artificial Intelligence”. Its Cluster 6 top-up is the €60m COFUND above.
• RAISE (Resource for AI Science in Europe) — a Horizon Europe virtual research institute for AI in science: €33m in WP25 and €107m in WP26-27, with HORIZON-RAISE-2026-01-02 “Thematic Networks of Excellence for AI in Science — Agriculture and Environmental Pollution” among its open calls, and a planned Horizon Europe contribution to the AI Gigafactories.
• CEADS / AgriDataSpace (Digital Europe Programme) — the Common European Agricultural Data Space, built “following a step-wise approach, starting with a preparatory action ‘AgridataSpace’, followed by a deployment action”. Announced on the Commission’s digitalisation-of-agriculture page; budget not verified from a primary source (G-414).

Corrections to the July 2026 scan

• “Single project budgets up to €38 million for the largest projects in 2026-27” does not check out. No €38m figure exists in the Cluster 6 work programme. The largest single-project indicative EU contribution in it is the €60.00m AgData COFUND.
• “The 2028-2029 work programme is in drafting” is wrong. No such instrument exists: Horizon Europe’s MFF runs to 2027, so 2026-2027 is the last work programme. The successor is the proposed Horizon Europe 2028-2034, in which the Commission proposes to double the budget to €175bn (published 16 July 2025), with Pillar II continuing to feature EU missions and moonshot projects including next-generation AI and data sovereignty; interinstitutional negotiations were ongoing.

What this unit is doing in the taxonomy

Anchors the EU research-and-deployment funding layer — the layer above EIT Food’s accelerator pipeline (units/eit-food-eu-knowledge-innovation-community.md) and alongside the CAP’s farm-level funding (units/eafrd-cap-strategic-plans-digital-agriculture.md). Distinguishes from:

• EU Mission Soil (units/eu-mission-soil-deal-for-europe-living-labs.md) — funded from the Missions work programme part, to which Cluster 6 contributes; a deployment mission rather than a research programme.
• AI Continent Action Plan / Apply AI Strategy (units/eu-ai-continent-action-plan.md) — strategy and compute, not research grants.
• INRAE (units/inrae-france-ai-agriculture.md) and Wageningen-adjacent units — the national-institute and university recipients of this funding, not the funding instrument.

Why it matters for talks

• The money ordering is the story. €60m for a data partnership COFUND; €30m EU for the agrifood TEF; €15m for AI in food data; €11.8m for AI farm advice; €9m for AI-ready soil decision support (Mission Soil). Against a €676.40m Cluster 6 year, agrifood-AI-labelled money is a few percent. “The EU funds agrifood AI at scale” needs to be said with those numbers in view.
• TRL 8 is the surprise. The EU is funding AI advisory for farmers at demonstrated-operational maturity in 2027 — not as research. Contrast with the corpus’s extension-and-advisory cells, where deployment evidence is usually thin.
• The AI Factory link is now explicit in the Earth Intelligence topic, connecting the compute pillar to agricultural research for the first time in the corpus.
• The 2027 calls are real, dated and in the same programme as 2026 — a talk about EU funding flow can name dates a year out.
• The deployment instruments are not in the agriculture research programme. TEFs (Digital Europe), AgData (partnership), RAISE (AI in science), CEADS (data space) — the agrifood-AI deployment money is dispersed across instruments, which is itself the structural finding.

Critical context

• The “AI-labelled money ≈ €58m/year” reading is my own arithmetic over the named topics, not a Commission figure. The Commission publishes no AI share of the portfolio (G-402).
• Call budgets are indicative; deadlines can slip by up to two months at the Director-General’s discretion.
• Nothing here is a deployment count. Awarded projects, delivery milestones and outcomes are separate questions; per-project AI content is not published (G-403).
• The €742m 2025 award total and the €129.94m Destination 7 figure come from REA’s 6 July 2026 news item; per-project amounts for those 117 awards are not in the same source.