This presentation will be a live exchange of ideas & arguments, between a representative of a start up working on agricultural information management and discovery, and a representative of academia that has recently completed his PhD and is now leading a young and promising research team. The two presenters will focus on the case of a recommendation service that is going to be part of a web portal for organic agriculture researchers and educators (called Organic.Edunet), which will help users find relevant educational material and bibliography. They currently develop this as part of an EU-funded initiative but would both be interested to find a way to further sustain this work: the start up by including this to the bundle of services that it offers to the users of its information discovery packages, and the research team by attracting more funding to further explore recommendation technologies. The start up representative will describe his evergoing, helpless and aimless efforts to include a research activity on recommender systems within the R&D strategy of the company, for the sakes of the good-old-PhD-times. And will explain why this failed. The academia representative will describe the great things that his research can do to boost the performance of recommendation services in such portals. And why this does-not-work-yet-operationally because he cannot find real usage data that can prove his amazing algorithm outside what can be proven in offline lab experiments using datasets from other domains (like MovieLens and CiteULike). Both will explain how they started working together in order to design, experimentally test, and deploy the Organic.Edunet recommendation service. And will describe their expectations from this academic-industry collaboration. Then, they will reflect on the challenges they see in such partnerships and how (if) they plan to overcome them.