Animal Future - Steering Animal Production Systems towards Sustainable Future

Animal-Future will design strategies for assessing and enhancing the sustainability of animalproduction systems (APS). Main objectives are (i) Assess the multi-dimensional consequences of innovations on benefits (cash flow, income, jobs, product quality and safety, ecosystem services etc.) and costs (use of scarce natural resources, health and welfare) of APS. (ii) Improve the capacity of European animal sector actors to facilitate sound changes based on a thorough understanding of mechanisms underlying trade-offs between benefits and costs.(iii) Provide guidance co-designed by scientists and animal production actors through which the latter can reinforce their innovation capacity. To achieve these, the project will (i) Develop a indicator-based decision support toolthat will be used for assessing and benchmarking European APS according tobenefits and costs induced by innovations (from farm to region, nation andEU27). (ii) Bring together multi-disciplinary research teams and animalproduction actors (farmers, processors, breeders etc.) using a multi-actorapproach and starting from a farm network of intensive/extensive APS acrossEurope. Relevance to research area includes (RA1) Developing and assessinginnovations that move farm management closer to the production frontier, whileconsidering fundamental trade-offs with respect to social and environmental dimensions. (RA2) Insights into how animal production sector (from the farm toEU scale) can increase the efficiency of feed utilization, recycle waste andexploit potentials to convert biomass resources not directly edible for humans into high-quality protein sources for human nutrition. (RA3) Transparent and comprehensive accounting for on-farm practices that makes explicit a whole setof benefits and costs, at farm and larger spatial scales, thus raising the awareness of animal sector actors, citizens and policy makers about the often-neglected benefits that animal systems provide to society.