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Sustainable pig production systems (SusPigSys)
Project
Project code: FLI-ITT-08-Ce-0061
Contract period: 01.09.2017
- 30.11.2020
Purpose of research: Inventory & Assessment
SusPigSys' objective is to collect data on sustainability improvement strategies including trade-offs between pillars and integrate this information in advisory material to help farmers make informed holistic decisions. Project outcomes include an integrative on-farm assessment and feedback tool to help pig farmers to improve their economic, environmental, and societal sustainability (e.g. animal health and welfare), as well as their job satisfaction. Farmers in all partner countries will be actively involved throughout the project to ensure that outcomes meet farmers’ needs. After researchers and stakeholders have identified points to be addressed, a detailed sustainability assessment protocol will be developed based on existing protocols and including the guidelines provided by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. The protocol will be applied on a total of 70 farms in 7 European countries (AT, DE, FI, IT, PL, NL, UK) to generate a database from which a valid, condensed protocol can be developed using multivariate statistics. The condensed protocol will then be applied on 175 farms with various production systems in 7 countries. Data from farm visits will be used for developing an integrative analysis toolbox for summarising farm data, and the protocol and toolbox will be linked with an existing international pig production database to allow enhanced benchmarking. The integrative analysis toolbox will include information on possible trade-offs between the three pillars of sustainability and be integrated in a software to form a farmer decision support tool with farm-individual feedback. In addition, descriptions of best practices will be published in various formats to help farmers learn from each other across borders.
Results
An integrative system analysis toolbox was developed for all four pillars of sustainability (economy, environment, society, animal welfare) together with stakeholders and applied on pig farms in seven countries. All project outcomes can be found at https://www.researchgate.net/project/SusPigSys-Sustainable-pig-production-systems-ERA-Net-SusAn
Section overview
Subjects
- Animal Husbandry
- Business administration
- Computer science
Framework programme
Funding programme
Excutive institution
FLI - Institute for Animal Welfare and Animal Husbandry (FLI - ITT)
Participating institutions
- University of Warsaw (UW)
- Research Institute of Organic Agriculture Germany (FiBL)
- University of Natural Resources and Applied Life Sciences (BOKU)
- University of Helsinki (UH)
- Wageningen University and Research Centre (WUR)
- University of Newcastle upon Tyne
- Research Centre for Animal Production (CRPA)