Kick-off Seminar - November 2020

Kick-off Seminar

2018 Call on Novel technologies, solutions and systems to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions of animal production systems

Many thanks for registering and joining the Kick-off seminar on 18th November 2020. It was a pleasure to introduce the 83 attendees to the latest results of SusAn joint call projects. Many thanks to our great coordinator and the fantastic audience for a fruitful discussion.

The coordinators demonstrated Successful transnational research that is performed by the 8 projects which are funded via from the Joint call 2018, of the three ERA-NETs SusAn, FACCE ERA-GAS and ICTAGRI 2. During the last year eight research consortia started their project within this call on “Novel technologies, solutions and systems to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions of animal production systems”. The main purpose of this meeting was for the project consortia to provide insight into their ongoing research.

After the welcome word of Elke Saggau coordinator of the ERA-NET SusAn, Fran O’Mara coordinator of the ERA-NET FACCE ERA-GAS and Niels Gotke, coordinator of the ERA-NET ICT-AGRI-FOOD,  we started this seminar with the presentation of Kerstin Rosenow from DG AGRI on R&I as key enablers for Farm to Fork Strategy.

After this very informative presentation, the joint call projects presented their projects.

During this kick-off seminar, we divide the 8 projects into two groups. In the two sessions, each coordinator presented their project by a three-minute pitch and was immediately followed by six minutes more detailed presentation, giving plans for the project including and plans for stakeholder engagement and dissemination. After each presentation, there was five minutes time for the audience to ask questions.

Please find below download link to the presentations of each project and the recordings of each session. Feel free to share them with your community.

 

Presentation of Kerstin Rosenow

Presentations of the joint call research projects:

 

Questions during the different Q&A sessions:

CCCFarming (Paul Galama / Abele Kuipers)

  • How will you ensure that you get users for the web-based platform?
  • What is meant by precision manure management?
  • Can you give an example of animal behaviour that you will be measuring?
  • Could Blockchain be used to monitor, report and verify carbon footprint reductions on commercial livestock farms?
  • What kind of data will you use to build your management system on? What will be needed to generate these data and what do you foresee to be the cost for a farmer?
  • You mentioned food losses in the lifestock chain. How will you take this into account in your project?
  • Do your strategies affect animal production?

FarmSustainBl (Anastasiou Evangelos)

  • How will you ensure that you get users for the web-based platform?
  • What is meant by precision manure management?
  • Can you give an example of animal behaviour that you will be measuring?
  • Could Blockchain be used to monitor, report and verify carbon footprint reductions on commercial livestock farms?
  • What kind of data will you use to build your management system on? What will be needed to generate these data and what do you foresee to be the cost for a farmer?
  • You mentioned food losses in the lifestock chain. How will you take this into account in your project?

GrassToGas (Joanne Conington)

  • How do you measure methane?
  • You showed a Picture of sheep With an SF6 harness on With back mounted canisters. Are you planning to perform SF6 Experiments to measure the methane emissions from sheep on pasture? If so, where is this harness for sheep explained? Are there any Method paper for example that we could look up for harness for SF6 Experiments on sheep?
  • What is the risk of selecting for a lower efficiency of ruminal digestion of cellulose when selecting low emitting sheep?
  • Besides GHG mitigation, do you expect other advantages for the environment from your tested strategies/treatments?
  • Compared to cattle, pigs and poultry, what are the emissions from sheep production (eg in Europe)?
  • You mentioned sheep breeding? Is this also a part of the project as well?
  • How will you predict feed intake?

GrASTech (Leen Van Daele)

  • How will you measure emissions during pasture?
  • How do you take account of C storage under grassland in the experimental -  If you could freely choose, over how many growing seasons would you like to conduct this project?
  • You shortly mentioned regulation for the definition of Pasture milk. Is that a national legislation?

M4Models (Søren O. Petersen)

  • Besides the temperature, there might maybe other factors that play a role, such as ventilation in de manure pit. Do you think such other parameters might also be important? If yes, how will take this into account in your model?
  • What is the output of your model? Is that methane per dry matter or per organic matter?
  • How could M4Models contribute to regulations for agriculture?
  • Have you already (in Denmark maybe?) compared (the results of) this calculation method with the IPCC Tier approach?
  • Methane is an important GHG emitted by manure storage facilities, but they also emit other GHG's e.g., nitrous oxide.
  • There is a risk that strategies to reduce methane from manure may adversely affect nitrous oxide, which may cause a net increase in GHG emissions. Does the project plan to look at the overall GHG balance of manure storage facilities?

Mels (Barbara Amon)

No Questions from audience 

Milkey (Barbara Amon)

  • How do you take into account for the evaluation of the sustainability of milk production, the production of meat from the dairy herd?
  • How many cases farms will you follow?
  • Prioritise the 3 pillars => does green deal have an impact?

SEASOLUTIONS (Maria Hayes)

  • There are well-established companies that market their seaweed extract products for plant and animal feed and health. How are these companies being involved in your research?
  • Seaweed products seem to be highly processed prior to feeding. Will you assess the overall sustainability of the seaweed-based rations (net GHG mitigation per milk produced?)
  • Which effects on animal health and food safety do you foresee?
  • Are you exploring the possibilities to further exploit algal biomasses (after the extraction of bioactive compounds) in a biorefinery perspective?
  • What is the expected potential emission reduction of adding seaweeds or extracts to feed? And what kind of molecules/extracts have/might have the (most) potential?