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This initiative originates from a group of scientists who had the opportunity to collaborate during the EU COST Action FA1308 "DairyCare", and share their interest in developing methods to monitor animal health and farming efficiency with different approaches, and alternative strategies for promoting animal health, preserve the customer's health in an environmentally friendly food system.
Precision Livestock Farming (PLF) technologies in the context of the "European Green Deal".
When an animal has to cope with environmental challenges, one common response is to divert energy away from "non-essential" functions, such as growth, reproduction and production, towards maintaining the animal's internal environment, and this often leads to poor health and reduced productivity.
The farm environment can be very complex, and animal's inability to predict and control such complexity can result in ethological and physiological changes generating a stress. Climate changes can be a real threat to animal health and productivity, if not adequately managed. The continuous validation of existing biomarkers and the discovery and field implementation of new biomarkers will enable us to understand the specific physiological process and regulatory mechanisms used by the organism to adapt to different environmental conditions, to monitor animal health/welfare and improve management and breeding strategies, optimizing animal performances and efficiency.
Effective strategies for improving dairy animal health and welfare, as well as maintaining elevated productivity, require collaboration across specialist and expert skills aiming at:
• Developing and validating new technologies to monitor animals and to detect health/welfare problems at an early stage to allow early intervention measures.
• Integrating data of production, sensors and biomarkers.
• Limiting the use of medications (e.g.: see the problem of antibiotic resistance) and developing alternative strategies to preserve animals' health in the "one-health" approach.
• Providing innovative solutions for animal housing and use of renewable resources related to buildings for animal housing.
• Reducing GHG and ammonia emissions by means of climate smart cattle farming systems.
• Selecting more robust and resilient animals in a longer timeframe by identifying suitable traits to evaluate the animals' phenotype.
Workshop aims
PLF to monitor animal health & welfare and farming efficiency applied to climate changes conforms to the guidelines encompassed in the EU "Green Deal" Strategies:
The main topics of the workshop will be animal adaptation to hot environments, as this is recognized as a major problem for both Israeli and Italian farming systems, as well as other Mediterranean countries. However, the workshop aims at identifying other common interests between IL and IT related to PLF technology. In particular, the workshop aims at:
• Discussing the state-of-art and future development of PLF techniques
• Laying the foundation for further cooperation
• Involve in the discussion people from public Institutions and industry.
• Presenting the outcome of a position paper on the common IL-IT view of the role of PLF in the context of European Green Deal Agriculture.
This Webinar
This webinar is intended as a preparatory event for the Workshop that will be held in Israel next June, if emergency due to the Covid-19 pandemic will cease. This small size meeting aims to focus on common problems, interests and technologies that IL and IT can share and develop together, and to set the outline of the position paper on the common IL-IT view of the role of PLF in the context of European Green Deal Agriculture.