Contexte

Poultry is expected to become the world’s most widely consumed meat soon. The challenge for the European poultry meat sector is to support increased global consumption and provide safe and high-quality poultry meat products that are affordable for consumers around the world. The EU is the 4th largest importer and the 3rd largest exporter of poultry meat. Thus, a major trading partner in the global market.

Society demands, as shown in the EUs Farm to Fork Strategy, more environmentally sustainable production, more animal-friendly production systems and a way of managing animal health that tackles key challenges. Significant adjustment of the broiler production system is needed to address these challenges. This requires a more resilient broiler sector and a greater capacity of farmers to cope and adapt their day-to-day farming practices. 

Traditionally, innovation has been science-driven, with innovations identified and developed by scientists. However, although there have been great advances through this innovation pathway, scientific knowledge is not always translated into improved on-farm practice, and there remains a critical divide between science and on-farm practice. Moreover, recently, it has become increasingly clear that access to knowledge alone was rarely enough to generate innovation by farmers and the ability of farmers to innovate was influenced by many factors such as institutional context, policy environment, and market forces.

BroilerNet is a direct response to closing this divide and strengthening research and innovation in the broiler sector through a new and interactive approach to innovation. This approach perceives innovation as a social process where innovation is co-created by a diverse range of AKIS actors. Enabling and mobilising this demand requires creating space for joint learning and knowledge sharing through innovation networks at national and cross-national levels, bringing together farmers and other relevant AKIS actors.

Objectives

The objectives of are to:

1. Establish 12 national Broiler Innovation Networks (BINs) of broiler farmers, advisors, researchers, vets etc. to enhance national collaboration, enable information exchange, and collect innovative ideas and Good practices (GPs). A bottom-up approach is used for networking and enhance exchange of science and best practices within and across the broiler sector in Europe.

2. Create three Thematic Expert Networks (TENs) at the European level bringing together the actors within the broiler sector around the three key theme: environmental sustainability, animal welfare and animal health management. The TENs aim to collect the innovative ideas and practices identified by the BINs, perform evaluations and cost-benefit analyses of these practices and disseminate the best practices across Europe.

3. Engage with existing and new broiler-focused EIP-AGRI Operational Groups (OGs) and enhance their impact on national and European level.

4. Identify and assess the most urgent needs of broiler farmers across the three key themes. Based on these the TENs will identify the priority challenges as a sector and work on finding innovative solutions to solve the most important challenges within the broiler sector.

5. Collect and evaluate the feasibility of practice-ready research solution - and innovative good practices that meet the urgent knowledge needs identified for each of the three key themes. The practice-ready research solutions - and innovate GPs will be collected in an online knowledge reservoir to enhance knowledge sharing between BINs, TENs and the wider European Broiler sector. 

6. Disseminate practice-ready research solution- and innovative good practices and enhance uptake and impact by developing multi-language user material and videos to deploy the knowledge reservoir and organising national road shows. The end-user material will be developed in partnership with identified broiler related OGs and AKIS channels relevant to the sector.

Activities

BROILERNET has created twelve national level innovation networks and three EU level networks of broiler farmers, advisors, supply chain integrator companies, farmers' organisations, researchers and veterinarians to address the upcoming challenges faced by broiler farmers. The project is designed around three main fields of concern: (1) environmental sustainability; (2) animal welfare; and (3) animal health management. Through a multi-actor approach, the most urgent needs of broiler farmers will be identified and the network will collect and evaluate good practices that are able to meet these needs. BROILERNET will also engage with existing and new broiler-focused EIP-AGRI Operational Groups (OGs) and enhance their impact. The selected best practices will be spread through a variety of communication and dissemination activities to reach the vast majority of broiler farmers in the countries of the participating consortium partners, but also to all broiler farmers across Europe. Numerous multi-language flyers, videos and national roadshows are just some of the dissemination methods that will be foreseen among the activities dedicated to communication and dissemination.

Other comments

Associated partners of the BroilerNet in the UK are RAU (ROYAL AGRICULTURAL UNIVERSITY) and BPC (BRITISH POULTRY COUNCIL LIMITED LBG), respectively.