Editorial

– by Anne Collin (INRAE)

Here it is! After five years of PPILOW project with the consortium facing dramatic sanitary and economic events, we enjoy the progress made together with all the practitioners involved. More than a hundred of farmers and members of the production chains, NGOs, scientists and policy makers accompanied us for deciphering how to improve the welfare of poultry and pigs in low-input outdoor farms. Achievements will soon be available as a mind map on the PPILOW website, concerning the use of medicinal plants for limiting parasitism in pigs, how to identify genotypes well adapted to the outdoor range, how to manage dual-purpose breeds, non-beak-trimmed hens and non-castrated male pigs in organic farms for ethical meat and egg productions, how to manage incubation and hatching for better chicken resilience, how to improve piglet survival by means of selection and housing, how to identify the embryo sex as early as possible to avoid the killing layer male chicks… with dedicated evaluations of animal welfare made possible by the development of welfare self-assessment applications, One Welfare sustainability grids and business models for ensuring the economic viability of the proposed strategies.

In this final PPILOW Newsletter are available the last-publicised papers and videos from the consortium, but also the list of the PhD defended in the framework of the project, a presentation of the recently integrated PPILOW partners and an update of the coming events where PPILOW partners will present their last results. Enjoy and welcome to future projects prolonging the work done thanks to the multiactors involved, may they be warmly thanked, as all the project collaborators and the European Commission divisions AGRI and SANTE for their continuous support!