The H2020 PPILOW project (2019-2024) has started!

The Kick-off meeting of the H2020 PPILOW project: ‘Poultry and PIg Low-input and Organic production systems’ Welfare’ was held at the INRA Headquarters in Paris, 4th to 6th of September, 2020.  Supported by 6 members of its European Multiactor Board, DG AGRI of the European Commission, 81 representatives of the 23 partners from 9 countries (Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, The Netherlands, Romania, United Kingdom) started the work programme of the PPILOW multi-actor project by building up the interactions between the National Practitioner Groups and project partners. During the first year of project, the PPILOW consortium will identify barriers to welfare in organic and low-input outdoor pig and poultry rearing systems and levers of improvement, adopt of shared tools for evaluating welfare and sustainability, and begin to test experimentally and on-farm strategies and techniques for improving welfare in these systems in a participative approach. The objectives are to co-create with end-users welfare self-assessment tools and innovative breeding and rearing strategies and techniques for improving animal and human welfare based on robust scientific sets of data. The co-created innovations will allow to prevent piglet castration and beak trimming and the elimination of one day-old layer male chicks, while favouring positive behaviours and improving health and robustness in both species. The feasibility of the proposed approaches and their impacts according to the ‘One welfare concept’ will then be evaluated through appropriate multicriteria analyses and business models and the change in field practices will be facilitated.

The PPILOW project will receive funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme under grant agreement N°816172.