PPILOW co-creates innovations for welfare improvement thanks to professionals and associations of the poultry and pig production sectors

by Anne Collin (INRAE)

PPILOW, as a multi-actor project, involves several private partners from the poultry and pig sectors in order to propose innovations for improving the welfare of pigs and poultry in organic and low-input outdoor production systems. Among them, Circular Organics (Belgium) produces live insect larvae that are currently tested for avoiding feather pecking when offered to laying hens with intact beaks at young age. The breeding company syndicate SYSAAF (France) enables the use of new breeds from poultry breeding companies for dual-purpose production (of both meat and eggs) and free range exploration. The Danish firms Fermentation Experts and Vanggård Staldmontage provide new fermented feeds for poultry and hut prototypes for sows reared outdoor, respectively. Finally, the proposed innovations are discussed, co-built and tested thanks to the PPILOW’s National Practitioners Groups gathering numerous actors in the value chains and facilitated by the project organic associations, technical institutes, research institutes and universities in Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, The Netherlands, and Romania.

Fig. 1 and 2 – Farrowing huts from the Danish PPILOW partner firm Vanggård Staldmontage (© Vanggård)