– by G. Tesnière (IDELE) and C. Dwyer (SRUC)
Following the annual meeting of the TechCare project in Glasgow, two workshops were offered to partners on Thursday 22 September.
- Look to the future large-scale deployment: “From pilot to large-scale” session n°2
To continue the work carried out during the onsite meeting of July 7 in France, at the pilot farm “La Cazotte”, Germain Tesnière (Idele) first presented the synthesis of the ideas expressed to anticipate the large-scale deployment planned in the project (WP5). Gilles Lagriffoul (CNBL) then presented the current approach in France, based on a pre-selection of two dairy sheep farms in the Roquefort production area. Initially, the objective is to discuss with these two breeders and the technicians the possibilities of collecting existing data on the farms, to consider the installation of simple and cost-effective technologies to collect new data, and to imagine a pragmatic and feasible organization for the collection, transfer, and storage of this data. In a second step, other breeders will join the group for the large-scale phase in 2023/2024. The large-scale partners who were present in Glasgow were invited to discuss about this example to form a first group of breeders in their country. While waiting for the results of the pilots, we can’t select precisely for now the technologies that will be deployed on a large scale. Anyway, it is already possible and important to form groups of breeders interested in technologies and animal welfare and to identify obstacles and levers to the collection of existing data on these farms.
- Monitoring small ruminant welfare during transport: “how to integrate it to our pilots/large-scales?”
The objective of the second workshop was to present the issues of animal welfare during transport and to discuss relevant issues, welfare indicators (WP2) and new technologies that it could be developed to improve welfare in transport within the framework of the project (WP5). Béatrice Mounaix and Claire Mindus (Idele) introduced the workshop by presenting a reminder of the definitions, regulations and work carried out in different transport sectors. A very interesting video was shown during the session to visualize these issues and recommendations: click here to watch the online video. Afterwards, participants were divided into focus groups, facilitated by Cathy Dwyer and Claire Morgan Davies (SRUC). The participants proposed interesting ideas to assess certain animal welfare criteria using technologies: space available for the animals and standing/lying position, losses of balance and falls, climate and atmosphere in the truck, vibration and acceleration/deceleration forces, travel time and distance, etc. The discussions will continue in the next meetings of the pilot farms to plan trials in 2023.
© all photos IDELE
