Re-Livestock – Facilitating innovations for resilient livestock farming systems

Summary

Climate change will bring about plethora of challenges to how we farm, creating a need to adapt our practices to shield ourselves from extreme weather, supply chain shocks, increasing temperatures and more. Here, we present an overview of the Horizon Europe project Re-Livestock – Facilitating innovations for resilient livestock farming systems. Re-Livestock is a five-year project (2022-2027) with the overriding objective to increase the overall resilience of the livestock sector. This will be achieved by understanding and mobilizing adoption of innovative practices, to reduce GHG emissions and increase adaptive capacity in livestock farming, to increase the overall resilience of the sector. Specifically, Re-Livestock will identify and evaluate low carbon footprint feed materials, the role of grasslands in low carbon livestock production and the use of feed supplements to suppress enteric methane. In Re-Livestock we will also investigate the role of breeding in increasing sustainability and resilience. We will investigate the potential for certain cattle breeds to mitigate GHGs through reduced enteric methane, as well as the potential for cross-breeding, and dual-purpose (beef and dairy) systems to bring about wider environmental and social benefits. We will also assess the role of sustainable management approaches such as agroforestry, and compost bed systems to increase resilience. Innovative holistic farm-level environmental and socio-economic assessment tools to enhance the adoption of strategies by farmers will be applied. Additionally, Life Cycle Assessment and a suite of models will be applied to explore the impacts of re-designed European livestock production systems. This poster will give an overview of the objectives of Re-Livestock and how the project will increase sustainability and resilience in livestock systems. Re-Livestock receives funding from the European Union under Grant Agreement No. 101059609.