The development of dairy sector remains a priority in Mediterranean countries. The present project proposed by multidisciplinary consortium of 5 partners aims to characterize dairy chain in North Africa (Algeria and Egypt) focusing on dairy cattle sector and in Europe (Greece) focusing on cattle, sheep and goat dairy sectors. Many dairy actors will be actively involved through the current project. The main farming practices information in feed management and milking, storage, transport and processing will be analyzed to identify the different gaps that constraint dairy supply chain and set up a guideline of best farming practices for farmers. Moreover, quality and safety of milk and/or dairy products will be assessed by analyzing physico-chemical parameters, microbiologic profile, mycotoxins, somatic cell count and organic contaminants. In addition, several new technologies will be introduced and tested in North Africa to improve cattle dairy performance and milk processing. The outcome of the project will be benefit for all dairy actors by promoting changes in farms, milk dairy centers and milk processing units.

The objective of the CERAO project is to improve cereal production in semi-arid sub-Saharan regions in West Africa, while identifying ecological and social meta-rules that confer viability and sustainability to agro-socio-ecosytems despite higher climatic and demographic constraints. The main hypothesis is that viable and sustainable agro-socio-ecosystem trajectories are guided by meta-rules derived from natural ecosystems functioning. Consequently, concepts developed in ecology and complexity sciences will be reused to analyze agro-socio-ecosystems trajectories during a five last decades as well as their viability and sustainability. Such an approach will allow us to determine the key meta-rules to provide guidance in future agricultural intensification schemes. The specific objective will be to analyze and produce models of trajectories for contrasted agro-socio-ecosystems in a context of strong climatic or socio-economic constraints. The project will rely on a diachronic and multidisciplinary analysis in the Peanut Bassin of Senegal. Over the last decades this area faced significant climate change, which started with severe droughts in the 70s, and experienced socio-economic disruption marked by significant population growth and strong rural exodus. The study site is included in the long term observatory of health and population of Niakhar where three contrasted neighboring agro-socio-ecosystems. The trajectories during the last decades of these three situations are will be studied in term of social structure, cropping systems, livestock systems and soil fertility management.. Project activities are organized around 3 mains tasks. Task 1 will precise the local dynamic of climate (task 1.1), population (task 1.2), and land use (task 1.3) over the past decades. The task 2 aims at describing the trajectories of households (task 2.1), cropping systems and crop performance (task 2.2), organic matter and nutrients cycles (task 2.3), and cultivated cereal biodiversity (task 2.4). Task 3 will synthesize all collected data and knowledge produced by developing and validating different modeling tools: a household-model integrating a dynamic crop module (task 3.1), a community and village level multi-agent system (task 3.2) and a multi-scale compartment model coupled to a nutrient network analysis (task 3.3). The task 3.4 uses these models to simulate past trajectories of studied agro-systems and to identify meta-rules guiding these trajectories on the basis of a multi-disciplinary approach. Models will be designed and validated with all the project multi-disciplinary partners and the stakeholders involved in the functioning of studied agro-socio-ecosystems in the studied area. The French partners are UMR ECO&SOLS “Ecologie fonctionnelle et biogéochimie des sols et des agrosystèmes” ; UMR DIADE “Diversité Adaptation Développement des plantes » ; UMR LPED “Laboratoire Populations Environnement Développement”; UMR SELMET «Systèmes d’élevages méditerranéens et tropicaux » ; and two senegalese partners : LNRPV « Laboratoire national de recherche sur les productions végétales » of ISRA « Institut Sénégalais de recherche agricole », and LPAOSF (Laboratoire de physique de l’atmosphère et de l’Océan » of UCAD (Université Cheikh Anta Diop) in Dakar. Main project outcomes will be (i) an up-to-date database describing environmental, agronomic, demographic and social evolution, (ii) models of organic and nutrient fluxes at different time and spatial scales, (iii) scenarios of adaptation to environmental and demographic changes (iv) prospective options for better staple food production in the studied areas (iv) the building-up of a multi-disciplinary research consortium, (v) high-level publications in peer-reviewed journals and general public communications on social and ecological concepts related to ecological intensification of agro-socio-systems in Sub Saharan Africa.

Agriculture in the Mediterranean and Sub-Saharan Africa is increasingly a challenging sector that’s shaped by climate change. TRUSTFARM will use Climate-Smart Farm Practices (CSFPs) that cope with climate change. Core challenges in the case studies will be identified by their climate impact variability on food security. In cooperation with stakeholders, TRUSTFARM will develop Multi-Stakeholder Innovation Platforms (MIPs) to prioritise and select the best-fit innovative CSFPs for each case study. A toolbox of innovative pathways will be developed that contains the following: 1) Identification and promotion of food crops with high yielding germplasm that are resistant to heat and disease; 2) Soil and water conservation to improve productive capacity; 3) Adoption of best practices in ruminant husbandry. TRUSTFARM will design integrated agro-ecosystems based on the selected pathways with on-farm trials. The environmental and economic impacts of the designed systems will be assessed using Life Cycle Analysis. To increase and diversify farmers’ income, two business models will be developed:1) Reduce Reuse Recycle (RRR) to produce high-quality compost; 2) Dairy and meat products and wool from small ruminants. TRUSTFARM will select one or both business models according to the needs of each case study with the stakeholders through the MIPs. Expected results: i) A strong EU and African partnership for R&I to achieve the goals of sustainability and food security; ii) A Better understanding of the impact of climate change in the case-study countries; iii) Improved capacity building among farmers’ and stakeholders’ with better coordination of the targeted value chains; iv) Improved soil and water quality and thus productivity with efficient use of inputs; v) Enhanced farmers' incomes and a boosting of the rural economy as well as consumers’ nutrition; vi) Dissemination of the integrated agro-ecosystem and CSFPs through social media, taking advantage of farmers’ smartphone usage.

The objective of ADAPT-HERD is to develop management simulation tools to implement innovative strategies for resilience and efficiency (R&E) in small ruminants herds, based on harnessing animal adaptive capacities. These tools will address a wide range of current feed resource constraints in the Mediterranean area (Egypt, France, Spain and Tunisia) and the future perturbations induced by climate change. The locally tailored management solutions will improve the ability of livestock systems to adapt to climate change by: i) managing early-life nutrition to safeguard adult adaptive capacities; ii) managing reproduction to find the best match between feed supply and herd demand; iii) tailoring group feeding strategies depending on animals’ adaptive capacities and iv) managing herd demography with replacement and culling to adjust feed demand. To achieve this, ADAPT-HERD brings together information from animal and herd levels with: i) a fine-grained experimental approach (adaptive mechanisms and trade-offs); ii) field phenotyping of local breeds (adaptation to local conditions) and iii) local production environment characterization. These multi-level information will be used to develop computer models and test scenarios. Interfacing and disseminating project’s deliverables as a user-friendly toolbox will be achieved with a participatory modelling framework. The toolbox will help to adapt agricultural practices to change in resource availability by proposing different technical solutions of herd management aimed at facing feed resource perturbations induced by climate change. The challenge is not to find an optimal strategy for R&E, but to explore how management strategies impact the relationship between R&E. These strategies will be grounded in a deep understanding of how local breeds adapt to feed resource constraints. They will be complementary to on-going projects that focus on genetic selection and breeding solutions to improve R&E in small ruminants.

The objective of the PAS-AGRO-PAS project is to increase productivity, adaptiveness, sustainability and profitability of Mediterranean agro-pastoral production systems, by exploiting every dimension of their multifunctionality through a novel systemic approach that will identify stressors currently impacting on agro-pastoral systems’ viability, with views to implementing tailored strategies that redirect agro-pastoralism from subsistence-oriented fragile production systems towards commercially-oriented resilient systems. To achieve this objective, PAS-AGRO-PAS will explore a representation of 10 agro-pastoral production systems from Portugal, Spain, France, Italy, Cyprus, Morocco, Egypt and Tunisia, covering a wide range of environmental, agro-ecological, economic, socio-cultural and institutional traits and challenges; and will apply a systemic approach from farm to global scale, interlinking three systems: (i) “agro-ecosystem”, with interventions on the productivity and diversification of crops, pasture and livestock resources (such as better utilisation of crop residues, new grazing surfaces, use of biodiverse pasture seeds, including forage legumes into rotations with crops, alley cropping with barley, drought-tolerant forage and crop varieties, effective treatment of manure, matching livestock production cycle to feed resources, multi-nutrient blocks to enhance digestibility, etc.) that will be implemented, in order to ensure low input, maintenance/increase of biodiversity, enhanced soil fertility and custody for local adapted breeds – in the short term, and the rehabilitation of rangelands and the reduction of vulnerabilities to climate change – in the long term; (ii) “socioeconomic system”, with interventions towards the valorisation of agro-pastoral products (through assurance of quality, safety and typicity, and creation of notebooks of product standards for origin/quality certification), the leveraging of the marketable “healthy” trait of food produced with environmentally friendly systems, the efficient integration into markets, and the rising of the “commercialisation mentality” of agro-pastoralists, in order to ensure economic benefits and generational renewal; and (iii) “information system”, whereby, within a multi-actor co-creation process, the agro-pastoralists’ traditional knowledge will be sourced and steadily integrated with the outputs of this project, taking advantage of the networked and cooperative digitalisation of Agriculture 4.0, in order to efficiently manage information resources and access to decision-making support e-tools. Furthermore, the successful implementation of PAS-AGRO-PAS with the expected impacts at the farm, at the regional and at the global scale will be sustained by two important pillars: (i) “capacity building activities” for agro-pastoralists on effective strategies, climate change mitigation and adaptation, quality of their products, pricing and economic profitability, commercialisation and entrepreneurship, inclusive development, with special focus on women, the youth and newcomers; and “divulgation activities” with key stakeholders and policy-makers for providing policy guidelines for more enabling structural, economic and institutional settings; and (ii) the development of the PAS-AGRO-PAS Mediterranean e-platform, which through systematised data, reports, models and web applications for resource allocation, ration formulation and feed management, optimum slaughter weight prediction, and e-commerce, will better inform evidence-based decisions for both agro-pastoralists and policy-makers.