Stakeholders’ activities

– by C. Mosconi

In 2021, the dissemination activities for stakeholders will be focused on the ten National Round Tables to be organized in the second part of the year and the first part of 2022. Moreover, during the ICAR Annual Conference a Smarter session was held.

The ten National Round Tables (NRTs)

The programme for the ten National Round Tables has (NRTs) been mostly designed during the summer and can be identified as it follows

• December 2021 in Hungary
• October/December 2021 in UK/Ireland/Norway
• April 2022 in Uruguay
• April 2022 in France
• April/May 2022 in Italy
• April 2022 in Switzerland
• June 2022 in Spain

The scheduled NRD to be held in Greece previously scheduled in October 2021 has been moved since the Zootechnia Exhibition 2021 (30 September – 3 October 2021) in Thessaloniki cannot take place as the Exhibition has been postponed. The partner is examining alternative ways of dissemination activities.

The partners responsible for the organization of the roundtables are:

Programme of the NRT

A common set of presentations that would be done in each country, including

• A set of presentations focused on main objectives, main (practical) results of the Project.
• A presentation from each WP will be provided (for use as it is or for possible personalization, up to the country to translate). For that target, each WP will prepare a set of 10-12 slides for this common part.
• A custom part adapted to the needs of each country (traits-oriented, evaluation-oriented, breeding goals-oriented …). This is an opportunity to go further in the discussion and to interact with the stakeholders.

List of invited organization

The participants to the NRTs include:

• Sheep and Goat Breeding Organizations and partners (AI centers, breeding centers / stations, recording organizations)
• Sheep and Goat inter-professional organizations
• Stakeholders of the sheep and goat industry: specialized labor unions, cooperatives, merchants, slaughterhouses
• Inter-professional organization for cattle, sheep and goat industries and the stakeholders of the breeding programs.
• Partners of Research and Development Institutes
• Agricultural training institutions and farming high schools involved in sheep and goat breeding
• Specialized newspaper
• Local farmers
• Industry representatives
• PhD Students
• Sheep cooperatives,
• Students and re-searchers

In each NRT, about 50 participants are expected for the 1–2-day meeting.

SMARTER Session at the ICAR 2021 Annual Conference

Organised in April as a remote event, around 520 registrations have been received and a specific Session was reserved to the SMARTER Project.

Chaired by Jean-Michel Astruc, (INRAE), the Session on “Resilience and Efficiency in Small Ruminants” presented five papers:

• Flavie Tortereau – SMARTER – Which novel traits to improve feed efficiency?
• Antonello Carta – Feasibility of a genomic selection approach for gastro-intestinal nematodes resistance based on a female informative population in Sarda breed sheep.
• Mojca Simčič – The variance components estimation for growth traits of kids in Slovenia.
• Jean-Michel Astruc – Selection tools to benefit from international cooperation in small ruminants: a comprehensive work package of the SMARTER project.
• Martin Burke – A stakeholder platform to disseminate results from SMARTER project.

The Abstracts and the Presentations of the whole ICAR Sessions have been made available in the ICAR site (here) while all the videos of the ICAR Sessions have been also integrally available (here). The Proceedings of the ICAR Conference are expected to be published in September and they will be immediately available on the ICAR web site (here).