Project title: COwLEARNING for sustainable beef and milk supply
Society’s greatest current challenges include limiting climate change and its consequences, ensuring a healthy diet and preserving an intact cultural landscape with a high level of biodiversity.
A transition to a sustainable agricultural and food industry plays a key role in achieving these goals.
In Austria, with its high proportion of permanent grassland, cattle farming is particularly important. Various aspects of beef and dairy supply are considered critical in terms of their sustainability, for example negative effects on climate change, land and biodiversity loss, animal and human welfare on farms or slaughterhouses, health risks from high meat consumption or antibiotic resistance.
While these problems are generally understood, there are gaps in knowledge regarding the goals and practicable paths of change towards greater sustainability. Actors along the entire supply chain (‚farm to fork‘) are trapped in ‚lock-ins‘ and see the responsibility as lying with other actors.
In the spirit of transition management, we want to break the cycle of mutual recrimination by starting a learning process that brings together expertise from social, environmental, agricultural and veterinary sciences with the experience of practitioners from production, processing, trade, gastronomy and urban consumers.
The aim of the project is to identify paths of change towards a more sustainable beef and dairy supply in a participatory, transdisciplinary approach involving various stakeholders and interest groups. The project is also investigating how scenarios and serious games can support learning and transition management.
Three research questions
Three research questions are addressed:
- What were the drivers of previous change processes in the cattle systems and why were sustainability innovations (not) implemented?
- How should alternative, more sustainable dairy/beef supply chains be assessed in terms of human and animal welfare, environmental impact, socio-economic characteristics and their growth potential (out- and up-scaling)?
- What are generally acceptable and future-proof change paths? To this end, the project will carry out an integrated and comparative evaluation of sustainability innovations (e.g. systems with cow-calf contact, pasture-based feeding, cow-sharing, whole-body utilisation in catering, milk/beef substitutes) across the entire supply chain (‚farm-to-fork‘) as well as an ‚up-scaling‘ analysis.)
This assessment is supplemented with scenarios (visions, goals, conflicting goals, compromises) and ’serious games‘ to support playful experimentation with change paths. The project generates new knowledge on changes in beef and dairy supply, the evaluation of sustainability innovations, as well as methodological advances in transition management.
Project partners:
Duration: 01.03.22-31.03.27
Programme: FWF #Connecting Minds
Contact: DI Dr. Stefan Kirchweger
