The BroilerNet project involves a bottom-up approach to identify challenges and innovation needs for broiler farmers in Europe, and to collect promising and already successfully implemented Good Practices to meet the challenges in question. The top Good Practices selected by experts within the three thematic areas (animal health management, animal welfare, and sustainability) have been summarized in factsheets. The installation of environmental monitoring and control systems aims to ensure the environmental conditions on poultry farms at optimal levels, providing comfort and best welfare conditions to the broilers, minimizing health risks, and maximizing productivity. Alarm and control systems for monitored environmental parameters allow automation or accelerated responses to the occurrence of undesirable variations in defined critical parameters. The detection of critical variations in temperature (heat/cold), gas concentrations (CO2, NH3, etc.), or relative humidity (RH) activates automatic ventilation systems, window opening, and other automated procedures, or human interventions, necessary to ensure the environmental stabilization of the facilities. Optimizing environmental conditions for animal housing allows productivity gains by maximizing growth rates and reducing mortality and health risks.
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Agricultural run-off and subsurface drainage tiles transport a significant amount of nitrogen and phosphorus leached after fertilization. alchemia-nova GmbH in collaboration with University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences, Vienna developed two multi-layer vertical filter systems to address the agricultural run-off issue, which has been installed on the slope of an agricultural field in Mistelbach, Austria. While another multi-layer addressing subsurface drainage water is implemented in Gleisdorf, Austria. The goal is to develop a drainage filter system to retain water and nutrients. Both multi-layer filter systems contain biochar and other substrates with adsorption properties of nutrients (nitrogen, phosphorus). The filter system can be of practical use if an excess of nutrients being washed out is of concern in the fields of the practitioner by keeping the surrounding waters clean. This approach may result in economic value by re-using the saturated biochar as fertilizer and improving the soil structure, thus increasing long-term soil fertility. Link: https://wateragri.eu/a-bio-inspired-multilayer-drainage-system/
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under Grant Agreement No 858735This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under Grant Agreement No 858735. FACTSHEET NANOCELLULOSE MEMBRANES FOR NUTRIENT RECOVERY Key information Functionalized nanocellulose membranes can take up nitrate and phosphate. These membranes can be put in a water treatment unit. As the membranes are biobased, degradable materials, they can after use be added to the soil, thus returning the leached nutrients back for their original purpose providing fertilizers (nutrient recycling).
Because variables such as temperature and humidity have a profound effect on the activity of crop pests, diseases and natural enemies, the ability to monitor environmental conditions within a crop has always been important for crop protection.