CASE STUDY 3: SUSTAVIANFEED project.
SUSTAvianFEED “Alternative animal feeds in Mediterranean poultry breeds to obtain sustainable products. A tangible approach for a more sustainable livestock sector based on circular economy principles” is an EU project funded by the EC through the PRIMA Foundation.
The project SUSTAvianFEED aims to demonstrate innovative poultry farming systems by the inclusion of sustainable animal feeding: the project will develop a sustainable nutritional formula for poultry farming in which insects will play a key role and which will lead to an innovative poultry farming approach. This falls under the basis that new food chains must be environmentally friendly, foster local economies and consider social aspects. Feed production will be the mainstream of this change.
In this framework, partners are implementing a Living Lab (LL) methodology. A Living Lab is a multi-stakeholder approach set-up to carry our innovation projects that follow the principles of open innovation and focus on real-life experimentation to co-create, test and validate novel solutions. Open innovation involves external stakeholders, mainly users or consumers, making them co-participate in the innovation process.
This methodology has the general aim of involving relevant stakeholders and end-users along the agri-food value chain for the co-creation of SUSTAvianFEED activities and solutions.
They will last during the whole project implementation. The ones associated to the co-creation of the sustainable diet have been already developed. These activities, among which there are participatory actions such as workshops, surveys, semi-structured interviews and others, had the main objective of improving the list of possible by-products, local ingredients, etc., to be included in the alternative nutritional diet to be developed in the project.
First interesting result have been already obtained and applied to project activities, about the quality of the diet, the reduction of soybean, the use of by-products and raw materials, the use of insects, the profitability and sustainability in a general view.