The community of the 16 Farm Facilitators, which manage the national / regional network and actors, has been set-up and their roles clearly discussed during meetings and training sessions and written on guidelines. The workflow is known but will be adapted along with the progress of the project. Their action plan is also written and has been shared during last General Meeting in June 2022.The 16 stakeholder groups and 120 pilot farms are ready to work for the other project activities on test and give feedback on their needs and solutions. We need to produce and share materials to show that the more we exchange, the more we receive in return. All the 16 stakeholder groups met at least once and started to build their local community. The 1st cross-visit was held in June 2022 and it was a success. The key challenge will be now to keep all the 16 stakeholder groups and pilot farmers involved in our project dynamics and momentum.
The preliminary inventory of needs/solutions was developed to base the survey on. The survey was created on Google Forms, shared with all partners, and translated as required. A total of 16 regions filled in the survey (535 responses). All regions carried out at least one NDA meeting to further discuss solutions for improved resilience.The work plan template has been finalized and sent to all Farm Facilitators for completion. It has tables to report information on needs/solutions from both the survey and stakeholders group meetings. All regions have been asked to recruit an expert for each main key issues.
An assessment scheme was completed. The Interactive multi-actor assessment is under way. A try-out of the multi-actor assessment was performed at the Kiel farm facilitators meeting in April 2022. The workflow and actions have been described. A first round of assessment of the 220 solutions identified has been performed by the experts in Dec 2022/Jan 2023. A second round of extra assessments is on its way. Readiness and acceptability are an integral part of the assessment scheme, and, thus, will be included in the final result. Economics is also part of the assessment scheme, but additionally also addressed during the monitoring of practices as activity of the adaptation and translation of the Best Practices for practitioners.
The assessment tool to evaluate solutions on farm is ready to be used. The farm facilitator is responsible for evaluating solutions on farm by means of an assessment tool. This tool is based on the assessment tool that is used as in assessment of solutions by the 3 MKI expert teams. Hence, the farm facilitator will also evaluate the solution on different main topics. The use of this assessment tool was evaluated during the Kiel meeting and adjusted according to the feedback of the participants. The final results of the on-farm monitoring will be made available for evaluation by the work group on evaluation and assessment of solutions for resilient dairy systems. Guidelines and templates to produce fact sheets and practice abstracts are ready to be used.
The communication and dissemination plan for R4D project is ready to be used. R4D webpage is set up with all fact sheets produced on the three MKI; the digital strategy is set up. Creation of social media accounts: Twitter & Facebook (more than 500 followers at this date). Leaflets and roll-up are designing and printing. During cross visits, we start peer to peer learning. There was the first exchange of students in the project (French students to Luxembourg and Slovenia). The first technical days for farmers were organized in a Pilot farm in France in Nov 2022; the first presentations of the project were made at EAAP congress in a “resilience “session in Aug 2022. 5 webinars to present the stakeholders, the needs and resources collected were held online in 2022.
Resilience4Dairy (R4D) aimed to identify the priority needs of dairy farmers in the 16 partner countries and propose innovative solutions to address the challenges they face. The farmers expressed priorities focused on work-life balance and the pursuit of fair compensation, contrasting with the concerns of researchers and advisors who were more oriented towards animal welfare and environmental sustainability. The practical solutions selected, evaluated by groups of experts, were ranked and tested for their resilience, attractiveness, level of achievement and ease of implementation. The wide range of dissemination channels, including webinars, videos, and technical sheets, aims to maximize the adoption of these practices across Europe. At the end of the project, the areas where concrete solutions are still lacking were identified, with the pursuit of work/income balance remaining the priority challenge to improve the resilience of farms.
