The PPILOW project aims to co-construct through a multi-actor approach solutions to improve the welfare of poultry and pigs reared in organic and low-input outdoor farming systems. The first originality of PPILOW is the participatory approach, involving all actors of the production chain from farmers to consumers, citizens, scientists and policy makers, for proposing and studying welfare improvement levers. The second originality of the project is to provide a combination of practical solutions for welfare improvement that can be applied on a pan-European basis with specific adjustments depending on citizen’s expectations and the target market (national legislation or consumer preferences). More precisely, PPILOW will co-create with end-users welfare self-assessment tools, innovative breeding and rearing strategies and techniques for improving the welfare of animals by avoiding mutilations (piglet castration or beak trimming in poultry), the elimination of one day-old layer male chicks, favouring positive behaviours, and improving health and robustness in both species. The innovative solutions will be investigated experimentally and the most promising ones will be tested on-farm. Multi-criteria analyses of the most effective breeding and rearing strategies will then be realised to evaluate their economic, social and environmental impacts based on the ‘One Welfare’ concept embracing sustainability goals with specific emphasis on animal and human welfare. Business models will be created for the use of high-quality products issued from the adoption of PPILOW strategies to improve welfare in organic and low-input outdoor farming systems for poultry and pigs. Finally, to ensure the rapid uptake of the project results by end-users, appropriate dissemination activities will be developed (such as training, digital videos from field partners, EIP abstracts…) and the close involvement of national practitioner groups throughout the EU will be managed to facilitate change.

The aim of the proposal is to develop biorefinery processes as part of new value chains to convert under-spent side streams/residues from the agro-sector and processing sector into useful marketable products. Cascading processes (recovery of multiple compounds from the same feedstock) are envisioned to increase the conversion efficiency (product/ton biomass input) and maximise the values of the feedstock (euro/ton biomass input). Direct biorefiney of the biomass will be compared with indirect biorefinery. The latter refers to the two-step process that can cope with the heterogeneity of side-streams. In a first step the heterogenic feedstock is converted to homogenous biomass. The game-changing approach that will be applied is the use of insects in this step. Insects are able to convert a variety of feedstocks into a more homogenous biomass, being their own biomass. In a second step, the insect biomass will be further fractionated into a lipid, protein and chitin fraction, that all three have potential to be converted into marketable end-products (step 3). The ability to use various feedstocks results in a more robust and scalable biorefinery process that is expected to be less dependent on the season. The direct approach (without the insect convertion step) which will be explored for green leaves, is expected to be more seasonally variable, but generates a larger variety of compounds. The project foresees to process the derived fractions further into multiple marketable products for the feed, food and chemical sector. More than 20 new product formulations are envisioned and will be subjected to application tests within InDIRECT. Activities from lab to pilot scale are foreseen, enabling the generation of sufficient material for application tests that are crucial for developing the downstream market. Viable business concepts will be formulated and translated into business plans.