ClimateSmartAdvisors is a pan-European multi-actor network covering 27 countries. Its aim is to boost the EU agricultural advisory community, leading to an acceleration of the adoption of climate smart (CS) farming practices by the wider farming community within and across EU AKISs. To reach this objective, ClimateSmartAdvisors focuses on the crucial role of advisors in the development and dissemination of CS innovations and practices. The project will organize activities focusing on strengthening the advisors’ capacity in providing CS advice and boosting the advisors’ role in the transition towards CS farming through their involvement in innovation projects, CS-AKIS, and EU projects and initiatives. A number of complementary activities are developed to strengthen the CS advisory capacity of the EU advisory community: 1) an EU-wide network of 260 advisory Communities of Practice (CoP) to support the development of 1500 advisors will form the core of CS knowledge exchange; 2) 140 advisors will receive expert training on selected topics, relevant for their context and for facilitating a CoP; 3) CoPs will internationally exchange knowledge on 12 thematic areas; 4) a knowledge repository will provide advisors with CS tools, practices and approaches developed in the ClimateFarmDemo project and further expanded in ClimateSmartAdvisors, 5) monitoring, evaluation and learning activities will capitalize lessons learned in and outside the project. Activities to boost the advisors role in the CS transition include: 1) connecting to local and EU (multi-actor innovation) projects, initiatives, AKIS actors, and policy makers to clarify and address joint needs, challenges and lessons learned, 2) the set-up of Co-Design Innovation Experiments to learn on how to strengthen the advisors’ role in innovation processes. Finally, to accelerate the wide spread of results, an ambitious dissemination, exploitation and communication strategy will be deployed at EU and national levels.

Climate Farm Demo is a unique pan-European network of Pilot Demo Farmers (PDFs) covering 28 countries and all pedo-climatic areas. Its overall aim it to accelerate the adoption of Climate Smart Farming (CSF) practices and solutions by farmers and all actors of the Climate Smart Agriculture Knowledge & Innovation Systems with a view of adapting agricultural production systems to climate change and of achieving a carbon neutral agricultural sector by 2050, thereby meeting the targets of the EU Climate strategy. To reach this objective, the project adopts a Multi-Actor approach by connecting 1500 Pilot Demo Farmers and their Climate Farm Advisors (CEAs) at European and national levels to increase knowledge exchange & cross-fertilisation in their respective AKIS. The CFA's will support the PDF's in implementing Adaptation and Mitigation Measures suggested by contextualised guidelines and will assess & monitor their environmental performance thanks to harmonized methodologies & tools. Technical and social innovations covering a broad range of thematic areas will be demonstrated to the wider farming community across six annual demo-campaigns (4500 demo-events) supporting interactive and peer to peer learning. New and innovative CSF solutions will be co-created in 10 Living Labs spread across Europe and lessons learned from multi-actor innovation will be shared and scaled. A set of public and private rewarding mechanisms will be identified, proposed and demonstrated to the AKIS actors, thus incentivising the uptake of CSF solutions while ensuring sustainable business models. Strategic and operational cooperation will be organised with projects, flagship initiatives and policy-makers at European and national levels in order to share knowledge, organize coordinated actions, and produce policy briefs. Finally, to accelerate the wide spreading and uptake of results, an ambitious dissemination, exploitation and communication strategy will be deployed at EU and national levels.

Antibiotics are used to prevent and treat bacterial infections in humans and animals. Antibiotics are natural products of microbes and have been present in the environment in small amounts for millions of years. Some environmental bacteria have therefore had time to evolve resistance to these antibiotics. Once we started using antibiotics to treat infections, we set off a chain of events that has led to pre-evolved resistance moving from its environmental origins into bacteria that cause disease. This "mobile" resistance can spread through bacterial populations, leading to long-term consequences when these bacteria cause infections. One example is the CTX-M enzyme, which gives resistance to 3rd generation cephalosporin (3GC) antibiotics. CTX-M was discovered 30 years ago, but it is now found in bacteria causing about 5% of urinary tract and bloodstream infections in humans in the UK. 3GCs are used to treat infections in humans and animals. However, because they are considered Highest Priority Critically Important Antimicrobials for use in humans, their use in farm animals in the UK has now almost stopped. This is because the Red Tractor farm assurance scheme, which is followed by 95% of UK farms, introduced new regulations around antibiotic use in mid 2018. One aim is to reduce the number of 3GC resistant bacteria in farm animals, which might spread to humans and cause resistant infections. Some antibiotics, in contrast, are used to treat infections in farmed animals but never in humans (in the UK). One example is spectinomycin, which has been extensively used to treat sheep in the UK for decades. There are no rules specifically preventing the use of "farmed animal specific" antibiotics like spectinomycin, but in many countries, there is a general downward trend in antibiotic usage in farming. Furthermore, since late 2021, spectinomycin has no longer been available in the UK for treatment of sheep because its manufacturers have withdrawn it from sale. This might be expected to reduce rates of spectinomycin resistance in the UK sheep flock. We also see spectinomycin - and other farmed animal specific antibiotic resistance - in bacteria causing human infections, suggesting that there is a flow of resistant bacteria from farmed animals to humans. Maybe this will now start to reduce? Moves to reduce antibiotic usage in farming are ongoing in many countries. This project aims to build a partnership between UK (University of Bristol) researchers and those in Canada (Universities of Montreal, Guelph, Calgary and Prince Edward Island) who are experts in antibiotic use and resistance in farmed animals, and/or in humans. In Canada, there has been variation in regulatory and industry-led changes to antibiotic usage in farming at provincial level, but generally, a downward trajectory in usage started later than it did in the UK. Our partnership will be built though a variety of activities, but predominantly by collaborative research aiming to understand whether antibiotic usage reduction in farming is driving down antibiotic resistance levels on farms, and also in human infections. To do this, we will take advantage of natural experiments in the UK and Canada that are uniquely possibly for us to undertake, become of our ongoing involvement in large-scale longitudinal farm antibiotic usage and resistance surveillance projects, and the fact that antibiotic usage is being reduced in both countries at different rates and in subtly different ways. It is very difficult to validly demonstrate a significant association between antibiotic usage reduction in farming on antibiotic resistance in bacteria on farms, and even more difficult to show and effect on human populations. This is because of all the potential confounding factors occurring in parallel that might also be driving down resistance. The value of our partnership is that we can pool our cutting edge technical expertise and so make these analysis possible.

The fight against enteric infections while containing the uprise of antimicrobial resistance, represents one of the major challenges in contemporary broiler farming, with repercussions on both bird and consumer's health. Key to future, better solutions for surveillance, diagnostics and treatment selection, is to gain an improved understanding of the bird's gut microbiome, exploring the modifications its population of commensals and opportunistic pathogens undergo as a consequence of infection, treatment and development of resistant traits. In this project, we plan to explore the broiler gut microbiome, focusing on infection and resistance in relation to pathogens typically found in the gastrointestinal tract of the birds: Clostridium perfringens, Enterococcus cecorum, Escherichia coli and Salmonella spp. We cover also scenarios of co-infection with viruses causing dysbiosis of gut microbiome. We consider resistance/susceptibility to 8 classes of antibiotics: tetracyclines, sulphonamides, beta-lactams, fluoroquinolones, polymyxins, macrolides, diaminopyrimidines, aminoglycosides, whose use as therapeutics is diffused in the UK. We plan to collect a large amount of heterogeneous data from farms, feed and birds, covering normal production periods and infection events. Data will include results of microbiological analysis, whole-genome sequencing, shotgun metagenomics and phenotyping performed on faecal samples, on-farm management practices, as well as environmental sensor data and bird imaging. We propose to use machine learning and cloud computing to perform large-scale data mining and ultimately unravel the network of possible interactions amongst the observable variables, following broilers along their life cycle, and capturing episodes of infection, treatment and development of single or multi-drug resistance. Acquired knowledge may provide hints at the selection of observable variables acting as biomarkers, i.e, targetable by future solutions for real-time livestock monitoring, to detect/forecast infection or the presence/insurgence of resistant traits, and to support precision diagnostics and bespoke treatment selection. The results may also suggest routes to improve the birds gut microbiome, for example via feed additives, making it more robust to infection while at the same time inhibiting the development of resistance.

Lactating dairy cows generate a significant amount of body heat due to their high metabolic rates. Excess heat must be dissipated and a failure to do so leads to heat stress. The ideal ambient temperature for dairy cows ranges between 5 - 25 degree C, but this is affected by breed, feeding level, production, and other individual factors; temperatures as low as 20 degree C may lead to heat stress in some cows. Such conditions are common in the UK during summer, and can even occur in the winter, particularly indoors. Heat stress is already a problem on many UK farms, but predicted increases in average temperature and the frequency and duration of heat waves resulting from climate change, makes the issue even more urgent. Heat stress can result in a range of physiological problems including reduced feed intake and milk yield, and impaired fertility and immune function, all of which negatively affect cow welfare and the economic sustainability of dairy farms. Cows are known to adapt their behaviour to help cope with high temperatures and humidity: they may increase their intake of cold water, seek shade or areas of increased ventilation, or exhibit other individual and social behavioural responses. Not all cows show obvious physical signs of heat stress and hence monitoring has typically been based on proxy measures such as local weather station temperature and humidity records, or measurements from a few indoor sensors. However, recent research, including by our team, has shown that temperature, humidity, and ventilation within barns have high spatiotemporal variation, and are affected by both building design and usage, as well as external conditions. The presence of these barn 'microclimates' means that cows experience different individual-specific conditions, varying over time and space, that will influence their ability to cope with heat stress (and hence their subsequent physiological and behavioural responses). Social interactions and herd-level responses may also be affected by, and directly affect, the indoor microclimate: we have evidence that cows housed indoors spatially cluster with increasing temperature, a potentially maladaptive response since social clustering further increases localised temperatures. In this project we will use location tracking technology to record, in unprecedented levels of detail, patterns of movement, activity, and space-use of full herds of dairy cows under varying thermal conditions and indoor microclimates. Data will be collected for 12 months on the main study farm (CEDAR, Reading) and for shorter periods in summer and winter at 6 case-study farms with different building design and usage. Continuous sensor monitoring of barn microclimates (temperature, humidity, air quality) and detailed ventilation surveys will be combined with physiological measures (body temperature, production, health) to enable detailed analysis of how indoor-housed dairy cows respond to, and cope with, heat stress over different timescales. We will use building engineering modelling approaches to determine indoor microclimates in different farm building environments and management systems, and how these microclimates affect, and are affected by, cow behaviour. We will work directly with farmer study groups in a participatory approach to evaluate a range of potential mitigation strategies to reduce heat stress impacts under current and future climate scenarios. Working with our industry Steering Group, we will provide practical evidence-based solutions to the UK dairy industry for preventing and managing heat stress.