The objective of the PAS-AGRO-PAS project is to increase productivity, adaptiveness, sustainability and profitability of Mediterranean agro-pastoral production systems, by exploiting every dimension of their multifunctionality through a novel systemic approach that will identify stressors currently impacting on agro-pastoral systems’ viability, with views to implementing tailored strategies that redirect agro-pastoralism from subsistence-oriented fragile production systems towards commercially-oriented resilient systems. To achieve this objective, PAS-AGRO-PAS will explore a representation of 10 agro-pastoral production systems from Portugal, Spain, France, Italy, Cyprus, Morocco, Egypt and Tunisia, covering a wide range of environmental, agro-ecological, economic, socio-cultural and institutional traits and challenges; and will apply a systemic approach from farm to global scale, interlinking three systems: (i) “agro-ecosystem”, with interventions on the productivity and diversification of crops, pasture and livestock resources (such as better utilisation of crop residues, new grazing surfaces, use of biodiverse pasture seeds, including forage legumes into rotations with crops, alley cropping with barley, drought-tolerant forage and crop varieties, effective treatment of manure, matching livestock production cycle to feed resources, multi-nutrient blocks to enhance digestibility, etc.) that will be implemented, in order to ensure low input, maintenance/increase of biodiversity, enhanced soil fertility and custody for local adapted breeds – in the short term, and the rehabilitation of rangelands and the reduction of vulnerabilities to climate change – in the long term; (ii) “socioeconomic system”, with interventions towards the valorisation of agro-pastoral products (through assurance of quality, safety and typicity, and creation of notebooks of product standards for origin/quality certification), the leveraging of the marketable “healthy” trait of food produced with environmentally friendly systems, the efficient integration into markets, and the rising of the “commercialisation mentality” of agro-pastoralists, in order to ensure economic benefits and generational renewal; and (iii) “information system”, whereby, within a multi-actor co-creation process, the agro-pastoralists’ traditional knowledge will be sourced and steadily integrated with the outputs of this project, taking advantage of the networked and cooperative digitalisation of Agriculture 4.0, in order to efficiently manage information resources and access to decision-making support e-tools. Furthermore, the successful implementation of PAS-AGRO-PAS with the expected impacts at the farm, at the regional and at the global scale will be sustained by two important pillars: (i) “capacity building activities” for agro-pastoralists on effective strategies, climate change mitigation and adaptation, quality of their products, pricing and economic profitability, commercialisation and entrepreneurship, inclusive development, with special focus on women, the youth and newcomers; and “divulgation activities” with key stakeholders and policy-makers for providing policy guidelines for more enabling structural, economic and institutional settings; and (ii) the development of the PAS-AGRO-PAS Mediterranean e-platform, which through systematised data, reports, models and web applications for resource allocation, ration formulation and feed management, optimum slaughter weight prediction, and e-commerce, will better inform evidence-based decisions for both agro-pastoralists and policy-makers.

The objective of ADAPT-HERD is to develop management simulation tools to implement innovative strategies for resilience and efficiency (R&E) in small ruminants herds, based on harnessing animal adaptive capacities. These tools will address a wide range of current feed resource constraints in the Mediterranean area (Egypt, France, Spain and Tunisia) and the future perturbations induced by climate change. The locally tailored management solutions will improve the ability of livestock systems to adapt to climate change by: i) managing early-life nutrition to safeguard adult adaptive capacities; ii) managing reproduction to find the best match between feed supply and herd demand; iii) tailoring group feeding strategies depending on animals’ adaptive capacities and iv) managing herd demography with replacement and culling to adjust feed demand. To achieve this, ADAPT-HERD brings together information from animal and herd levels with: i) a fine-grained experimental approach (adaptive mechanisms and trade-offs); ii) field phenotyping of local breeds (adaptation to local conditions) and iii) local production environment characterization. These multi-level information will be used to develop computer models and test scenarios. Interfacing and disseminating project’s deliverables as a user-friendly toolbox will be achieved with a participatory modelling framework. The toolbox will help to adapt agricultural practices to change in resource availability by proposing different technical solutions of herd management aimed at facing feed resource perturbations induced by climate change. The challenge is not to find an optimal strategy for R&E, but to explore how management strategies impact the relationship between R&E. These strategies will be grounded in a deep understanding of how local breeds adapt to feed resource constraints. They will be complementary to on-going projects that focus on genetic selection and breeding solutions to improve R&E in small ruminants.